1913

by Charles Emmerson

  The imperial court still loomed large in St Petersburg in the Romanovs’ tercentenary year. Russia’s politics largely revolved around the relationship between the Tsar, his government and the Duma. But the imperial family preferred to live in the relative privacy of Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles distant. The Tsar was nowhere near as visible in St Petersburg as Franz Joseph was in Vienna, or Kaiser Wilhelm in Berlin, speeding from the opera house to the palace in a motor car several times a day, in a different uniform each time. The Tsarina was virtually invisible in St Petersburg’s aristocratic social life, a black mark against her name. Walking around the city streets one could perhaps forget the Tsar and the buzzing of the Duma and take in St Petersburg itself: a modern city now, a crucible of modernity, perhaps a harbinger of Russia’s future alongside the other modern great powers of Europe.

  Though dominated by the various nationalities of empire, and above all by the Russians, the city had an international feel. An English colony flourished. French was widely spoken in polite company, while a French-language newspaper offered a blend of news of home, French coverage of Russian politics and, inevitably, reminders of France’s unquestionable grandeur. (The French Institute provided courses on Voltaire; the Journal de Saint Pétersbourg ran a series of articles on Napoleon, arch-enemy of Nicholas’ forebear Alexander I.) A 50,000-strong German community boasted no fewer than seven churches, five choirs, a theatre and two daily newspapers.47

  The city still bore the hallmarks of its aristocratic upbringing and its aristocratic wealth in 1913, in the city’s liveried servants and grand palaces. ‘No capital in the world has more porters than St Petersburg’, noted Wladimir de Belinsky in the Journal de Saint Pétersbourg, ‘they comprise a people, no, a nation, no, a state!’48 But alongside the old palaces of the nobility were the new palaces of the middle classes. Opposite the Kazan Cathedral stood the Russian branch of the Singer sewing machine company, built in the style moderne of Paris or Budapest rather than the traditional style of Petersburg. A little further down the Nevsky Prospekt was the Elisseeff delicatessen, advertising its wares in French, German and Russian. On the street itself, advertising hoardings enticed customers with everything from English tea to French perfumes.49

  Years later, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov – son of the journalist at the Beilis trial – was still able to reel off the British commercial products of his Petersburg childhood:

  Pears Soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light with wet fingers, took care of one’s morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. ‘We could not improve the cream, so we improved the tube’, said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered onto a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.50

  Twenty-eight of the fifty-five buildings on Nevsky Prospekt between the Admiralty Building and the Fontanka canal contained banks, reflecting a newly prosperous bourgeois society which both saved money and speculated with it.51 (In 1913 Prokofiev invested 4,000 roubles in the Nikopol Mariupolsky metallurgical company, and later in cement – both were industries expected to do well in times of economic expansion and urban construction.52)

  Ten minutes’ brisk walk from Nevsky Prospekt, the Astoria Hotel, St Petersburg’s grandest and newest, was thoroughly modern in style and would not have been out of place in Berlin, Stockholm or Copenhagen. Equally striking was the building opposite it, the new embassy of the German Empire, Russia’s largest trading partner, designed by Peter Behrens, the same man who had designed the AEG turbine factory in Berlin a few years previously. Though its façade sported classical columns in a nod in the direction of the St Petersburg style, these were thoroughly without any prettifying Petersburgian adornment.

  British journalist George Dobson found a city that was ‘hurrying up’, as he put it, picking up its pace as it strode towards modernity.53 ‘Less than ten years ago’, he wrote:

  … it could still be said with a certain amount of truth that St. Petersburg consisted of only two main avenues, towards which everybody seemed to gravitate – the Nevsky Prospekt and the Great Morskaia Street – the Oxford and Regent Streets of the Russian capital. To-day many other important thoroughfares, such as the Sadovaya and Gorokohovaya Streets, and the Litainy, Soovorofsky and Voznesensky Prospects are equally busy and crowded arteries of traffic. The crowds also have mended their pace, which was formerly a crawling one in comparison with the bustling throng of other European capitals.

