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‘WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS IS A REAL BIG LAUGH’

To the disappointment and astonishment of Communists, the American working people did not rise up en masse during the Great Depression to demand even the overhaul – much less the overthrow – of their system of democratic capitalism, despite the failure to relieve their sufferings for more than a decade. Arriving at the height of the economic misery, a confident Gertrude Klivans held court in her stateroom on SS Bremen at the New York docks. She was back at long last in the United States, a returning political pilgrim and a secret convert to Communism. While she was already an agent of INO, Klivans did not consider herself a traitor to the US, but rather a contributor to helping the peoples of the Soviet Union.

Her courtiers were a small crowd of journalists, fans of the small-town socialite-turned-adventurer. She was a Youngstown, Ohio celebrity. Local magazines had serialised parts of the letters she had written to her family from the mysterious, godless USSR describing most of her adventures. Exposure to the socialist experiment had transformed her in just a year from a frustrated English Literature teacher at the local high school into a confident woman, delighted to be sought out for her views on the world. She was secretly engaged, if not already married, to her fellow agent Alexander Gramp. She adroitly ducked answering questions from the wire services on international politics, but was more than happy to announce that the first Soviet Five-Year Plan was a resounding success. Joseph Stalin must have been pleased. The journalists asked her if it was possible to teach the Soviet leaders anything. She replied, ‘Indeed yes, in fact, they are the most teachable people to be found.’¹

Amid America’s worst ever socio-economic crisis, Klivans delivered the message that a socialist future was the answer to her society’s ills. Before October 1929 the United States had believed that it would enjoy an uninterrupted period of increasing prosperity. This mirage was not an invention of the people but was what they had been told by their leaders. In his last State of the Union address in 1928, President Calvin Coolidge had said: ‘No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time.’² He had overseen an expanding economy based on easy access to consumer loans for housing, its citizens buying vast numbers of new automobiles on credit instalment plans. The vehicles, once a luxury, were now commonplace and seemingly affordable; there was even a fear that the car would create an amoral society as young couples were now out of sight of their parents. That great barometer of America’s health, the stock market indices, were not merely soaring on the back of the credit bubble; they went through the roof. The Dow Jones Industrial Average quadrupled between 1924 and 1929. America appeared to be on the brink of economic greatness.

Led by New York, the modern cities of the USA were a bustling hive of theatre, movies, arts, food and sober fun. Based on its global leadership in technological innovation, mass production and consumerism, America had overtaken the British Empire as the pre-eminent economic power in the world. When Herbert Hoover campaigned for the presidency in 1928, he assured the country it could expect ever greater economic prosperity. In a campaign speech, he said: ‘We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.’³

Hoover would later quip that he was the first man in history to have a depression named after him. For all these dreams came crashing down in just a few days in 1929, and for the next decade, even the Big Apple became a sombre city of hopeless, desperate people. The stock market crash began on 24 October and ended on the 29th. In a matter of four days, America saw $30 billion of its wealth wiped out for ever. Within months New Yorkers were starving to death. Large crowds of bewildered investors, bank workers and concerned citizens wandered around Wall Street in a daze during the crash. In an attempt to exercise some control the police began making arrests. After the initial panic, worse was to follow.

The administration estimated that any recession resulting from the crash would be shallow, like the one the United States had experienced after the Great War. Despite the high drama, the conservative President Hoover believed that ‘anything can make or break a market … from the failure of a bank to the rumor that your second cousin’s grandmother has a cold’.⁴ He and his laissez-faire economist advisors thought it was just a small setback and the market would soon bounce back. It didn’t. Publicly, Hoover continually downplayed the nation’s agony, retreating into his dogmatic shell and refusing to act. At this most difficult time, he offered his wounded people no leadership. In the face of the suffering and bewilderment, the White House appeared distant and unmoving.

