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Odyssey of a Liberal
Chapter 22
I DISCOVER AMERICA
Waiting at the airfield until the Eurasia plane came in at midnight with only one
small light to guide it down, I became acquainted with Walther Stennes, the German World
War One hero who had become Captain of Chiang Kai-shek’s Bodyguard after repudiating
Hitler and escaping from the Third Reich. In
later years in Germany after her defeat he became a close friend. That night, while pacing up and down the airfield,
we found that we had a mutual friend in Captain Charles Boxer, the British Intelligence
officer in Hong Kong with whom I had become acquainted on my arrival there thanks to Major
Vinden in Singapore, a friend of my sister-in-law Emsie.
A few days later in Hong Kong we all three got together for champagne cocktails and
lunch and I almost missed the boat to Shanghai. In
the intervening days I had lectured and given press interviews and was asked by Eugene
Chen to carry with me an article for the Double Tenth issue of the Shanghai Evening Post to deliver to its editor,
Randall Gould. This led to my being invited to
a dinner in my honor by C.V. Starr, the prominent American tycoon in China who published
this large circulation newspaper. At this
dinner I first met Emily Hahn, who insisted that I come and stay with her in Shanghai. She was then the “concubine” of Sinmay, a
Chinese poet of a formerly rich family in Peking which had lost everything in the Japanese
takeover.
Sinmay had a wife and several children living close by “Micky”
Hahn’s house and Emily was supporting them all by her articles in the New Yorker. We
became good friends and have remained so until now. I
liked her from the beginning on account of her fearless frankness. Far from hiding her liaison with Sinmay she openly
proclaimed it, and such was her personality, beauty, charm and talent that she was
generally accepted in such diplomatic society as that of the British and American
Ambassadors and Admirals. She was also
politically intelligent and clear sighted. Despite
her good standing in the American liberal literary establishment, she made fun of the
ignorant and misleading reporting on China as when she wrote:
The
average American is full of hooey through no fault of his own. He thinks guerrillas are
the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in China. He thinks the woods are full of them. Actually, the great burden of resistance has rested
on the regular army. The situation is due to
the peculiarity of most American newspapermen in China, who are nearly all of them
inclined to be Leftist, out of a frustrated sense of guilt, a superior viewpoint of things
as they are, and a tendency to follow the crowd – of newspapermen. Most newspapermen don’t know any more about
the Communists in China than you do. They hear
rumors . . . but the chances of seeing what goes on among the Chinese Communists are even
less than those of seeing the inside of Russia. If
you live in Chungking, you can always interview Chou En-lai.
That is what he is there for. But if
you think he is going to give you all the answers you are as innocent as an American
newspaperman.* China To Me, Doubleday,
1944.
After leaving Shanghai by ship for the United States I wrote to Charles Boxer in Hong
Kong telling him that whoever else he failed to see on his next visit to Shanghai he must
surely visit Emily Hahn generally known as Micky by her friends. A long distance introduction which was to lead to
their marriage some years later, and to Sinmay’s desolation. The whole story has been told by Miss Hahn herself
who was to escape incarceration in a Japanese concentration camp in Hong Kong, after
bearing a daughter out of wedlock to Charles Boxer after he had become a prisoner of the
Japanese.
Back in 1938 in Shanghai she was exceedingly kind to me, arranging for her Chinese
tailor and dressmaker to fit me out in suitable clothes for my forthcoming lecture tour in
America with hurried fittings between talks and newspaper interviews. Ending 11/21/02 China To Me, Doubleday,
1944.
In the
evenings, or late at night I sat with her and Sinmay while they smoked opium and I drank
Scotch, which is perhaps a worse indulgence than opium for those who can break the habit
as Emily Hahn was able to do. One of the
prominently successful and well known writers of our time, Emily Hahn has never lost her
capacity and courage to “tell it as it is” without fear, prejudice or wishful
thinking.
When I visit England we always meet although her husband, Charles Boxer, has become
more and more of an anchorite immersing himself in their Berkshire retreat and writing
learned monographs on such subjects as the Portuguese in Macao in the 17th
century. His Professorship at London University
on this subject frees him from the necessity of lecturing to students since none are
interested in his subject.
Sir George Sansom who, following his retirement from the diplomatic service, was to
have a less favorable sinecure at Columbia University in New York where he had to instruct
a few graduate students, remarked that he and Boxer wanted to start a society for the
abolition of students in universities.
After enjoying myself hugely in Shanghai and making many Chinese friends besides
such Americans as Randall Gould, Emily Hahn and C.V. Starr, I took ship for the United
States.
I became a small lion, or little V.I.P. in those days, thanks to the success of Japan’s Feet of Clay and to the publicity
gratuitously given me by the Japanese authorities. By
refusing to let me land when the ship on which I crossed the Pacific from Shanghai docked
in Yokohama and by placing an armed guard outside my cabin door when I was visited by
George Sansom, Minister of the British Embassy, they made me newsworthy all over the
world. In Honolulu I was interviewed by a
crowd of reporters, and on my arrival in the Western Hemisphere I was inundated with
invitations for lectures. I addressed
audiences from coast to coast, sometimes speaking twice a day, and appearing before such
distinguished groups as the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the Council on Foreign
Relations in Chicago and Cleveland; and Foreign Policy Association audiences all over the
place from Denver to New York and Baltimore.