  Dobson noted the spread of cinemas – 130 in St Petersburg by 1913 – where one might watch a film of the tercentenary celebrations or, more probably, catch a silent account of unrequited love played by Russia’s most popular film actress, Vera Kholodnaya.54 He noted the spread of electric lighting, particularly brilliant in winter. Although many buildings on the outskirts of the city were still built of wood, elsewhere they were steadily becoming colonised by bricks and stone. He remarked on the introduction of motorised transport in the city, mourning the loss of wintry silence conferred by sledges running silently over snow-covered roads. He noted the introduction of electric trams, replacing their horse-drawn equivalents from 1907 onwards, fifty or sixty at a time.

  Those who looked up into the skies of St Petersburg in 1913 might see something still more remarkable, further evidence of the way in which Russia was bounding ahead into the future, unshackling itself from the past: Russia’s latest aircraft, the four-engined Grand, compared to which other planes were nothing better than ‘air kayaks’.55 Interviewed by a St Petersburg paper, the aircraft’s designer Igor Sikorsky – son of the Kiev professor who provided anti-Semitic ‘evidence’ against Mendel Beilis – declared that ‘having started later than others … we [Russia] gain more experience day by day in flying and in construction: we are not behind our teachers, soon we will overtake them’. Edward Acheson, an American inventor speaking in front of the Imperial Technical Society in St Petersburg in early 1913 declared simply ‘Russia – country of the future!’56

  Yes, the city still had its tenements, naemnye kazarmy, after the German Mietskasernen. The city had its homeless, their survival through a hard winter dubious. Most workers’ apartments had no running water at all, and excrement was still removed by cart at night. Large red-letter placards on the city’s trams warned residents not to drink raw water, but to boil it first. St Petersburg’s death rate was higher than Constantinople. In 1908–1909, some 30,000 fell ill with cholera; in 1913 the Tsar’s own daughter contracted the disease.57

  But these were perhaps the inevitable growing pains of a city undergoing galloping change, in a country experiencing a transformation from archaism to modernity. Such problems were experienced a few decades later than other European cities, certainly, but they were not fundamentally different from them. Would they not also be overcome, as they had been elsewhere in Europe? A matter of time perhaps. A matter of time.

  The Exposition Universelle in Ghent in 1913 was not as successful as some earlier international exhibitions. Some reasons were easy to find: Ghent, charming though its lace shops were, was not Paris. The organisers were unfortunate: in May that year a fire destroyed the pavilion of French Indochina, in September another fire started in a German restaurant and spread. But perhaps there was a deeper reason too. By 1913, international affairs and exhibitions had become routine, run of the mill. Rather than exceptional events, they were expected, the anticipation lessening with each repetition. Internationalism was, as John Maynard Keynes later put it, ‘normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement’.58

  To many a European, he continued, ‘the projects of militarism and imperialism, of
racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper’. Such projects were never off the front pages in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome or St Petersburg, of course. The war in the Balkans received ample coverage. So, too, the related movements of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, not to mention French nationalism, Italian colonialism, Prussian militarism, British imperialism and Russian anti-Semitism. But they had competitors for space: royal weddings, parliamentary debates, political scandals, social scandals, industrial strikes, celebrations and anniversaries, the prices of bank shares, Russian railway stocks, South African gold and Canadian wheat. For some, war was a word which denoted the facts of modern life, a scramble for position. For others, it was a word from the past, and something which should be forever kept there. For many, war was just a word. If it ever actually happened it was generally in other parts of the world, between people who were either impossibly heroic or inconceivably dastardly, and were almost certainly poorer and less well educated.

  In the meantime, the world came to Europe, the world went from Europe, and Europe remained its midpoint, steady on the seas of change.

