Category Archives: travel

by Joel | 5 March 2011 · 12:21 pm

Railroads and State Debt, 1839

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 79-81:

The progress of the years preceding the 1837 Panic surely would resume, many wrote. Apparently insurmountable obstacles had been overcome. The “howling wilderness” was disappearing. “McAdamized highways, railroads and canals, have pervaded the country in every direction, giving free circulation to the products of mechanical skill, of art, and of labor, and animating the whole, immense, diversified country, with every sort of active business and intelligent enterprise.” That was no mean feat. No wonder, however, that types arose who tended to abuse the opportunity—people all too “shrewdly alive to their own interest.” There came a “universal mania” for wealth. “The old beaten track of plodding for our gains, was forsaken and contemned by the restless anxiety for change, and all seemed to engage in the alluring game of running hazards.” A long period of peace and prosperity emboldened them, as though the boom would never end. Yet there was wide consensus that the achievement was impressive. “We take the ground,” wrote a Baltimore man, “that the laborer who turns up a spadeful of earth in excavating a canal, or strikes a blow in constructing a railroad, becomes, by so doing, one of the builders up of a system, the benefits of which will endure so long as the continent on which we live shall endure.”

In the wake of the panic came a long and related crisis over state debts, a large proportion of which had been contracted in order to build railroads. The national debt was nonexistent; in fact there was often a surplus, but it was different with the states, which had borne the brunt of subsidizing rail finance. An Ohio editor estimated in 1839 that eighteen states had authorized public stock for canals and railroads amounting to $170 million, “which is as much a mortgage on our farms as was the national debt.” Interest ran about $12 million per year. It was ridiculous, the regional press thought, that Ohio had an agent in Europe to try to arrange more debt. The Ohio state legislature at its last session had, according to one critic, done more to “degrade the State abroad, and beggar its people at home, than the accumulated energy and labor of years can undo.”

Maybe it was not all bad, a New Yorker commented. Speculation had created 3,000 miles of railroad. “The parent may die, but the offspring will live to enlighten and bless.” A Massachusetts man argued that the Western Railroad there would be completed eventually and would be a good thing. Delays required credit, and credit required the payment of interest and the raising of taxes, but this was not “inconsistent with the business-like character of a business people.” The states received many indirect benefits from the railroads that did not show on their balance sheets proper.

To some that seemed cold comfort. People had been too extravagant in generally prosperous times, importing, for example, $41 million per year in foreign wines—half as much as was spent for railroad iron. Depressions came from overtrading. People seemed to have commenced business on too large a scale. There was a penchant for outright gambling. “Confidence has been destroyed; public and private faith and credit have been grossly abused, and foul deeds of iniquity have been committed.” Public business seemed to be influenced primarily by private business lobbies, and no producers appeared in proportion to the growth in borrowing. The credit of the states had been all too good. New York owed $23 million in 1839, Louisiana $23 million, Pennsylvania $27 million, Maryland $11 million, Massachusetts $4 million, Alabama $10 million, and Tennessee $7 million. And states were adding debt all the time. “Our credit is so good that it will ruin us, if we do not stop and think of the consequences of so severely testing it…. Are we not getting in jeopardy the dearest interests, the honor and independence of our country, and selling our glorious national birthright for a mess of pottage?”

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 5 March 2011 · 11:18 am

New Hampshire Skeptical of Railroads, 1840s

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 119-120:

Why were railroads so great? Who had benefited? When the Eastern [Railroad from Massachusetts to Maine] was proposed, stated one letter to the editor, people along the projected route in Massachusetts and New Hampshire were “lunatic” on the subject. “One would suppose that there was no other road in existence, that indeed to them belonged the discovery of the power of steam, engines, Railroads, &c, and that their fame exceeded the fame of any and all ancient and modern cities. It was said that the old men of the city assembled at the depot in the morning, and really forgot to go to their meals.” Yet by 1841 most of the towns that had been courted had become minor way stations, hearing only the buzz of the engine on the way to Boston. It seemed a bad bargain altogether.

New Hampshire debated the right-of-way issue into the mid-1840s. Enterprise should have full scope, wrote the paper in Concord, but the point in dispute was the right of the legislature to empower a private corporation for private gain to take from a man his land against his will. In that regard the New Hampshire debate was much like the modern controversy over the proper uses of the eminent domain power, and here the state did not regard railroads as a true public use. The chief purpose of a railroad, the legislators thought, was to make money, not to serve the public. “If the constitution must be violated and the rights of individuals molested, it seems no good citizen can favor any project, which shall encroach upon the rights of freemen.” This led one commentator to write in dismay that he was certain that in the state’s “lamentable” stance toward railroads, it had “shut itself out from one of the most beneficial improvements of modern times.”