Owen Lattimore, who secured the invitation for me to speak in Baltimore, asked Dr.
and Mrs. Emmett Holt to put me up after the one night I stayed at his home. No doubt my increasingly uninhibited criticisms of
Stalin’s dictatorship had been reported to the friends of the Soviet Union in the United
States so that, although willing to make use of me as an ardent propagandist for the
Chinese cause against Japan, Lattimore had become wary of too close association with me.
I reserve to my next volume an account of my subsequent relations with Owen
Lattimore whom I had first met in Moscow when he was not as yet subservient to Moscow’s
ideological dictation. I mention him here
because in his Ordeal By Slander* he falsely states that I spent
three weeks at his home in Baltimore, whereas the fact is that on this first and
subsequent visits to that city before my immigration to the United States, I stayed either
with the Holts or with Frederick and Sylvia Nelson.
·
Little Brown &
Co., Boston.
I have always accounted myself fortunate that I first entered the
United States by its Western “back
door.” I reached New York only on the last lap of this
strenuous speaking tour so that my first impressions of America were of a more open and
socially democratic society than any other in the world at any time in history. I also found greater awareness of the importance of
the fate of the Far East (actually Far West from America’s point of view) than in Europe,
or on the Eastern Seaboard which looks toward, or back on, Europe.
Having learned that the Soviet Union was a hierarchical state dominated by a
Communist aristocracy, I now discovered that America came close to my vision of the good
society.
In Seattle where I stayed with a Doctor’s family so well to do that they had
two automobiles and two or three bathrooms I was astonished to find there was no servant,
and that the doctor himself helped with the washing up.
Starting in British Columbia at Victoria and Vancouver, taking in Spokane and Tacoma
and spending several days in Seattle, I was next rushed down to San Francisco and Los
Angeles and thence by way of Albuquerque to Denver, sometimes lecturing twice a day and
giving many newspaper interviews.
In San Francisco I was enchanted by the charm of the city and the breathtaking
bridges spanning the golden Gate and the route to the Berkeley area and by the eager
intelligent and beautiful young people who looked after me and wanted to help China. Everywhere I was delighted by the unique American
atmosphere of social equality, freedom from class prejudices, friendliness and
informality.
In Chicago I spoke to a huge audience for the Council on Foreign Relations, then
run by Clifford Utley who had phoned me to Seattle on hearing of my arrival in the States.
In Chicago during my hectic lecture tour I spent some happy hours with Bertrand and
Peter Russell. He was then happily ensconced
at the University which he found “so far as philosophy is concerned about the best I
have ever come across.”** We agreed in
approving Chamberlain’s Munich policy which was being forcibly denounced by the
American ‘liberal’ press despite the fact that the United States showed no
disposition to do anything to ‘stop Hitler.’
As Bertie then wrote:
Here in America nine people out of ten think we ought to have fought but America
ought to have remained neutral-an opinion which annoys me.***
**
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Volume 2 (1914-1944). Allen & Unwin.
London. Page 246. In a letter to Gilbert Murray.
*** ibid. Page 225.
As Bertie then
also remarked it was “odd that in England the very people who in 1919 had
protested against the unjusted
frontiers of Czechoslovakia (incorporating the Sudentenland Germans) were the most anxious
in 1938 to defend them.”
I also remember
remarking in Chicago my astonishment at the ease of telephonic communication
over the vast territory of the U.S. as
contrasted with the rotten postal system, and Bertie saying with a chuckle that this was
because America had to demonstrate the superiority of private enterprise over
“socialism” by having an appallingly bad postal service.
By the time I
got on the train from Chicago to Washington and Baltimore I felt that I was coming
near
to the end of my journey. Chicago in the Midwest
seemed East to me, so huge were the spaces I had already traversed. Most eastern seaboard Americans had less conception
of the vast size o f their country than I had acquired.
The Committee in New York which had arranged by speaking tour was so
oblivious of the vast extent of America’s Western territories that it had arranged
for me to lecture one day in Spokane and be in Oakland the next in days when air travel
was yet in its childhood.
I even had tea
with Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House which proved a disappointing experience. I
had met her daughter Anna Boettinger in
Seattle where after hearing me speak at a luncheon she invited me to her house for tea
together with Mrs. Normal Littell and said I simply must meet her mother and tell her what
I had told them. So when I arrived at the
White House for my appointment with the “First Lady” I expected to interest her
in the terrible plight of the Chinese wounded soldiers and enlist her great influence in
getting help for the Chinese Red Cross. But I
found the liberal humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt more interested in some folk songs of the
Southwest which a man called Valiant was telling her about.
And her reference in her column the next day to me visit and my endeavor to
awaken her interest in Chinese relief was so wishy washy as to be useless. Her readers were told nothing at all about the
neglected wounded. Instead she uttered some
platitudes to the effect that, of course Americans help those in need throughout the world
and have “a sentimental interest in China.”
A few weeks later she was reported to have publicly purchased a lot of
Japanese Kimonos. And I well remember how
shocked and angry I had felt at her reply to my query “Why are most Americans only
worked up about the Nazi crimes and atrocities and care little about the horrible things
the Japanese do to the Chinese?”
“Well you know,” said Eleanor Roosevelt with her toothy smile and
vicar’s wife superior mein, “we never expected those oriental people to be
civilized.”
