Forgotten Man, The (9 page)

Raymond Moley, an acquaintance of Tugwell’s, taught a course at Columbia’s sister college, Barnard, on how reformers in Britain and Bismarck in Germany had solved some of the social problems of industrialization. Moley, and Douglas as well, had become interested in the British export of the settlement house, a community center for the urban poor.

Over at the Teachers College, Columbia University, another man on the Soviet trip, George Counts, was working in a different field: education. Counts had also researched and experimented with John Dewey at his progressive Laboratory School at Douglas’s university, trying to establish a new form of child-centered education. Farther north up Lake Michigan, another man on the trip, Carleton Washburne of the progressive Winnetka school system, had also been experimenting with new methods of teaching. The educational progressives believed that competition among individuals in school—just as in Tugwell’s economy—was wrong. Instead it was time to look
for a model of the collective school for the new society. Families mattered less in such a model—the family was an old agricultural unit, after all. And the factory mattered more. Long before this trip, Dewey and Counts had argued that the best models might be found abroad. Dewey had also argued that in a new mass society, the school must promulgate social change, not respond to it.

There were other refuges. Settlement houses had spread across the United States, and these were homes for intellectuals too. One that achieved the most was Hull House on Halsted Avenue in Chicago. For the poor of that area its resourceful founder, Jane Addams, provided everything, from piano lessons to drilling in English to health care. At Addams’s center Douglas met Europeans—“British journalists and politicians and fiery Indian nationalists”—who reinforced his sense that the United States must learn from examples abroad. At one point Addams called the Soviet revolution “the greatest social experiment in history.” For generations, progressives had gathered here.

On Halsted Street Douglas found other reformers. At least one who had paid a visit before him was an apprentice social worker—Frances “Fanny” Perkins, a young alumna of Comstock’s college, Mount Holyoke. Labor reform was deeply important, Douglas believed. He spent time familiarizing himself with the highly compelling case of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union.

In New York, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, which by 1916 was sending nurses out to see 1,300 patients a day. Henry Street helped the poor, but it also served as a safe haven for some of the children of the wealthy, who turned to progressive life as much out of desire to escape as out of any dedication to social change. One of those to work there—he spent time helping out as early as the summer of 1911—was Henry Morgenthau Jr., the son of the Morgenthau who had made a fortune on Wall Street and real estate. The younger Henry was not sure which field of work to choose, and was actually attracted to the idea of farming—the rural retreat. Another to come to Henry Street was a Vassar girl, Beatrice
Bishop. Bishop, an heiress from an old Dutch family like Roosevelt’s, had suffered at the hand of a vindictive mother, herself the daughter of a president of the New York Stock Exchange. Her mother, Amy Bend Bishop, had wanted to stop Beatrice attending college, predicting, “You will become a bluestocking and no one will look at you.” Beatrice had a striking, wedge-shaped face; her mother had been right only about the first part. It was Adolf Berle who brought her to Lillian Wald’s table. He described Henry Street to her as “a lay convent of sorts.” Dining there with him and other intellectuals at a dark oak table, Bishop found a refuge of idealism.

At Christodora House on Tompkins Square, yet another young idealist, a Grinnell graduate named Harry Hopkins, worked with boys’ clubs. Hopkins found himself intrigued with Europe in a more personal sense, secretly courting and marrying a bright young social worker who had emigrated from Hungary, Ethel Gross. Nor was he the only social reformer to take his romance with the European East to a personal level. Nearing the age of sixty, John Dewey in 1917 fell in love with Anzia Yezierska, a redheaded social activist from Russia who was also known as the “sweatshop Cinderella.”

And of course there were the magazines where the intellectuals found one another: the
New Republic,
the
Nation.
The audiences were small but the editors were friendly. Earlier in 1927, Tugwell had written a desperate article in the
Nation
titled “What Will Become of the Farms?” His conclusions were gloomy, but having an outlet and collegial editors consoled him. Two brothers, Carl and Mark van Doren, held spots on the masthead; so did Mark’s wife, Dorothy. Carl’s wife, Irita, had already gone over to the
Herald Tribune
as an editor. But they all knew one another.

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.”

Meanwhile Chase was looking into industry, his area. The official goals of the Russian state planning commission impressed him deeply. This was “the attempt to do away with wastes and frictions that do such dreadful damage in Western countries.” The scale of the management took his breath away: “Sixteen men in Moscow today are attempting one of the most audacious economic experiments in history…they are laying down the industrial future of 146 million people and of one-sixth of the land area of the world for fifteen years.” Chase continued, “These sixteen men salt down the whole economic life of 146 million people for a year in advance as calmly as a Gloucester man salts down his fish.” And, Chase noted with enormous admiration, “the actual performance for the year 1928 will not be so very far from the prophecies and commandments so calmly made…. One suspects that even Henry Ford would quail before the order.” Perhaps the United States could organize its economy in similar fashion. Chase, like Steffens, believed he saw something that worked. All this went far beyond the planned efforts to stimulate the consumer advocated by William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, or Herbert Hoover’s careful constitutional constructs.

Chase paid a call to the offices of Gosplan, the state planning commission now charged with running the economy. Here he found that phenomenon Tugwell had longed for in a
Nation
article: a nation unified as if at war—but during peacetime. “Its atmosphere,” he recalled after the trip, “reminded me strongly of the Food Administration Barracks in which I worked at Washington—the temporary partitions, the hurrying messengers, the calculating machines, the telephones, the cleared desks.”

George Counts, the education man, was even more excited than Chase. In Russia, he saw, schools had already moved beyond being John Dewey’s Lab School or Eleanor Roosevelt’s Todhunter: they were indeed, just as he had hoped, vehicles of “the collectivist social ideal.” Professional education, denied the common man under the
czars, was officially available to all: “All academic standards were abolished and the doors of the higher schools were opened to the members of the working class regardless of their qualifications.” There were adult education courses for workers, schools for political literacy so that all manner of adults might familiarize themselves with Marx and Engels. Physical education, another emphasis of American progressive educators, was moving forward here at a pace they could not dream of at home. “Basketball and volleyball are good Russian words today,” wrote Counts. In revolutionary Russia even women ran hurdles. The whole country seemed to be hurdling ahead of the United States.