Inevitably, the state eventually had more or less its share of railroads, and it learned to do what was necessary to accommodate them politically and socially. But New Hampshire remained proud that it had not swallowed the whole package. An editor in Portsmouth noted that credit could not be separated from character: “Integrity, industry, virtue, and character it is that commands the capital which changes the sailor boy in his tarpaulin to the captain of the beautiful packet ship.” So at least it should be. New Hampshire retained its strict laws about individual liability and its narrow interpretation of eminent domain for some years.

The Albany Argus wrote in 1841, in the wake of the Panic of 1837, that “New Hampshire may well congratulate herself, that she has never embarked in any of the wild and visionary schemes of internal improvements, which have plunged other states into such an embarrassing and wretched state of want and indebtedness. She has escaped the bitterness of learning by experience the folly of a large community attempting to carry on public works with prudence, economy or even honesty.” Would that Pennsylvania and Indiana, burdened with state works not paying even their current expenses and repairs on state railroad systems, not to mention the debt service, had done the same. The manic policy of the rest of the country was, according to some in New Hampshire, the “high road to beggary.”
…
Boston thought such a policy was a “dreaded obstruction” to its enterprise. It was suspicious of presidential candidate Franklin Pierce just because he was from New Hampshire.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 19 February 2011 · 10:08 am

Naipaul on Schweitzer in Gabon

From The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V. S. Naipaul (Knopf, 2010), pp. 203-205:

Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty years before, and missionary activity, both American and French, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, had been going on for almost all that time.

The English traveller Mary Kingsley came to Gabon in 1893 and 1895. Her famous book, Travels in West Africa, was published by the house of Macmillan in 1897. (This was the year in which Somerset Maugham published his first novel; it gives a kind of context.)

Mary Kingsley describes a busy river life in Gabon, with traders and missionaries. Dr. Schweitzer, when he came to Gabon twenty years later, in 1915, would not have had to live the life of Robinson Crusoe. Mission life by this time would already have been formalised. African children would have been trained in housework; the missionary whose energy was low needed only conduct a service in his church, which might be next door to his house.

Mary Kingsley writes especially about Dr. Nassau, a very early missionary from the American Presbyterian mission. He had been working among Africans for forty years when Mary Kingsley met him. She is full of praise for him; and he is clearly an unusual man, of high intellect, full of energy, and wise about the ways and beliefs of Africans. The subject of African religion interests Mary Kingsley, too. She consults Dr. Nassau at length about what she calls “fetish,” which is her portmanteau word for African belief, and she gives the subject five chapters in her book, a hundred pages.

Set beside Mary Kingsley and Dr. Nassau, Dr. Schweitzer doesn’t shine. Among Africans his reputation, which has lasted down to our own time, is that of a man who was “harsh” to Africans and was not interested in their culture. This perhaps is the true mystery of the man: not his ability in 1915 to turn his back on the civilisation of the time (though the 1914 war might have been a factor), but the—almost heroic—idea of his own righteousness that enabled him to live apart in Africa for all that time: the ideal of the missionary taken to its limit, the man less interested in serving men than in beguiling them.

Early on her travels Mary Kingsley saw the ruins of the first mission house Dr. Nassau built on the upper Oguwé. It was on one side of a ravine, and in front of it, “as an illustration of the transitory nature of European life in West Africa,” was the grave of Mrs. Nassau. The four or five lines about this—the ruined mission house above the grave—make a telling point about dedication and loss and the swift growth of bush.

Quite different is the cluster of granite crosses beside the Lambaréné hospital building. The crosses are close together. They seem not to leave room for anyone else. These are the Schweitzer family graves. They speak more of possession and triumph than tragedy. Nearby is a caged, depressed-looking pelican, padding about on trampled mud. Dr. Schweitzer had a pet pelican; and this unhappy pelican, flying nowhere, diving nowhere, is kept in his memory.