Years later, visiting Berlin during the 1948 Russian blockade, my original low
opinion of Mrs. Roosevelt was reinforced. While
touring German cities devastated by our bombing she had remarked that the Germans could
not really be in dire straits because they looked so clean and were growing flowers in the
ruins of their homes. Instead of appreciating
the sterling qualities of the German people who under almost any circumstances keep up
appearances, Mrs. Roosevelt reserved her compassion for the black or white derelicts who
had lost their self respect.
It was all very exciting, absorbing, exhausting and stimulating. I was exhilarated by the feeling that I was
promoting a good cause while enjoying myself hugely, relishing my success as a speaker and
enjoying my semi-VIP status.
As I now realize but did not then understand, my success was in large part due not
so much to my eloquence or to the convictions I expressed but because my line and that of
the Comintern were for the moment running parallel.
As Jane had one expressed it: Draw a
line from any one point to another and sooner or later the Communist Party line will cross
it.
Because Moscow at this time feared Japan and was therefore in uneasy alliance with
Nationalist China, my campaign to stop war supplies to Japan met with the approval of the
fellow travelers and camp
Followers in America who already
exerted a great influence on the climate of American public opinion by way of the news
media, the universities and the lecture forums.
Before sailing for England from New York on the Queen Mary I lectured in Cleveland
and Boston and was invited by the Feakins Lecture Agency to return for a commercial tour
early in the New Year.
One big chance I then missed was to speak at New York Town Hall because I was
determined to get home to Jon for Christmas. Later
on in America, after my anti-Communist views had become known, the invitation was not
repeated. On the Queen Mary traveling back to England
from New York in December 1938, I endeavored to secure an interview with Anthony Eden in
his deluxe accommodation in the futile hope that I might persuade him that China’s
struggle for national existence against Japanese aggression was as important as his
exclusive preoccupation with the German Nazi menace. He
must have known who I was in view of the success of my books in England. But either because I was traveling Second Class or
because he had no more interest in the aspirations of Asiatics than of Arabs twenty years
later, he refused to receive me.
Vincent Shean, on the contrary, also traveling deluxe, invited me up to the First
Class bar lounge and restaurant. I then first
met his wife, daughter of the famous English actor, Forbes-Robinson. I was to remain friends with this intelligent
attractive woman after she and Vincent Shean separated.
On my return to England, thanks to my dispatches published in the New Chronicle, as well as the reputation I had
established by Japan’s Feet of Clay and Japan’s Gamble in China I was afforded
opportunities to speak to such prestige organizations at The Royal Central Asian Society.
Photographs I had taken in China of the refugees and the wounded or killed victims
of Japan’s war machine were used by the London Lord Mayor’s Fund to raise money
for Chinese relief. I was as before active on
the China Campaign Committee presided over by Victor Gollancz and tangled with him only on
the question of identifying support for the Spanish Republican Government with support to China.
China At War published in June 1939 in
England was received with less enthusiasm, no doubt because of the credit it gave to
Chiang Kai-shek’s fighting forces on the Yangtze front, at a time with Edgar Snow and
other popular “experts” on China presented the Chinese Communists as heroes of
the national resistance of China against Japan. But
it won me a considerable measure of respect for its objectivity, and it might have become
a success had not the gathering storm of World War II riveted attention on Europe.*
Faber and Faber, London. The American edition published by the John Day Co.
came out later in the year after the outbreak of the Second World War. The delay in American publication was due to my
having delivered the ms. to the Brandt Literary Agency with sat on it several months.
CHAPTER 24
EMIGRATION TO AMERICA
I landed with my mother and son in New York on a Dutch boat in December 1939 with
$500 in cash and few possessions, but great expectations and good friends to welcome me.
Guenter (Hans) Reimann, who had emigrated to America ahead of us, met us at the Hoboken
dock and took Mother and Jon off to his one-room apartment at Minetta Street in Greenwich
Village while I stayed to see our luggage through Customs.
We had packed everything we took with us
in anything that came to hand and had some dozen large and small suitcases and one small
trunk. Most of our fellow passengers were
Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who, in contrast to escapees from Russia who were
lucky to get away with their shirts, had been permitted to take packing cases of furniture
and steamer trunks. My small bits and pieces
got lost in the shuffle on the over-crowded dock and it took hours to find them. Having risen at dawn and eaten nothing since
breakfast, I was exhausted by mid-afternoon when I finally succeeded in locating all our
baggage. I then had one of the wonderful
experiences which can happen only in America. I
secured the services of a porter who looked and behaved like a character out of a Jack
London novel. After passing through Customs,
he said: “You look all in; a drink would
do you good.” I replied that it certainly
would, but there did not seem any way of buying one at the Hoboken dock. “Come with me,” he said, and depositing
my baggage in a safe place he led me to a bar outside and treated me to a couple of
whiskies and soda refusing to take any payment when he finally loaded me and my baggage
into a taxi.
I was no longer young and that day must have been as disheveled and grubby as when
in my childhood Mother reproved me for looking "“like a lost gypsy"”-
one of her favorite North country expressions. The
young man who was so kind to me on the Hoboken dock cannot possibly have found me at all
attractive and was simply being kind to an immigrant without money.
Two or three weeks later I was afforded another example of the extraordinary
kindness of the misnamed “common man” in America.