  The inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson, March 1913. ‘It would be an irony of fate’, Wilson had commented to a friend a few months earlier, ‘if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems’. Reform of America’s financial system stood at the top of his list of domestic reforms.

  PART II

  THE OLD NEW WORLD

  In 1913, travelling from the Old World to the New World meant taking a boat. From Southampton, Cherbourg or Hamburg one could take fast steamships, cutting their way through the North Atlantic. More lumbering vessels made their way to America from Naples or Genoa, Trieste or Fiume. On the upper decks, sea air refreshed those travelling for business or leisure. On the lower decks, whose inhabitants were more likely to be migrants, the intermingled smells of tar and sweat predominated.

  There was perhaps a slight frisson of fear for some travellers on the fourth or fifth day at sea when a ship might come close to the spot where, the previous year, the Titanic had struck an iceberg and sunk, taking with it a host of the transatlantic elite – John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, the British journalist William Thomas Stead, the military aide to the American President – and many, many others whose names did not register in the public mind. But most voyages passed without incident. The safety of Atlantic shipping was constantly being improved. When the SS Volturno caught fire in October 1913, wireless signals brought nearly a dozen other ships to her rescue.

  Americans travelled to Europe to conduct business, to see the sights of the Old World and perhaps to marry into an aristocratic European family. Europeans travelled to America to seek a better life, attracted by the political freedom of the United States and by the boundless economic opportunities it appeared to offer for the common man. There was no shortage of European enquiries into the causes and consequences of America’s fantastic economic growth over the past fifty years – the multiplication of each American’s industrial output by a factor of six, while that of each Briton rather less than doubled. W. T. Stead, late of the Titanic, had written of The Americanization of the World as early as 1901. In 1913, the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero published an essay on ‘The Riddle of America’.1 The French Nobel Prizewinner, aristocrat and politician Baron Paul-Henri d’Estournelles de Constant, following in the footsteps of his compatriot de Tocqueville some eighty years previously, added his contribution to the pile in the form of Les Etat-Unis d’Amérique. The idea of America pressed itself ever more firmly into the European imagination, just as the products of America were ever more frequently to be found in European homes.

  Had the European traveller chanced upon Philip Dru, Administrator, a novel published anonymously the previous year about an America of the near future, they might have felt their curiosity particularly aroused – or perhaps, on further inspection, they might have wished to get off the boat. Here was an American book with a strange and unlikely vision of the United States, imagining that country in 1920, and on the eve of a second civil war. They would not have realised that the New York address, ‘Mandell House’, given to the book’s hero, Philip Dru, provided the clue to its author: Texan businessman and Democratic Party fixer ‘Colonel’ Edward Mandell House (the military title was honorary). And only if they followed American politics extremely closely would the name have meant anything to them – it was that of the closest political adviser to the newly elected President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

  As Philip Dru, Administrator begins, its eponymous hero regales his high-minded girlfriend, Gloria Strawn, with observations on the recent American past. ‘Wealth had grown so strong’, he tells her, ‘that the few were about to strangle the many, and among the great masses of people there was sullen and rebellious discontent’.2 The gap between winners and losers from America’s industrial growth has widened. For ‘the laborer in the cities, the producer on the farm’ the outlook is ‘gloomy and hopeless’. From the dismal state of American economics, Dru explains, flows the dismal state of American politics. In an America bereft of true leadership from its natural governing class – of which House would consider himself and Dru honorable members – political initiative has passed to the manipulators and the conmen. A bloody denouement is anticipated:

  Nowhere in the world is wealth more defiant, and monopoly more insistent than in this mighty republic … and it is here that the next great battle for human emancipation will be fought and won. And from the blood and travail of an enlightened people, there will be born a spirit of love and brotherhood which will transform the world; and the Star of Bethlehem, seen but darkly for two thousand years, will shine again with steady and effulgent glow.

  In the novel, Dru leaves the army and takes up residence in New York, observing the harsh and unjust realities of modern city life at close quarters.

