Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  CHICAGO: It has already been a hot and sultry summer. There have been race riots in Charleston, South Carolina, in Bisbee, Arizona, and in Washington DC (where local boy Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation searches for evidence to connect unrest amongst American blacks to the Bolsheviks).

  Then this. Sunday by the South Side Beach, Chicago. Mid-afternoon. The sun just past its zenith, but still beating down in fury. The kind of weather where ice cream melts in seconds. The kind where fights start a little too easily. Some black Chicagoans step onto that part of the beach that, by some unwritten rule, white Chicagoans consider theirs. Stones are thrown at the unwelcome arrivals. Blacks retaliate. Stones become rocks and rocks become bricks. Some black boys out on a raft on the lake think it is some kind of game. Then one of them gets hit in the head and drowns. Before long, guns are used and gangs arrive, both white and black. The papers embellish the incident as best they can, fanning the flames with additional rumour and prejudice.

  On Tuesday, gangs of whites are reported to be making their way through the Loop of Chicago on a hunt for black employees in the city’s restaurants. Chicago’s chief of police cordons off City Hall with riflemen. Pawnshops are looted for guns. Newspapers talk of armed black men taking up strategically elevated positions near the stockyards. Their pages read like wartime casualty lists: ‘Croft, William, white, shot in left wrist; Smith, Thomas, colored, lacerations of head and body; Unknown Negro, skull fractured at Thirty-Sixth and Cottage Grove Avenue; Virden, Henry, white, shot, wounded in abdomen, will die’.

  Several veterans are involved. A white man decorated with the Croix de Guerre is reported to have been injured in the shoulder when he stopped a black man threatening a lady on a streetcar with a knife. A thirty-three-year-old black soldier with three years’ service in the Canadian army, still suffering from the after-effects of poison gas, is knocked on the head while walking down South State Street. ‘I don’t see why they want to bother a fellow like me’, he tells the Tribune. ‘I did all I could to help make this old country safe for just such men as these.’

  On Wednesday night, over six thousand troops are finally called in to stop the fighting. Rain helps to dampen the violence. But calm only fully returns on Friday. By now, twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites are dead. One thousand Chicagoans, mostly black, have lost their homes to fire. Yet it could have been worse. At least an East St. Louis-style disaster has been avoided. Some see a silver lining in the determination of blacks to fight rather than run. ‘As regrettable as are the Washington and Chicago riots,’ writes a leading officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ‘I feel that they mark a turning point in the psychology of the whole nation regarding the Negro problem’. The war has changed America. Resistance, not submission, is the new attitude.

  VIENNA: On holiday high in the mountains, news reaches Sigmund Freud of the suicide of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Victor Tausk, by simultaneous hanging and gunshot. ‘He swore undying loyalty to psychoanalysis etc.’, writes Freud uninterestedly, referring to the farewell letters Tausk sent to him before he died. The suicide is put down to the horrors of war, and the pressures of peace. Freud’s own reaction is cold: ‘I confess I do not really miss him’.

  Every day when the weather is good Freud walks up alone into the hills, picking orchids one day, strawberries the next, and seeking out mushrooms. He receives letters from his daughter Anna, in which she reveals her (often violent) dreams and informs him of her latest holiday adventure. ‘Most of the time we do nothing, climb up a little to pick alpine roses and lie in the heather and feel the time passing’, she writes. Occasionally Freud hears an echo of what is happening in Hungary. But mostly he works on the outlines of a new theory. ‘There is a lot of death in it’, he admits to Anna.

  At the end of the month, he finds distraction in a new book, sent to him from Switzerland: The Erotic Motive in Literature. ‘Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one as do those of a wizard’, notes the book’s introduction. ‘After his discoveries, literary interpretation cannot remain the same.’ How pleasing it is to have the importance of his work recognised. Perhaps these are the first intimations of something he once hardly dared to believe in: celebrity.

  BUDAPEST: There are celebrations in the Hungarian capital in June when, reconquered by Hungarian soldiers, a Soviet Republic is set up in next-door Slovakia. Pretzels are handed out to children at school. Women are given half a kilo of white flour in additional rations. A gypsy band plays revolutionary songs for Béla Kun’s delight. The Jewish Bolshevik former prisoner of war is celebrated as a national hero.