I had arrived in Philadelphia at dusk on Christmas Eve without a present for my son
who was staying there with Mother under the care of Michael Ross and his American wife,
while I was in New York arranging a contract for my book on Russia with the John Day
Company. After hastily depositing my luggage
in their apartment on Pine Street, I was standing shivering in the cold waiting for a bus,
hoping to reach a shopping center before the stores closed, when an Italian vendor of
Christmas trees offered to drive me downtown n his truck to buy some small gifts at a drug
store. On our return to Pine Street my
benefactor refused to take any payment, accepting only a glass of wine in Michael’s
house.
John P. Marquand and his wife Adelaide, who became my friends a year or so later,
urged me to write a popular book about my first experiences in America which included
frequent encounters with the old gallant and kind “frontier” spirit which still
survives in these United States and which had endeared America to me on my first trip from
China in 1938. It might have been profitable
for me to have done so, but instead of writing a book to express my appreciation of my
adopted country, where there is so much more real “fraternity, equality and
liberty” than anywhere else in the world, I was to devote myself, for the most part
in vain, to alerting America to the Communist menace.
Michael, whose name appears frequently in my book about my life in Russia, had been
my comrade in the British Communist Party and had been Jane’s lover in Russia for two
years. He had left Jane and Russia in 1931 and
subsequently emigrated to America where he
worked first in the CIO and later for the AFL where he was Foreign Policy Adviser to
George Meany at the time of his death in 1964.
After a brief stay in Philadelphia I moved to Baltimore where Dr. and Mrs. Emmett
Holt and the Frederic Nelson’s had secured for me a small but very nice apartment for
only thirty dollars a month on Roland Avenue, next door to one of the best public schools
in America.
Remembering my own unhappy experiences at Prior’s Field, I feared Jon would
suffer because he was a foreigner in speech and dress.
Instead, he came home radiant from his first day at school. The teacher told the class that he had crossed the
Atlantic Ocean in war time and thus built him up; and American children, like their
parents, but unlike the British, are nicest of all to strangers in their midst.
I had first met the Holts and the Nelsons during my hectic six weeks tour of the
United States in the fall of 1938 lecturing for The American Committee for
Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, an organization which, under the chairmanship of
Henry Stimson, was endeavoring to stop war supplies to Japan, and whose most prominent and
eloquent speaker was Dr. Walter Judd, the future Congressman from Minnesota.
Dr. Holt was already well known as a pediatrician who had carried on and revised
his father’s work as author of the best known baby book in America before Dr. Spock
became more famous by his advocacy of ‘permissiveness’ carried to the n-th
degree, the results of which are now apparent in our schools and universities. Dr. Holt, now professor at New York University, is
today known internationally for his writings and lectures on nutrition. Olivia Holt at this time was active in arranging Maryland’s
display at the World’s Fair.
Frederic Nelson was at this time an editor of the Baltimore Sun.
Some years later he became editorial writer on The Saturday Evening Post and they moved to Philadelphia. Today in retirement he contributes witty articles
to such conservative publications as National
Review and Human Events, but in the early
forties he was still a member in good standing of the “liberal establishment.” Although anti-Communist, he was an
“interventionist,” and an ardent Anglophile.
His wife Sylvia, one of the kindest women I have ever known, was witty in a
delightfully unconscious fashion by reason of her devastatingly candid and perceptive
remarks. A southerner with innumerable
relatives, she had a particularly soft spot for old ladies and took to my mother at once. The Nelson’s large house on the outskirts of Baltimore
and their summer place on Cape Cod were always full of visitors so that Frederic found it
difficult to find a quiet spot to work. Sylvia
was a darling and Frederic was one of my own kind. We
were both liberal anti-Communists, a rare combination in those days.
Besides
finding the Roland Avenue apartment for us, Olivia Holt and Sylvia Nelson had furnished
it. From their own homes and that of their
friends, Dexter and Anne Keezer, they had collected old beds and tables, chairs and other
furniture which they painted or revarnished themselves.
We might have been a pioneer family arriving on the Western Frontier in days
gone by, so great was the kindness and helpfulness and hospitality of the Holts, the
Nelsons, and their friends. They all liked my
mother very much and she felt more at home in the Baltimore atmosphere than anywhere else
in America.
Jon
spent a lot of time at the Holts and the Nelsons who had large gardens and playrooms and
whose children, though older, were as nice to him as their parents were to me and Mother.
I
had little or no medical expenses to drain my meager resources as came to be the case
later on, since Dr. Holt saw to it that both Mother and Jon received medical attention at
Johns Hopkins where he was the professor of Pediatrics.
Jon had his tonsils out for free at Johns Hopkins when he was barely six
years old, and was also then circumcised because Dr. Holt suggested it might as well be
done at the same time. Which was perhaps a bit
hard on him although he did not seem to suffer much.
I
had wanted to have this operation performed on my son when he was a baby in Moscow because
my brother’s ideas of hygiene were similar to those now prevalent in America. But Arcadi told me that circumcision in Soviet
Russia was frowned upon as a Jewish religious rite, smacking of counter-revolution, so
that the only way to have the operation done was surreptitiously by a Rabbi without
benefit of anesthetics or antiseptics.