  Meanwhile, the plot of Philip Dru, Administrator turns to the national scene. It describes an unfolding political conspiracy master-minded by the deviously intelligent Senator Selwyn, manipulating American democracy by focusing efforts and money on just a thousand swing voters in each district in twelve key states and then finding out everything necessary to persuade, cajole and bribe them to vote the ‘right’ way. This is the way to win elections, Selwyn realises, not by running a wasteful national campaign of ideas, but appealing to the baser instincts and vanity of the few voters who really matter. Selwyn selects an obscure Midwestern state governor, James R. Rockland, to be his candidate for the presidency. In turn, Rockland uses classic techniques of political manipulation – holding out the possibility of visits to Washington and the power of high office – to attract additional support from the politically influential men in key states, using Selwyn’s database of information about them to know just how much, and what, to offer.

  Rockland wins the presidency, but the conspiracy which delivers his victory is ultimately undone in true Nixonian fashion: by a voice-activated recording device that Selwyn uses to capture conversations in his personal rooms, revealing the extent to which he has debauched American democracy. As the conspiracy is made public Philip Dru bounds back on to the scene, at the head of a military insurgency against Selwyn and Rockland, a kind of political crusade for a new politics. The states of the West rise in his favour. So, too, the South, recalling bitterly the impoverishment brought on them by the last Civil War and by the misnamed period of ‘Reconstruction’ which followed it.

  Dru wins a striking victory at Elma, in upstate New York. Subsequently acclaimed ‘Administrator of the Republic’, he embarks on a dramatic programme of radical reform: introduction of a federal income tax, nationalisation of key industries, limitation of the working week, more stringent controls on concentrations of industry and the introduction of profit-sharing with employees in return for the abolition of strikes. Not content to rest there, he
ensures women are granted the vote, and the Constitution is rewritten.

  Abroad, Dru negotiates a geopolitical deal between the United States, Europe and Japan to keep the global peace. Canada joins the United States, while American troops intervene in Mexico to ‘bring order out of chaos’. Dru assures the defeated Mexicans that he does not intend annexation or indemnity, yet:

  … in the future, our flag is to be your flag, and you are to be directly under the protection of the United States … There will be an equitable plan worked out by which the land now owned by the few will be owned by the many. In another generation, this beautiful land will be teeming with an educated, prosperous and content people.

  After seven years of dictatorship, America is renewed. But, following the example of George Washington, Dru refuses to remain permanently at his country’s head. He and Gloria sail into the sunset. Well-wishers watch ‘in silent sadness’ as their ship fades into the Pacific: ‘Where were they bound? Would they return? These were the questions asked by all, but to which none could give an answer.’

  Edward Mandell House was no great novelist, and Philip Dru is no great novel. But, as a book of the time, written by a man with a close understanding of the political system and of the pressures within it, it is revealing. On the eve of President Wilson’s inauguration in Washington in March 1913, House was offered his choice of position in the Wilson administration. But, like the fictional Selwyn, he preferred the role of consigliere behind the scenes.

  The themes of Philip Dru are those of America during the progressive era: a country grappling with a half-century of dramatic economic and social change, a country not at ease with itself, a nation incomplete.3 The fear that big business – the huge companies dominating the country’s railways, steel mills and Wall Street – would crush the enterprise and spirit of America was a commonplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Europeans looked at the New World as a rising global force, Americans looked back to the Old World for their culture and, for good or ill, for their immigrants. Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the South remained a sullen partner in the country’s construction. Though the American economy was now the richest in the world, having surpassed the United Kingdom on measures of industrial production as early as the 1880s, politically that economic power was only dimly mastered. The mechanisms for its management were weak: until 1913 America did not even have a central bank. The United States was only halfway along a course from being a country of small villages and towns, each with their own political hinterland, to being a nation of great cities, connected over vast distances, and expressing the dynamism of a single nation.