1 Comment

Filed under publishing, religion, travel

by Joel | 17 February 2011 · 4:36 pm

High-speed Rail in 1826

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 1-2:

A young lady wrote to a Pennsylvania newspaper in the summer of 1827 about her journey along the state-operated system of internal improvements. Having left Reading at three in the afternoon, she arrived at Mount Carbon the next evening after a passage of 49 miles by canal, “a great journey for me to make in one day.” The mountain scenery impressed her, as did the band on board the canal boat, but greater wonders awaited. From Mauch Chunk (population 1,300), she elected to ride to the nearby coal mines, 9 miles up a considerable slope, on the Mauch Chunk Railway. This line, built in September 1826, comprised, along with a shorter (3-mile) one from the Boston tidewater to a granite quarry at Quincy, Massachusetts, the first elements of the railway system in the United States.

There were three carriages that day each loaded with six passengers. A horse drew the train up the 3-foot, 7-inch gauge track to the mine, 900 feet above the Lehigh River, in 1 hour and 25 minutes. Coming down, there was no horse, only a rope wound at the top around a wheel with a friction brake to control the descent. That ride reached speeds of 30 miles per hour—faster than the passengers had ever experienced. The cars seemed at times on the verge of shooting off a cliff before a curve came into view and took the gasping tourists around. Wrote the young lady, clinging to her seat: “It really appeared like flying.”

The Mauch Chunk and Quincy Railroads were in those years (the mid-1820s) a national phenomenon, a tourist attraction of a magnitude far beyond their limited economic function. Newspapers competed for details. Also, they collected news from British journals of the architecturally impressive railroad lines completed in 1826 between Stockton and Darlington and Liverpool and Manchester.

At Quincy the attraction was the tremendous weights that could be moved with relatively little effort by means of rails. A load of 21 tons of stone made its way down a slight grade along the Quincy road in October 1826, pulled by a single horse. The horse easily pulled the empty cars back. “It is a matter of astonishment,” went a Massachusetts governmental report, “to consider how great an advantage is gained, by merely providing smooth iron tracks for the wheels of carriages to run on; and though, in every kind of machinery, simplicity tends to increase its value and beauty, yet in no instance, can we find, from so simple an arrangement, effects so striking, or which promise to be so extensively beneficial.” An extension of a railroad system, the report concluded, would impart energy to all kinds of business and produce circumstances that would improve the reputation of the state and of society in general. By the spring of 1827, people from around the nation were visiting the Quincy railroad, giving business to an inn and interfering substantially with the main business of the road in order to satisfy the demands of tourists. The little Quincy Railroad became an object of study for civil engineers and legislative committees thinking of more ambitious rail projects. The economic advantages were obvious. The railroad had made granite so inexpensive that in Boston a house could be built of that durable material more cheaply than with bricks, even when the bricks sold for as low as $4 per thousand.

The Mauch Chunk line drew more attention still, so much that one editor commented it had become a “place of notoriety” Pleasure cars made the round-trip once every day and were always booked in advance.” One passenger reported riding “in pleasure carriages, which have seats like sleighs, and precisely like the sleigh, but longer and without back and front, and have small iron wheels.” It seemed a pleasant way to travel, “not a jolt, jar, or movement, to the right or left.” Birds, cats, and cows flew for their lives before the train: “They must have thought the end of the world was at hand.”

Leave a comment

Filed under industry, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 25 October 2010 · 6:26 am

Dull Eating along the Tokaido in Edo Times

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 163-164:

After so much talk of famine, we too need some relief. Let us turn next to the food that travelers ate at the fifty-three stops of the Tōkaidō highway. In 1817 Yamagata Heiemon Shigeyoshi, the master of the scholar Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821), was summoned by the lord of Sendai. Yamagata left Osaka by boat on the eighteenth day of the first month and then traveled on highways to arrive in Sendai on the twelfth day of the second month. In his detailed travel diary, he recorded exactly what he ate at each of the inns at which he lodged.

For lunch on the nineteenth, while looking out over Lake Biwa near Atsuta, Yamagata ate corbicula soup; a dish of carrots, burdock, and kelp; and a dish of trefoil dressed with white sesame sauce. Toward evening he arrived at Kusatsu in snowy weather; here it was so cold that even the lamp oil froze. Supper consisted of a vinegared dish (namasu) of giant white radish (daikon), persimmon, and greens; a soup of greens and dried bean curds; a hira of kamaboko, gourd shavings (kanpyō), and burdock; and a broiled salted mackerel. The next morning he ate white beet soup; a hira of Japanese cabbage (mizuna), shiitake mushroom, and dried bean curd; a choku of pickled salted plums; and a roasted dried fish. Yamagata crossed Suzuka Pass in heavy snow and spent the night at the bottom of the opposite slope: the twenty-first found him in Kuwana; the twenty-second, in Miya. Although the surroundings changed considerably, food on the Tōkaidō highway stayed basically the same at every inn. As soups, hira, tsubo, or broiled fish were not varied by introducing locally available specialties, the cuisine was quite monotonous.