The
society into which the Holts and Nelsons introduced us in Baltimore included besides such
medical colleagues of Dr. Holt’s as Dr. Horsley Gantt, then already well known for
his association with Pavlov’s experiments in Leningrad and today President of the
Pavlovian Society for Research; the Baltimore Sun cartoonist,
Edmund Duffy and his wife, Anne; Dexter Keezer who soon afterwards went off to head Reed
College in Oregon and later became Vice President of McGraw-Hill and his comely wife Anne,
both of whom have remained my friends; Leslie Ford, the famous “who done it”
story writer; Philip Wagner, editor of the Baltimore
Sun, now in retirement famous for his Maryland vineyard, and others who gathered at
the Hamilton Street Club.
Olivia
Holt, to whom this book is dedicated, was to become my ever-present help in time of
trouble, as well as an increasingly dear and sympathetic friend in later years.
Our
divergent views on the war and their fondness and sympathy for my mother, whom both Olivia
and Sylvia thought I treated none too well, were to alienate us for a while following my
departure from Baltimore to New York. But they
never ceased to help me by inviting Mother for long visits and giving her comfort and love
during this difficult period of my life when I was often at my wits ends how to provide
for her and Jon.
Mother,
whose views were usually the opposite of mine, partly on account of temperamental
antagonism but also because she was a British patriot to the core, was naturally an ardent
admirer of Winston Churchill, wanted American armed intervention in the war, and saw no
merit in my arguments for a negotiated peace to obviate the danger of a Communist conquest
of Europe. So she felt very much at home with
those of my friends who disagreed with me. And
I was far to appreciative of the hospitality and friendship given my lonely and uprooted
Mother by the Holts and the Nelsons to resent their disapproval of me during the war. It was just wonderful that they loved her, gave her
some happiness and comfort, and took her off my hands for long periods by inviting her to
their homes in Baltimore and their summer places in Maine and on the Cape. Had it not been for the Holt’s and the Nelson’s
I should have regretted not having left my mother in England where she belonged.
In
this Baltimore society, as in England once upon a time, “breeding” or “good
manners” charm and wit, counted for more than money or fashionable clothes. My mother had these qualities combined with an
enduring beauty of face and form. She had such
natural elegance and good taste that she managed to look nice, or what the French call soignee even in old or cheap clothes and without
benefit of beauty parlors.
One
amusing episode in Baltimore in 1940 illustrates my mother’s incurably British and
most un-American prejudices. Although herself
the daughter of a Manchester manufacturer she considered those engaged in “trade”
to be inferior to the professional classes, and as far less worthy of respect than even
the most impecunious writers, poets, teachers, government workers or even journalists.
So
one evening after Olivia had brought a wealthy woman who owned a hotel in Miami to visit
us in our little apartment on Roland Avenue, Mother remarked after their departure, “isn’t
Olivia wonderful; she hasn’t a trace of snob in her; she was as nice to that hotel
keeper as to any of her friends.”
More
than 20 years after, a remark made by my “All American” son called this incident
to mind. Writing to me in June 1962 from South
America where at the age of 28 he had become the Vice President of an American company
selling Mutual Funds, he said:
Someday I’ll write you my opinions of all the
different nationalities I
meet, but the worst
in general are the English, still stifled by so much
class consciousness
they’re one group in several who obviously think a
salesman is low
class. Fortunately, however, we don’t
bother much
with them since they’re
the lowest paid group of any North European
nationality. The Germans, as usual, are the closest in thinking
to the
Americans, and after
Swiss and Swedes who earn more money, are our
best clients.
I
must here confess that I myself have never managed to shed the British prejudices which
have always been an anomaly since the British won economic predominance by being the world’s
most successful traders, and were contemptuously described by Napoleon as “a nation
of shopkeepers.” In Washington in the 60’s
when asked what my son was doing in South
America I found myself explaining in an apologetic tone that he was in business but surely
only temporarily. Jon, who calls himself
“a salesman” laughs and says that I preferred to describe him as editor or
publisher when for a while he produced the Bogota
Bulletin, a little news sheet he put out in his spare time and from which he derived
only a couple of hundred dollars a month. “I
didn’t raise my son to be a businessman,” I sometimes regretfully remark,
feeling a sense of guilt that perhaps I unconsciously did just that. In his childhood and youth my struggle for
existence as a writer with unpopular views made such an impression on Jon that he decided
to go into business and make enough money to become financially independent while also
enjoying himself skin diving in the Caribbean, hunting in the Amazon and in general living
the full rounded life which poor children dream about and the rich so often forego. Besides finding competitive business an absorbing
game, he acquired experience and knowledge unobtainable in the halls of Academe, and
gained greater knowledge of foreign lands than most State Department officials. I comfort myself with the hope that in the end he
will make his mark on the world by better writing than mine or by distinguished service in
government. But in his view writing is a sweat
and making money much much easier.
What’er
betide in the future I shall always be glad that I brought my son to the United States
when he was a child so that he is an American in outlook instead of being like myself, in
some respects still an alien in thought, sentiment and behavior. I am more at home in America than in the England of
either today or yesterday, yet at times I feel a nostalgic longing for the Old World.
For
half a year in Baltimore I worked hard on my book earning a little money in between times
by occasional lectures, articles and book reviews. It
was not easy to work in a two room and kitchen apartment shared by my son and mother, but
in those days one could still hire a maid cheaply so that I was temporarily relieved of
household chores. Moreover, the landlord
kindly let me use a room downstairs in an empty apartment without electricity where I
installed myself with a large kitchen table. Here
by day while Jon was in school, and by night upstairs with my son sleeping behind me, I
wrote The Dream We Lost.