Throughout the crisis, Hoover would display terrible judgement. One of his most passionate causes was to deny combat veterans an increase in their benefits. When it came to providing depression relief, he insisted that private charity, not state aid, funnelled through the Red Cross was sufficient. He went further, expressing the belief that charity was the sole answer to the enormous and growing needs of America’s army of unemployed and starving. He kept up this line even when nature added to the misery, a severe drought creating a dust bowl in the Great Plains region. In a White House press interview Hoover displayed shocking callousness towards his fellow citizens. ‘Nobody is starving,’ the President blithely asserted. ‘The hoboes are better fed than they ever were before.’⁵ New York City alone reported ninety-five cases of death by starvation that year.

Describing the start of the Great Depression as merely public hysteria, Hoover declared that ‘what the country needs is a real big laugh. If someone could get off a good joke every ten days, I think our troubles would be over in two months.’⁶ Far from being gripped by laughter, waves of bank runs began in New York City and spread panic around the country. In fear customers flooded into their banks to take out their savings. The banks didn’t have any cash; no one did. By 1931 it became evident that many banks were going out of business. In December, the Bank of the United States in New York collapsed, having at one stage held more than $210 million in customer deposits. It was a tipping point, and within the next month 300 other banks failed. By April 1932, more than 750,000 people in New York alone were on some form of welfare and a further 160,000 were on the waiting list. In desperation, crowds of unemployed men took to wandering the streets wearing signs showcasing their skills in an attempt to find work.

• • •

Klivans gave a series of detailed, teasing interviews to the newspapers about some of her experiences during her ten months teaching English in Russia. Amid the chaos, she sat on an upholstered chair in her parents’ elegant drawing room wearing an evening gown for the first time since she had left Youngstown society life to venture into the heart of the Soviet Union. One journalist asked the burning question:

it’s raining outside; you are alone in the house, lonely. At the door stand two young men, one Russian, a senior of Moscow University; the other is a Harvard senior. Which would you prefer as company for the evening?’ Klivans replied, ‘I’d prefer the Russian because he is more mature, more intelligent, not so flippant and doesn’t neck. Necking is not a national pastime in Russia. Sex is delegated to secondary importance. Work comes first, then sex. What is immoral in America is moral in Russia.’⁷

A mildly irritated Klivans knew the exact lines to prick the journalist’s interest: ‘Russians can’t understand America’s exploitation of sex.’ While in Moscow she had shared with her class pictures from American periodicals of bathing beauties in toothpaste and mouthwash adverts. The reaction was merely raised Russian eyebrows and quizzical smiles. She announced that Soviet society had developed very progressive answers to America’s fixations with sex, drinking, divorce and religion. None of the curses of American life existed in the Soviet Union, she believed, and unlike America, there was practically no graft in government. She had found there to be few courts to speak of, no instalment credit plans and few automobiles. Divorce rates had soared in the US during the economic crisis as the strain of unemployment took a vicious toll on relationships, and the busy divorce lawyers were reviled; in the Soviet Union, she believed, divorce and other lawyers were unknown. Klivans spoke of the very different ideas towards love and marriage found in the Soviet Union, where it was now the case that ‘whether registered or not the marriage is legal, and the parties can separate permanently without any more ado about it. No five day waiting is required when a Russian wants to get married. He just goes ahead and gets married. If he likes, he can register the marriage, and this means that if he leaves her their property will be equally distributed.’⁸

Some American scaremongers peddled the myth that Communism was synonymous with an amoral society. In Klivans’s view, it was American society, whose members had sex in cars, which was promiscuous, and not the atheist Russians. Cars in Russia were few in number and used exclusively for work. It was freedom-loving Americans, she continued, who had to be deprived of alcohol by their own government’s prohibition laws. America’s deprived drinkers would be jealous of the Russians, who took their daily drinking quite seriously. And yet, despite the ready availability of alcohol, there were in her experience few real drunkards in evidence on the streets of Moscow or Leningrad. Wine and beer were the favoured tipples. Seemingly Russians could be trusted to behave themselves responsibly with alcohol, whereas Americans could not. Moreover, she believed that religion was not prohibited in Russia, although as a result of pressure brought to bear on those who attended worship most Russians did not attend church. Overall she challenged the alarmist conservative view that a lack of religious training in Russia had lowered the moral standard of the country.