This was an official trip. Travel expenses for Yamagata and his attendant, a doctor, five porters, three packhorse drivers, and three horses were probably paid by the lord of Sendai. Thus meals at each post town must have been of a high quality. Although one must take into account that Yamagata’s journey took place in the middle of winter, the lack of variety in the cuisine is surprising. Soups always included giant white radish, either fresh or dried; the hira always featured combinations of dried gourd shavings (kanpyō), tofu, burdock, carrot, potato, kelp, shiitake mushrooms, and, as recorded on a few occasions, dried laver (nori) and kamaboko. The tsubo consisted of kokushō; of tofu boiled in water, soy sauce, and sake; of burdock; or of light wheat gluten cakes. Broiled fish usually meant mackerel, young sea bream, sole, or yellowtail. Exceptional meals included the eel served for supper at an inn at Arai and the “fluffy eggs” eaten for breakfast at Fukuroi. Today Japanese travelers would tire of such fare in two or three days. Such cuisine gives us yet another insight into conditions on the Tōkaidō during an age in which the pace of life was much slower than it is today.

Once Yamagata had passed Edo and headed for the northeast, some local color appears in his meals. At Kasukabe broiled carp (funa) was served; at Odawara he ate a wild duck. Broiled fish was almost invariably salmon or gurnard (kanagashira), but at Koshigawa he received dried cod flavored with sake. Nevertheless, both soups and hira featured nothing out of the ordinary. Even the fact that udo (probably yamaudo) was eaten at the stay at Kasukabe on the fifth day of the second month seems remarkable in this context. If high-class inns on the Tōkaidō and Ōshū-kaidō served this kind of fare during the late Edo period, one may assume that both the quality and preparation of food at townsmen’s homes must have been quite mediocre by today’s standards.

NOTES: Although I was familiar with kinpira (金平 lit. ‘gold ordinary’), I wasn’t aware that hira (平 ‘level, plain, common’?) could be used for all types of similarly prepared (sauteed then simmered together) vegetable dishes. Perhaps tsubo (壷) ‘pot, jar’ dishes differ from nabemono (鍋物 ‘hot pot‘) by being prepared in the kitchen rather than at the dining table. Kokushō (濃く漿, ‘thick sap/serum/plasma’?) seems more commonly known as 重湯 omoyu (lit. ‘heavy hotwater’) ‘thin rice gruel’, like okayu (お粥) ‘rice gruel, jook, congee’.

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Japan, travel

by Joel | 16 September 2010 · 6:54 am

The Strength of Edo-period Culture

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 8-9:

The strength of Edo-period culture is not to be found in extant artifacts of the era. Rather, its strength lies chiefly in its spectacular breadth and diversity. This was a period of unprecedented cultural prosperity. Even the general public took part in leisure pursuits and played an active role in the creation of new cultural forms. The average commoner read books or visited the theater; some even wrote haiku verses and senryū (seventeen-syllable comic verse) or performed musical genres such as gidayū, kato bushi, shinnai, or nagauta. Others went on pilgrimages sponsored by religious associations (kō) and toured distant places. The Edo period saw a rise in the quality of culinary fare that commoners consumed; clothing and housing too showed marked improvement. Even the poor managed occasionally to indulge in the luxury of purchasing a “custom-made” comb or an ornamental hairpin. The demand for such cultural items fostered the development of a highly refined handicraft industry. Never before had there been such an extraordinary variety of hand-made cultural artifacts in Japan.

Even in remote areas in the countryside or on distant, isolated islands, inhabitants cultivated rare varieties of flowers and trees and marketed unusual rocks or curiosities. As Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) noted in his Akiyama kikō (Autumn Mountain Travelogue, 1831), people in every corner of the land were busy manufacturing local specialties. Such articles were being produced, one by one, by thirty million people. By the late Edo period this activity had stimulated an unprecedented development of the transportation network. Mountain roads, waterways, and sea routes were extended in all directions to every nook and cranny of the country. Indeed, the construction of footpaths during the late Edo period can be seen as a kind of symbol of this golden age of handicraft culture.