Early
that summer when it was nearing completion, I moved to New York. Pleasant as life was in Baltimore, I had to make
contacts in the Big City to earn money, as also to be near my publisher, Richard Walsh of
the John Day Company. I had exhausted the $500
advance on my book and the $500 I brought with me from England, and spent of necessity as
it came, the small income I received from occasional lectures and articles contributed to Common Sense and Asia magazine. I expected soon to be able to make money again
having great hopes for the success of my book on Russia, and having been taken on by the
Columbia Lecture Bureau for the next season. But
for the moment I was almost destitute and Mother was entirely dependent on me having
ceased, since we left England, to receive the pound or two a week she had for some years
previously been paid as a residuary legatee of my grandfather’s estate.
Fortunate
as ever in my friends, I was able to survive by depositing both Mother and Jon for long
periods during the summer and fall of 1940 with them.
Jon spent several months with Alfred and Sylvia Bingham in Salem, Connecticut. They had children of about his age and he was happy
there.
One
of many sons of the late Senator Hiram Bingham, Alfred was at this time publishing and
editing Common Sense jointly with Selden Rodman
whose sister Nancy was Dwight MacDonald’s wife. I
had contributed articles to their publication before leaving England and now found their
views on the war and its probable consequences similar to mine.
In
April 1940 Alfred wrote me the following letter, which I happen to have preserved although
I no longer possess copies of any of the articles I wrote for Common Sense in 1940-1941:
I often get facts
from reading an article, but I rarely get a whole new perspective
– and that is always an exciting experience. Your
article gave me that. I had never seen so
clearly before the sense in which this is an imperialist war, and the way in which the
sins of Britain and France are coming home to roost. Somehow
the whole European war takes on a new meaning, and one gets the sense that the Allies must
lose without a sort of moral regeneration, not of the slobbering Buchman type, but a new
sense of the implications of what is fine in their civilization.
They can’t win without a new policy in the Far
East and toward their colonies. Incidentally I
think there are plenty of signs that such a new policy might be adopted, though the “shake-up”
in the British Government yesterday would hardly indicate even the beginnings of a change
of heart. At any rate I am enthusiastic about
the article. It’s really an important
piece of work. It cuts through all the fog
emanating from the Anglophiles as well as the Russophiles.
It’s the kind of clean and honest
thinking that all of us bewildered “men of good will” need today. It clears a lot of my own thinking. I only wish I had read it before I finished my book
on the U.S. of Europe which is now on the press.
Selden Rodman has been away all this week, and
I can’t tell how he will react, but he ought to be even more enthusiastic than I, at
least in so far as it reinforces an isolationist position toward Europe. He may be more skeptical about the call for action
against Japan,however, though your cases seem to me wholly convincing. I do appreciate
your doing this for us. It is a distinguished
contribution.
Common
Sense well deserved its name. With an
appreciation of political realities rare among intellectuals and the historical
perspective which rendered it immune to war hysteria, this unique liberal journal
expressed views consonant with those of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Men, who had eschewed “entangling alliances,”
not for narrow selfish interests, but because they knew that the quarrels and divisions of
the Old World could not be resolved by American intervention.
While
others praised the Atlantic Charter, Common Sense pointed
out that the Roosevelt-Churchill commitment to the total defeat and disarmament of Germany
must lead to a second Versailles with even worse consequences.
In
contrast to Freda Kirchway in The Nation and
other “hawks” of that time intent on getting America into the war to save Russia
from defeat Common Sense asked, “If Moscow
rather than Berlin comes to dictate the peace, would America be more secure?” Neither Alfred Bingham nor Selden Rodman were
isolationists anymore than Normal Thomas and Sidney Hertzberg* who likewise opposed
American intervention in the second war to “save democracy.” We were internationalists who refused to believe in
the particular wickedness or virtue of any people, race or nation, and had a lively
appreciation of the menace of the Communist ideology exemplified by Stalin’s terrible
tyranny.
We
therefore advocated a negotiated peace with America putting her power unequivocably behind
Britain’s for this purpose, instead of urging her to continue fighting a war she
could not win, and would surely lose unless our “English cousins” acquiesced in
the extension of Soviet power over Eastern and Central Europe.
Common Sense could afford only small
payments for the articles I frequently contributed, but Alfred Bingham was a most generous
friend and his wife, Sylvia, as hospitable as himself.
I visited often for weekends while Jon was staying with them in Salem and
frequently met their neighbor and good friend Chester Bowles.
·
Publisher and editor
together with Cushman Reynolds of Uncensored a
weekly newsletter whose sponsors included John Chamberlain, Stuart Chase, John T. Flynn,
C. Hartley Grattan, Oswald Garrison Villard, Burton Rascoe, Selden Rodman, and whose
Washington correspondent was Frank Hanighen.
At
this time Chester Bowles was a liberal non-interventionist.
In November 1941 he wrote to me from his Madison Avenue Public Relations
Office, asking my opinion of an article which Bingham had persuaded him to write for Common Sense on “What’s Wrong With the
Non-interventionists?” which expressed views similar to my own. Later, however, he joined the “main-stream”
of the Democratic Party and became almost as renowned as Adlai Stevenson in expounding a
view of the world comparable to that of Mark Twain’s “innocents abroad.”