  But times are fickle. The promise of joining forces with the Soviet Red Army has not come off. Food remains scarce. Hungary’s conservatives have never liked him, of course, but now the workers are starting to waver. Kun catches wind of a plan by hardliners in his own camp to overthrow him. He holds two Ukrainians responsible. They are thrown into the Danube with rocks tied around their necks.

  In July, an international strike called to show support for Soviet Russia and Soviet Hungary fails to rally the workers of the world. Kun still issues orders–on the number of shirts and pieces of underwear a citizen of the Soviet Republic is allowed to own, for instance–but the tide is turning strongly against him now. Lenin regrets Soviet Russia is unable to help in any material way. He sends his ‘warmest greetings and a firm handshake’. At the end of July, the Romanians cross the Tisza river.

  The Hungarian Social Democrats who supported Kun in spring abandon him in August. He is forced to flee to Austria with his family and a handful of associates. Their money is confiscated and they are kept incommunicado–and as far away as possible from Vienna–to prevent them from causing a new revolution. The Romanians march into Budapest a few days later. The experiment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic is over. From being Europe’s capital of revolution Budapest becomes the Continent’s capital of reaction. Hungary emerges from the war more reduced in territory than any other country. The bitterness lasts.

  UPSTATE MICHIGAN: Now it is Ernest’s turn to commiserate with an old friend, unlucky in love. ‘There’s something wrong with us Bill–we’re idealists’, he writes. ‘If you do want to keep the old ideals straight and cut loose from the damned dirty money grubbing for a year I’m your man.’ Hemingway proposes a trip to Hawaii and the South Pacific: ‘And we’ll live Bill! We’ll live.’

  In the end, a fishing trip in the Charlevoix region is organised instead with a group of old school friends. One hundred and eighty trout are caught in four days. When his father visits, Ernest asks him to bring his Italian medal to remind him of those glorious days. At the end of the summer, he moves into accommodation in Petoskey, sleeps with a woman for the first time in his life, and begins work on a couple of short stories about the war. The rejections mount.

  RUSSIA: Kolchak, the shooting star of the spring, is pushed back further east. In June, the city of Ufa, which he took at the beginning of his offensive, is retaken by the Reds. Trotsky fleetingly suggests doubling down on Bolshevism’s eastward advance. A revolutionary training academy should be set up in Turkestan. Perhaps the revolution will reach Paris and London not through Europe after all, but through ‘the towns of Afghanistan, Punjab and Bengal’. Leon’s fertile mind imagines a dramatic turn towards Asia.

  And yet there is real danger much closer to hand. Trotsky’s grand eastward vista may hold promise for tomorrow, but only if it survives the threat building in the south. Denikin’s armies roam across a broad front stretching almost from the Urals to the Black Sea. Over the summer, Wrangel’s army marches up the Volga from Tsaritsyn before being forced halfway back. Ukraine crumbles into savage anarchy, torn between peasant warlords, nationalists seeking to free Ukraine for ever from the Russian yoke, Reds who see its future as a brother proletarian republic of Soviet Russia, and Whites who view it as an integral part of the conservative greater Russia of the future. Piłsudski’s Poles hover on the sidelines, opposed to Lenin�
�s Bolshevism and Denikin’s Russian nationalism alike.

  In Ukraine, all sides operate according to the same principle: today’s ally may be tomorrow’s enemy (and usually is). All sides officially repudiate anti-Semitism–but all sides, including the Reds, are involved in pogroms against the Jews. Techniques of mass violence and torture are routine. One Cossack method is to tie a rope around a householder’s neck, a sturdy soldier pulling on either end to tighten the noose, and choke him until his family give up everything they own. The procedure can be repeated several times until the requisite sum is provided, or the man is dead (or both). Synagogues are torched. Women are raped. Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulate freely. (It is said to be Admiral Kolchak’s favourite book.)