No doubt, Japan today boasts a high level of culture. But the price has been high as well: severe environmental pollution and the wholesale destruction of nature. Until the end of the Edo period, red-crested cranes could still be seen soaring through the skies over the city; swans and geese flocked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. Foxes and badgers were found everywhere, and cuckoos (hototogisu) flourished in such numbers that their song was considered a nuisance. Even during the late Meiji period the water of the Sumida River was clean enough to be used for brewing tea while boating. Human activity imparted only minimal damage to nature. Viewed in this way, Edo-period culture seems almost ideal.

Certain elements of the Edo-period cultural heritage were vulgar, no doubt, but a more comprehensive view of the period reveals an almost infinite number of admirable qualities. Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation. That the true value of Edo-period culture could not yet be properly assessed had much to do with the lack of any inquiry into its origins and actual conditions. Recent research, however, has shown that Edo-period culture was outstanding in its own way and not at all inferior to the culture of earlier or later periods.

Leave a comment

Filed under art, Japan, language, literature, music, scholarship, travel

by Joel | 6 September 2010 · 5:00 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Birds for Trains

“So what is a shirasagi, anyway?” I asked the JR clerk in Nagoya Station who had initiated our rail passes and booked reservations on the Shirasagi Limited Express to Hida Takayama. “Could it be a white rabbit (shira- ‘white’ + usagi ‘rabbit’)?” She had no idea. But I should have known it would be a bird.

Before the advent of the Shinkansen bullet trains in 1964, the most famous limited express train along the Tokaido Main Line was the Tsubame ‘swallow’. In fact, the Japan National Railways (JNR, 国鉄) used a swallow logo on its bus system and called its professional baseball team the (Kokutetsu) Swallows. Two other notable limited express trains we rode in those days were the Hato ‘dove’ and the Kamome ‘seagull’.

Most express trains were named for destinations, like the Miyajima Express that I used to ride home to Hiroshima from boarding school in Kobe, but the fastest limited express trains tended to be named for birds. The first bullet trains went for even speedier names: Kodama ‘echo’ (speed of sound), Hikari ‘flash’ (speed of light), and the latest, postmodern-sounding Nozomi ‘desire’. But regional bullet trains have revived a lot of the old limited-express bird names: Hayabusa ‘peregrine falcon’, Kamome ‘seagull’, Toki ‘crested ibis’, Tsubame ‘swallow’.

On our latest trip, we were in the Hokuriku region, off the Shinkansen grid, where the fastest trains are traditional limited expresses, so we encountered several bird-named trains that were new to me. Shirasagi can be translated ‘snowy egret’ (Egretta thula), although sagi labels the whole family of herons (Ardeidae), as in aosagi (lit. ‘blue heron’) ‘gray heron’ (Ardeia cinerea).

Coming back to Kanazawa from Nanao on the Noto Peninsula, we rode the Sandābādo/Thunderbird, whose name left me a bit nonplussed until we paired it with Raichō ‘rock ptarmigan’ (Lagopus muta), a limited express that runs from Osaka through Kanazawa to Toyama. Thunderbird began operations as Super Raichō (Thunderbird), and Raichō (雷鳥) literally translates as ‘thunder bird’. The rock ptarmigan is a symbol of Toyama Prefecture’s Tateyama, one of Japan’s 三霊山 Sanreizan ‘Three Holy Mountains’, along with Fujisan and Hakusan. (Doesn’t the Rock Ptarmigan sound like a good name for a smaller version of Ford’s SVT Raptor?)

Another limited express we rode between Kanazawa and Toyama was the Hakutaka, whose name is always written in kana, not kanji, and whose train cars carry an emblem with the English words “White Wing.” The name evokes an old Tateyama legend about a white hawk (白鷹, which would normally be pronounced shirataka), but also evokes the name of a long-distance train, Hakuchō (‘white bird’ =) ‘swan’ that used to run all the way from Aomori (where the swan is the prefectural bird) via Ueno and Kanazawa to Osaka. The name Hakutaka was independently used for trains running on the leg between Ueno and Kanazawa until that leg was disrupted by the extension of the Shinkansen toward Nagano and Niigata in 1982. In 1997 it was revived for limited express trains running along the Japan Sea coast between Fukui and Niigata prefectures.

The first Japanese long-distance trains to receive names seem to have been the Fuji and Sakura, which began running between Tokyo and Shimonoseki in 1912, but were not named until 1929.