Although
I still occasionally meet and argue with Chester Bowles today at North Haven in Maine when
I spend summers there with the Holts, I have never been able to make up my mind whether he
is a romantic liberal capitalist, striving toward a glorious New Frontier, or a very
clever politician. Giving him the benefit of
the doubt whenever I read his Candide-like public statements I remember Bertrand Russell’s
essay on the “evil that good men do.”
Whereas Chester Bowles has become
a national figure, Alfred Bingham has sunk into obscurity although, or because, he was a
first class writer, a perceptive political thinker, and a man of outstanding integrity and
courage. After Pearl Harbor Alfred, who had
always been in favor of the “New Deal,” while opposing Roosevelt’s foreign
policies, convinced himself for a while that F.D.R. was another Woodrow Wilson – a
hope which he was to abandon by the time he wrote me the following letter from France in
October 1944:
Some of your criticisms of our
commander-in-chief have come to my mind occasionally lately, and I have reached the point
where I should not feel it a great calamity if Dewey were elected – and that is a
pretty drastic statement! I am extremely
pessimistic about the prospects for an intelligent peace.
There is almost no really intelligent discussion reaching us from America. It seems as if immature emotionalism had a free
field in place of idealism, or even intelligent realism, in theshaping of the peace.
The Reader’s Digest has occasionally had some
good articles. And I am very much pleased on
the way Sidney Hertzberg has carried on Common
Sense.
I spent six months in England, and left there feeling
reasonably optomistic about the general drift toward a Common Sense type of liberation. There is hopefulness and a determination to move
ahead in that country. The same is true in
France – France h as not suffered too much, but enough to prompt a re-thinking of
democracy, capitalism and socialism, and there is a surprising degree of unanimity and
intelligent reformism – except in the attitude toward Germany where naturally
emotionalism is pretty strong. I have been six
weeks in France, waiting to move into Germany, where I have a pretty good job as a
regional specialist on labor waiting for me. You
can get a better idea from the papers of when the job is likely to begin than I have.
My hope is that during the next twenty years there
may be a chance of undoing the mistakes that will be made in the next few months. But I suppose I wold appear as an extreme optimist
if I had a chance at one of those pleasant evenings of discussion with you which I miss
these days.
Others
of my friends came to believe that although at the outset of conflict of ‘imperialisms’
the war against Nazi Germany was being converted, or could be converted, into a “war
for democratic welfare” for all mankind. Geoffrey
Hudson* in a long letter written to me on May 21, 1940, expressed the hopes which inspired
my anti-Communist friends who came to support the war despite their distrust of Stalin’s
Russia. “Whatever happens to us now”
he wrote, “we are delivered from the all-enveloping complacency of Chamberlain –
for better or worse we are now going somewhere and the motion is exhilarating even if it
is only to be ‘down a steep place into the sea.’”
·
Author of The Far East in World Politics, Oxford University Press 1937. Then a Fellow of All Souls College and today head
of the Department of Far Eastern Affairs at St. Anthony’s.
Commenting
that after my experience of suffering in Russia and China I would be fitted to endure what
was coming in England, he wrote: “It is going to be terrible for the well-to-do of England
who have always thought themselves so inaccessible to the processes of history and have
been lapped for years in Chamberlainite self-delusion.
We at any rate, whatever dreams we have entertained, have never given
ourselves up to that kind of fantasy.”
Expressing the belief that inspired
“those of us on the Left who have been preserved from Communist lunacy” but had
by now come to believe that the war had become “our war” he wrote:
There are only two motive forces which can
supersede capitalism; one is the quest of military power and the other is the purpose of
democratic welfare. Fascism, being exclusively
nationalist and despotic, controls capitalism only for military ends. A democracy at war with a fascist nation must
undertake a similar subordination of private vested interests (as Chamberlain would not
do, but Churchill will), but in so far as organized democratic forces participate in this
control, it can be diverted after the period of temporary military need to democratic
welfare.
When
I moved to New York Hans arranged for me to become a “lodger” in the 50 dollar a
month apartment on Waverly Place in the Village which Dora Shuser, who was to become the
closest of all my friends, shared with her sister Rosa and Rosa’s husband Ephraim
Doner. I occupied their tiny, spare room in
which there was barely space to install my bed and the small desk I bought. This was no hardship since I became a member of the
family and we lived an amiable communal life undreamed of in Moscow where, in a similar
small living space, there would have been continual bickering and quarrels and arguments
about who owed who a few kopeks for gas or electricity.
Meanwhile,
when Mother was not enjoying the hospitality of the Holts or the Nelsons, I arranged an
inexpensive lodging for her in Westport where she was well looked after by Mrs. Oates on
Greens Farms road. Mrs. Oates is one among the
many strangers in my life who have been most generous and kind when circumstances were
most difficult. Although poor herself, she
charged me as little as she could while she looked after my mother there. As also when for a month that summer I arranged for
Jon to stay there with his Aunt Amsie to look after him, and was able myself to spend
weekends with them out of New York.
My
letters to Mother during the summer and fall of 1940 reveal how hectic and busy and
worrisome my life was at this time. My
situation was rendered all the more difficult by Mother’s price which made her
reluctant to reveal to our well-to-do friends just how nearly destitute we were. I had less shame.