  Out of chaos arises opportunity. White forces swoop into the Black Sea port of Odessa, where the cosmopolitan war commissar went to school all those years ago, and towards which his train now imperiously steams. Denikin’s men on the ground search out anyone with the surname Bronstein. Everywhere, the Reds are forced back. At the end of August two rival flags fly over Kiev: the flag of imperial Russia under which Denikin’s Whites fight, and the nationalist flag of the Ukrainian republic. Denikin promptly pushes out the nationalists, bans the Ukrainian language and orders the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals. In Russia itself, a roving contingent of White cavalry pierce the Red lines and strike a hundred miles behind them towards Moscow, conquering town after town, causing havoc along the way.

  ‘It is true, comrades, that we are facing an unpleasantness,’ Trotsky admits a little primly on a trip back to Moscow, ‘not a military failure, but an unpleasantness in the full sense.’ He devises a new slogan: ‘Proletarian, to horse!’

  WASHINGTON DC: A new confidential memorandum arrives on the desk of the Director of Military Intelligence: ‘Beyond a doubt, there is a new negro to be reckoned with in our political and social life.’ The memo notes the proliferation of ‘defense funds’ amongst American blacks and a new slogan animating the community: ‘Fight for your rights’. It warns that the doctrines of radical socialists are gaining ground. The experience of black soldiers in France has also played its role. Then there is the propaganda of the NAACP: ‘They have become more sensitive than ever to the practice of lynching’.

  J. Edgar Hoover is made chief of the new Radical Division of the Department of Justice around the same time. Within two months he has compiled an index of fifty thousand names, cards that can be cross-checked against radical organisations, and against the files in the Bureau’s archive, just like at the Library of Congress. To prepare himself for the next part of his mission to clean up America he reads the Communist Manifesto and studies the workings of the Comintern. He tries to get inside the Bolshevik mind.

  MUNICH: Within a month, the students have become teachers. Towards the end of August, Adolf is sent as part of an army propaganda squad to a camp for returning POWs, where they give political lectures to keep up morale and ensure the soldiers’ political soundness before they are released back into civilian life.

  The squad leader lectures on war guilt, Goethe, the rise of Germany in the nineteenth century, as well as his own experiences during the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Hitler lectures on peace and reconstruction.

  The soldiers consider the mangy field-runner a natural. He speaks from personal experience, capturing the audience’s imagination with his turns of phrase and passion for his subject. In a lecture on capitalism, he gets a little carried away talking about the Jews, raising concern that his talks might be considered anti-Semitic.

  For the first time in his life, Adolf Hitler basks in the warm glow of public appreciation.

  VIENNA: The Austrians try one final diplomatic manoeuvre to avoid being tarred with the same brush as imperial Germany. Since Austria–Hungary has ceased to exist, they argue, and entirely new states have been born from the ashes of the empire, the new Austria should be considered a partner for the future, rather than a historic enemy. It should not be made to bear the sins of its former imperial bosses.

  The victorious powers in Paris are having none of it. ‘The people of Austria, together with their neighbours, the people of Hungary, bear in a peculiar degree the responsibility for the calamities which have befallen Europe in the last five years.’ The crowds on the streets of Vienna in 1914 are proof enough of popular complicity with the Habsburg regime–‘an ancient and effete autocracy’–in conducting the war. The Austrian and Hungarian people are particularly damned for their domineering rule over other nationalities, nothing less than a ‘policy of racial ascendancy and oppression’ over Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and the rest.

  The plight of the Sudeten Germans in the new state of Czechoslovakia, the Austrian parliament warns, will be a stain on the consciences of the victorious powers. Nevertheless, bitter and defeated, they recommend the treaty be signed all the same.

  CHICAGO: A national convention of the American Socialist Party takes place in Machinists’ Hall at 113 S. Ashland Avenue, in the industrial Lower West Side. The party has been engaged in a vicious organisational civil war for months. In Chicago, only those with a white card issued by the national executive, the moderates, are to be allowed into the hall. Those without such credentials, delegates from local associations excluded for being too left-wing, are to be kept out. A government spy reports that ‘John Reed had about 50 husky Russians and Finns lined up to “start something”’. Chicago police are on hand to enforce the white card rule.