The first train named Hato ‘dove’ was an express on the South Manchuria Railway (満鉄 Mantetsu) running between Dalian and the new (in 1932) Manchukuo capital, 新京 Shinkyō (now Changchun). The limited express on that route was named あじあ Ajia ‘Asia’.

POSTSCRIPT: The first trains named Hikari and Nozomi were Mantetsu expresses running between Busan (釜山) and Shinkyō (新京). (Japanese Wikipedia offers very detailed coverage of Japanese train systems, past and present.)

And, speaking of Imperial Japan, many of the same bird names were used for Hayabusa-class torpedo boats built between 1900 and 1904 that served so well in the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War.

Leave a comment

Filed under industry, Japan, language, military, travel

by Joel | 16 July 2010 · 8:06 am

Another Holiday Hiatus

We’re off to Japan until the end of the month.

UPDATE: I’ve been very busy since I got back, but I have managed to upload, in small batches of a half dozen or so at a time, several score of the hundreds of photos from our trip, many of them with captions that contain tiny Wordcatcher Tales in their own right. Just click on the images from my Flickr account that display on this blog.

Leave a comment

Filed under blogging, travel

by Joel | 7 June 2010 · 2:47 pm

American Travelers Meet Stalin, 1927

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007),
Kindle Loc. 1305-60:

The appointment hour, 1:00 p.m., came without further vacillation by the Kremlin. Robert Dunn, John Brophy, and Paul Douglas all went for the interview. So did Louis Fischer, an American who was writing pro-Soviet articles for left-wing American periodicals out of Moscow at the time. So, as it turned out, did a journalist who was visiting Moscow for the New York Times, Anne O’Hare McCormick.

Those who did attend kept notes. Douglas: “Recalling the deeds of terror that had been committed there throughout its history, I shivered as we entered Red Square and then went through the gates of the Kremlin.” A small pockmarked man met them in a cloakroom; Douglas assumed it was an attendant. But the man took the head place at the table. It was Stalin. “His low brow was clear under a square-ish brush of black hair that made his head look oddly cubist,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick. “He looked like any of a million Soviet workingmen,” commented Fischer. “Deep pockmarks over his face,” read Fischer’s notes; “low forehead”; “ugly, short, black and gold teeth when smiles.” Whereas Trotsky had worn white, Stalin wore khaki. Douglas thought he saw a private’s uniform, Fischer a civilian suit. The pants legs he stuck into high black boots. Fischer sought to capture the moment in every medium possible. In his notebook, next to the words, he made pencil sketches of the leader’s head.

The group expected an hour with the leader. They got six and a quarter. One thing struck them even before the meeting started: Stalin’s charm. He was not dashing like Trotsky, but he seemed in a way more genuine. What came through was that Stalin had done his homework and touched on the issues that interested them—workers’ insurance, for example, Douglas’s pet research area since the days of the loggers. Stalin knew all about La Follette’s strong 1924 showing. A questioner asked how Stalin knew that the Russian people were behind him. He answered that the Bolsheviks would never have come to power if they were not popular; today heads of unions were all Communists, again a fact that reflected grassroots support.

Stalin also took time to emphasize that his government was an ethnically diverse one, with a Ukrainian, a Byelorussian, an Azerbaijani, and an Uzbek in the central executive committee of the Soviets. There were also, Fischer would later write, questions about religion: must a Communist be an atheist? Yes, Stalin answered, and even as he answered, church bells across the street rang. The guests laughed, and Stalin smiled—as if to signal the tolerance he could not articulate officially.

Stalin also rejected the notion that U.S. Communists worked “under orders” from Moscow as “absolutely false”—itself a lie. As the group drank lemon tea from a samovar, Stalin made his case: the Soviet Union and the United States might trade together even if they had different systems—the new doctrine of Socialism in One Country.

Fischer reported that no one but a serving woman entered the room during the course of the meeting; she brought cheese, sausage, and caviar sandwiches. (Brophy reported tea and cookies.) There must have been an interpreter and stenographer present. After several hours the guests made an attempt to go; Stalin would not permit it. Instead he turned the tables and asked questions of the delegates. The transcript of these questions, published within a week in Pravda, give as clear a snapshot as any document of the tactical and strategic goals of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin wanted to make the point that he had a genuine labor following in the United States, and he wanted to sideline those organizations that had sidelined him—with the aid of his interlocutors. He had already skewered the anti-Communist American Federation of Labor. Now he set about doing so again: “How do you explain the fact that on the question of recognizing the USSR, the leaders of the American Federation of Labor are more reactionary than many bourgeois?”