“In spite of our dignity, etc., “I wrote to her in one letter,
“we shall have to take advantage of any possible offer of hospitality. Please, dear, for my sake and Jon’s, tell
Sylvia the exact position.” Should she
not be able to stay on a while longer with the Nelsons, I continued, “in New York you
can live cheaply. Dora is so sweet and really
friendly to me that I do not mind our living there rent free. And Hans really loves you and will secure money
somehow if I cannot for a few weeks. Please,
darling, don’t be upset anyhow. In time I
shall make money.”
On
July 30, 1940, I wrote, “I stayed up till 4:00 a.m. finishing the index last night in
Westport and caught the 8:16 a.m. train to New York this morning – so am dead tired
and this is only a note. I shall return to Westport
tomorrow evening, I expect, and stay quietly there till next Monday. Jon looks wonderful and really is swimming. He moves along quite fast.”
The
postmarks on the envelopes of many of my letters to my mother are illegible, and I all too
often datelined them only by the day of the week and the place I was writing from. The following one written sometime early in August
1940 conveys some idea of my difficult financial situation when I was reduced to borrowing
a few dollars here and there to privide for Mother’s immediate needs.
Thursday
C/o Bingham
Mumford Farm
Salem via Colchester, Connecticut
Dear Mother:
Hans and Dora have just telegraphed me
that they are going away on Friday – Dora till the 26th and Hans for about
ten days, I understand, but that we are welcome to the flat and she will leave the keys, I am afraid this means, dear, that you will be
alone in New York from Saturday night to Tuesday. Will
you mind this very much? I am very sorry,
dear, but Mrs. Oates is going away with her daughter tomorrow for 3 or 4 days rest so that
you could not go there. I will come to New York
on Tuesday morning – possibly late Monday night.
If you have no money for food, either borrow five from Sylvia or from the
Pippetts* at 15 West 8th Street (just beyond University Restaurant). Also dear, I have just had a letter from Sybil who
arrived on July 30 with her children and is in New York at 1160 Park Avenue. I am writing to her now to tell her you will be
there and to send you a note with her phone number. She
is alone there as her friends are away and will love to see you. You could borrow two or three dollars from her till
I come, if necessary.
So awfully
sorry, darling, but I am sure things will soon be alright.
You will keep cheerful, won’t you?
I hope to send you and Jon here to Mrs. Oates by the end of next week.
My dearest love – also very best
love to Sylvia.
Freda
Take a taxi from Penn Station to Dora’s flat, 137 Waverly Place. I enclose keys in case difficult for you to get
them late on Saturday.
Aileen and Roger
Pippet, English friends of mine who did book reviews for various publications.
Although concerned about Mother I was
happy to be free for a while from her. I loved
her and was sorry for her, but she often got on my nerves and I felt most sympathetic
toward her when she was absent. After leaving
her I regretted having been nasty and impatient, and also felt guilty because I was happy
to be away from her. In one of many letters I
said:
Thanks awfully for your letter. I am so very glad you are enjoying yourself. I know Emmett and Olivia are both really fond of
you and there you are in your best atmosphere. You
see, dear, I really do understand how difficult it is for you in my society in New York,
or I should say in my world. And once things
go wrong it is so difficult to put them right – each becomes nastier and nastier. But I do feel it will be alright when you come back
after this break. I wish too, that you could
have peace and comfort in your last years. Because
I really do love you dear; it is mainly that my whole outlook, experience, attitude to
life is quite different from yours.
In
those difficult years when I was endeavoring with indifferent success to be both father
and mother to my son and daughter to my mother
while earning a living for us all, I used half jokingly to say that I badly needed a
“wife.” My dear sister-in-law Emsie,
who was now living in Morris Plains with her American-born mother, could have been just
that had it not been for mother’s jealousy of Temple’s wife even after his
death. This made it impossible for Emsie to
live with us, although at this time her own widowed mother did not, as in later years,
require that she look after her without respite.
Emsie
admittedly was tiresome in some ways, as opinionated as myself and very talkative, sharing
some of my mother’s all too British prejudices but with more understanding and
sympathetic respect for my views. She was a
most unselfish person who, having started to love Jon and me because of Temple, came to be
a dearer friend to me than any sister by birth would in all likelihood have been had I
ever had one. She not only loved my son
devotedly, but gave him the loving care that I was unable to provide either by temperament
or for lack of time. This, of course, only
further aroused Mother’s jealousy.
Writing
to Mother in Baltimore I endeavored in vain to make her understand how much both Jon and I
needed Emsie:
Jon is very well and happy. Emsie is taking very good care of him. His hair looks lovely again, as she brushes it
night and morning. You see dear, I cannot be a
proper mother and Emsie largely takes my place in giving the little care and attention he
needs. He does not even worry about my not
being at home because she plays with him and talks to him.
Neither you or I are much good at playing with him. I know how difficult Emsie can be and how impolite
to you sometimes. But when she loves –
and she does love me and Jon – she is quite wonderful.
She has already tidied my drawers, she mends for me, unpacks, etc., etc.
Don’t be offended, dear, but it
does make a big difference to me having her and knowing that all responsibilities and
little worries at home are off my shoulders. You
cannot help it that you are not strong enough – if only I could have you both
together at home for my own sake and Jon’s.