  A small group of renegades, including Reed, decide to meet in the basement of the same building and set themselves up as the Communist Labor Party, the only party, they claim, that really gets revolution. A different group of renegades, including a large number of Russian-speakers, establish themselves as the rival Communist Party of America. The two parties agree that capitalism should be overthrown, and power conquered. But they hate each other. Both seek sanction as official representatives of the worldwide Communist movement from Moscow. Reed plans to return there to make his case.

  BERLIN: At the beginning of September, a minister of the Prussian government signs a release form for a number of items–furniture, paintings, silver plate, a motor boat and the tobacco-box of Frederick the Great–to be sent to the former Kaiser in Holland. The manifest covers seventy-one pages. The goods fill sixty-two railway carriages.

  All this will help with the decoration of Huis Doorn, the estate the Kaiser has just purchased for himself and his family, a few miles from Amerongen. Count Bentinck’s joy when informed of the imperial departure–at least some trees will be left standing–is cut short when told renovations at the new residence will take at least six months. Central heating must be installed, as well as a lift and electric lighting for the garden. The Kaiser discusses all these issues at length with the local mayor.

  At the same time, Germany is barely holding together. Ebert’s government sends German soldiers, reinforced by right-wing Freikorps, to suppress an incipient Polish uprising in the economically vital, coal-rich province of Silesia, where the Versailles Treaty calls for a plebiscite to determine its future status.

  FIUME: There is at least one man in Europe who consistently shuns the mediocre, who thumbs his nose at the Great Powers, who proclaims only me, me, me and Italy, Italy, Italy. And why not? Are they not one and the same?

  Gabriele D’Annunzio, recently promoted to lieutenant colonel, decides to bite the bullet. For a long time, Italy’s various nationalist groups have been pressing him to lead an expedition to Fiume. What is needed, they tell him, is a demonstration that Italians will not give up their Adriatic dreams, whatever the weakling government in Rome agrees. A theatrical act with a bit of military muscle behind it. A propaganda coup. In early September, Gabriele writes to Mussolini complaining of a temperature. And yet, he announces, he will nonetheless rouse himself from his sickbed and do his duty. D’Annunzio instructs Mussolini to provide vigorous journalistic support from Milan. Although Benito later presents himself as Gabriele’s equal
in this endeavour, their letters suggest that his role is closer to that of unpaid publicist.

  Tension in Fiume has been rising again since the summer riots. Protests against the town’s imminent internationalisation and against Dalmatia being handed to Yugoslavia have turned violent. The Italian military has done little to calm the feelings of Italians amongst the local population. They make ostentatious preparations for the winding down of operations in accordance with instructions. And yet an American diplomat catches soldiers pasting up posters promising Fiume will never be abandoned. The security situation goes from bad to worse. A French soldier is murdered. It is reported that a number of children thought to be local Croats are shot by Italian police when they refuse to shout Viva Italia on returning to town from a picnic in the countryside. The city seems primed for a takeover by the time D’Annunzio sets out one morning in a Fiat Tipo 4, at the head of a column of trucks stolen from a nearby barracks.

  Along the short drive to Fiume, the poet and his band of legionnaires pick up support from regular army units. The black-shirted Arditi so admired by Hemingway, bored with peace and keen to add a touch more swagger to their reputation, prefer to join in Gabriele’s fun than follow half-hearted instructions to stop him. When an Italian general orders D’Annunzio to turn back or else, the hero of Vienna simply offers up his medal-covered chest and suggests the general shoot him. He knows the threat is empty. Mussolini’s paper reports that the general sent Gabriele on his way with the words: ‘Great Poet, I hope that your dream will be fulfilled, and that I may shout with you “Viva Fiume Italiana”’.

  By midday, D’Annunzio and his legionnaires–swollen to about two thousand men (and a few schoolboys)–have arrived in the city. Church bells welcome them. Not a shot is fired. Over the next days, the British and the French decide to withdraw. ‘There is nothing to show whether this is a revolution in the Italian army or an attempt to seize the town for Italy’, reads an urgent telegram to London. Allied forces do not want to be stuck in the middle when Rome sends troops to restore order–by force, if necessary–against apparently rebellious units of its own army, led by the rubber-faced poet-aviator.