Brophy allowed that the AFL had a “peculiar philosophy.” Dunn took time to point out that the AFL was too close to capitalists—especially Matthew Woll, AFL vice president. Brophy was the one who spoke the last formal words of the visitors to Stalin before they departed. In Stalin’s official transcript, the travelers gave the Soviet leader what he sought, a form of U.S. blessing: “The presence of the American delegation in the USSR is the best reply and is evidence of the sympathy of a section of the American workers to the workers of the Soviet Union.” As the group left, Douglas spied a bust of Karl Marx, with full beard, in the corner. Contemplating it, he was startled to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Stalin. They joked about whether Marx had worn a necktie.

Several of the travelers sensed that they had been used to an extent they had not foreseen: “we realized that in his speeches he was talking over our heads to the newspapers, in answer to Trotsky,” Brophy would write. Anne O’Hare McCormick, confused, retreated to racialist imagery for her report: Stalin, she said, was a hybrid of east and west, almost “Occidorient in person.”

The vessel that returned the group home to America was not the President Roosevelt this time but the Leviathan. The irony of that name may not have escaped some of them. On shipboard, Silas Axtell, the lawyer, bitterly objected that some of the other labor people on the trip were producing a report far too positive. As he later recalled, “The whole report was written with such a solicitous and affectionate regard for the welfare of the dominating group in Russia, whose guests we had been, and the impression from reading the report was so different from the one I had received, I could not possibly subscribe to it.” Douglas likewise quarreled with Robert Dunn over the content of their joint essay. Dunn was painting the picture too rosily, Douglas maintained. Later, he discovered that Coyle had diluted his discussion of civil rights in the published report.

Axtell and Douglas may have been thinking of another intellectual pilgrim who had met Stalin before them: Emma Goldman. Goldman had had every reason to accept what she saw in Russia; the United States of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge was unlikely to welcome her back. Yet when she learned that Stalin was imprisoning her beloved fellow anarchists, she had grown skeptical. And when the Bolsheviks—led by the same Trotsky of the white suit—bloodily put down their fellow Communists in Kronstadt in 1921, she had turned against the Soviet Union entirely. “I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise,” Goldman wrote. Though she really had nowhere to go, she left Communist Russia and shortly published a monograph on the false freedoms of the Soviet Union, My Disillusionment with Russia.

A decade after Emma Goldman’s experience, and five years after the 1927 delegation, Arthur Koestler, a young Communist, would also be repulsed. He found that the Soviet Union had developed a neat trick for bribing young intellectuals. Through its State Publishing Trusts it would buy the rights to a book or article—with a different payment for an edition in each one of the Soviet Union’s multiple languages. Koestler reported selling the same short story to as many as ten different literary magazines, from Armenian to Ukrainian. The place really was, he would note ironically, “the writer’s paradise.”

Leave a comment

Filed under publishing, travel, U.S., USSR

by Joel | 3 June 2010 · 8:50 pm

American Travelers in the USSR, 1927

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007), Kindle Loc. 1196-1250:

TO MAKE LANDFALL IN EUROPE was a relief for the travelers. Here at least the economic facts did not contradict their reform concepts so profoundly. There were some bumps along the road. In Warsaw they felt a jolt when their guide, Albert Coyle, acknowledged that he had misplaced the trip funds. In Dortmund, Tugwell got bored and skipped a meeting with trade union people at a steel plant to go to an art gallery. But from the time they met Soviet trade union leaders at the Polish-Soviet border, the travelers felt their spirits rise. This would indeed prove the junket of all junkets. It didn’t hurt that their hosts gave them first-class treatment—free transportation, cheap or free hotel service, and so on. And there were to be meetings with leaders—Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the Russian prime minister, Leon Trotsky, already out of the Kremlin’s inner circle but not yet exiled, and others of high rank. For the travelers, who were at best respectable but not themselves of national rank at home, these introductions in and of themselves made for a high. There is nothing headier than finding one is more recognized abroad than at home. And that was not all: rumor had it there would be meetings at the highest level, perhaps even with Stalin himself.

The travelers’ enthusiasm was only strengthened by what they saw in the first few days. The failures of the economy were not all visible. Indeed, if one squinted, things looked almost reasonable in Soviet Russia. Lenin, before dying, had instituted his New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed the survival of small artisans. The economy had finally begun to regain pre–World War I levels. The brutal collectivization of agriculture and the famines of the 1930s were still to come. The Soviets for their part tried to burnish their own reputation with unfavorable references to America. Everywhere the travelers went, Brophy would later note, they heard about Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed while the travelers were in Russia, just as predicted. For days after the execution, the towns the travelers arrived in were draped with banners hung in honor of Sacco and Vanzetti, “victims of ‘American capitalism.’” To the travelers it seemed that Russia understood what the land of Babbitt did not.

Roger Baldwin, who had corresponded with Vanzetti until his death, was deeply impressed with what he saw. Baldwin understood that Stalin’s Russia had a dark side. He didn’t enjoy his time in what he called this “irritating place.” But Russia still seemed somehow farther along than the narrow Massachusetts that could put the anarchist pair to death. Baldwin gave Leo Tolstoy’s son letters he had received from Vanzetti so that Tolstoy might post them for Russians to see at a state bank. As he wrote of Russia, Baldwin’s own conclusions were hopeful. “Everybody is poor together,” he wrote to his mother. “There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes.”

For the high-spirited Tugwell, part of the trip was about having a good time. Half a century later, Stuart Chase would write Tugwell, asking whether he recalled when “you, Bart Brebner and I were the ‘Three Musketeers’ in Moscow in 1927.” At one point the group split up, and Tugwell traveled down the Volga on a barge, insisting that his interpreter and captain teach him a folksong about a Russian Robin Hood, “Stenka Rasin.” In exchange Tugwell taught the Russians “Beulah Land.” He rode in private railway cars—“ancient but gaudy” first-class wagons-lits from the days of the Romanovs—through Cossack country. Tugwell kept notes; he dined out. He wondered, as he always did when he was abroad, whether his life was on the correct path: after another preceding period overseas he had taken leave from academia for a year to farm beside his father before deciding the move was a mistake. The more earnest Douglas, himself considerably distracted by his own dying marriage, at one point reproached Tugwell for his lack of gravity.

But when it came to their work, Tugwell, like the other travelers, was serious enough. Committed to researching agriculture reform, he fought off offers to see factories and demanded visits to farms instead. He noted, first of all, that while conditions were still terrible within the Soviet Union, they were probably improving: “The manor houses are gone; only the drab villages remain,” he wrote, concluding that “here is a bit more to eat of a little better quality. There is a radio in the village hall. There is more wood for warmth,” he would later write. New England might be slowly dying; the Soviet Union to his mind represented “a stirring of new life hardly yet come to birth.” He loved the idea of economics being made subservient, itself like a serf, to the good of the rural village: “with us, prices are a result; in Russia they are agents of social purpose.” Tugwell insisted on more visits and was duly granted them.

Tugwell found himself admiring the active role of the Soviet government toward farming. He liked the idea of the agronom, the farm manager or bureaucrat, who oversaw a set of farms or a region. The Russian farmer, he noted, “suffers from price-disadvantage, it is true; but so also do farmers all over the world.” Tugwell pointed out a difference from the United States: in Russia, the farmer’s challenges were the subject of genuine government controversy. “There is a disposition to do something about it. Can this be said of the U.S. government?”

Most of all, however, it was the villages that impressed Tugwell. Many had not yet been collectivized, but they were still relatively cooperative compared to rigidly fenced New England. This cooperation he perceived to be natural, indeed, inevitable—“cooperation is forced in the nature of things.” In his own childhood, there had been similar cooperation. He remembered traveling over New York’s Ellery hills to a friend’s house with his father, only to find the family not at home. The pair had fixed a meal from what they found in the buttery nonetheless, a fact which did not bother their hosts, when they returned, in the slightest. That was the way things were, in the old agricultural community. Under the czars, Tugwell noted, village farmers too had shared—“Russia was communal in this sense long before it was persuaded to Communism in the Marxian sense.”

Tugwell believed that what remained of private arrangements also needed to be ended; it was time for “abandoning the old one-man, one-plow method.” After all, in a big communal field “a tractor can go as far and fast as it is capable of doing without the bother of fence corner turnings. Socially, the village has great advantages if it is not too closely built or too big.” Further rationalization might work if only the stubborn peasant would cooperate. And even though he disliked the Soviet dictatorship from the start, he was struck by the authority of Russian propaganda and its enormous success. Always, the Russians they met up with “told us what our country was like.” This simultaneously horrified the progressive in Tugwell and pleased the efficiency expert in him: “I knew from then on how determined dictators come to manage a people.”