Painting a picture of a society with difficult economic problems but one that had embarked on an exciting journey to a much better future, she confirmed to readers that despite the advantages of some aspects of the Communist system, there were extreme shortages of the basics in the Soviet Union. ‘One cannot buy the most trivial thing in Russia such as knives, scissors, screwdrivers, thumb tacks and the thousand and one other things that are so common in our five and ten cent store. An American five and ten cent store transplanted to Russia would probably give the Russians the impression that the millennium had arrived.’⁹ But Klivans was a convert, as she had found living in Russia had given her a tremendous feeling of stimulation at being part of an energetic society where everyone worked for a definite purpose. She would get her wish to go back to what she described as ‘the most exciting place on the globe’. She was not alone. Many fellow left-leaning US thinkers had already made similar pilgrimages to Moscow.

A highly perceptive observer, Klivans could have been an excellent US intelligence asset. She certainly was an important Soviet one, through her work passing on to her charges her observations on American life. She had learned during her stay exactly what was going on in the USSR. Her close friendships with her students had given her invaluable information. Her sources were impeccable, as her engineering students were at the heart of every aspect of the first Five-Year Plan. And her analysis of the state of Soviet economic development was correct. She told America the unvarnished truth that in the mind of the Russians Henry Ford was the greatest American and that they were trying to model Soviet industry on his methods. It was her view, however, that using the Ford method without Ford himself to direct them might not lead to success. She explained the importance of the mission in America her charges were about to be sent on:

The development in Russia has been so rapid that usually even after new industries have been established the training of the Russian labour has been so inadequate that they cannot run them. A tractor factory that was supposed to have turned out 100,000 tractors per year has turned out not over 2,000 in six months, and none of these would run more than 4 or 5 days without falling apart, solely because of the lack of training on the part of the workers.¹⁰

Earnestly Klivans explained that the Soviet Union was still very much a work in progress, not the finished article. Her students were now on the way to America in order to learn the skills to train Russian workers to drive the industrialisation programme. In Russia, she exclaimed, engineers were rated highest among the professional men, the value placed on them three times greater than that of a doctor. She adroitly turned the reporters’ dumbest questions to her advantage to explain the sacrifices required from the Russian people today for a brighter tomorrow: ‘There are no sleepless nights for Russian families, for no coffee is served. Food of the type familiar to us is impossible to obtain. Most of it is shipped to foreign countries, and the proceeds go towards purchasing machinery for the Soviet factories. Wheat, fish and the like are extensively imported, however, as are fine wines.’¹¹ And the Russians, Miss Klivans declared, actually liked work. But few in the US cared to listen.

The readers of the newspapers were evidently hungry for news about the mysterious Soviet Union, a society with an answer to the world’s problems. No doubt they were confused by the conflicting accounts trickling out of Moscow. Jack Hayward, another correspondent, reported, perhaps untruthfully, in the same edition of the newspaper that when a Russian went shopping in Moscow, he was likely to find that his cheese purchase was made of wood; delicious. Klivans confirmed to readers that despite the ongoing effects of the Great Depression, standards of living were still higher for the majority in the United States than in Russia. But the gap was closing. The Ulanovskys, two ‘illegal’ Military Intelligence agents already embedded in New York at the time, agreed. They had witnessed first hand the conditions of the unemployed, homeless families in the shanty towns known as ‘Hoovervilles’ set up on the Great Lawn at Central Park and Riverside Park at 72nd Street in New York City. These Russian patriots arrived knowing that America was the classic country of capitalism,

the most disgusting in the world, and we sought to see all the evils of capitalism first hand quickly, and we found a lot of it unattractive … We saw the unemployed in line for soup, which was distributed by the Salvation Army. But the unemployed in the queue in 1931, during the Depression, were dressed better than my Moscow friends. We went looking in vain for a slum.¹²

• • •

But why was there such an intense American interest in news from the first Communist state? The answer lay in the grim, fatalistic mood of the US at the time. Trapped in the midst of the Great Depression, perhaps they were witnessing the death of the American dream itself. Like many of her generation, Gertrude Klivans had, through her travels, come to question the very future and purpose of liberal democracy and capitalism. She had discovered a ‘Soviet atmosphere, an atmosphere strangely free from the tradition of that brand of democracy to be found in the West’.¹³

The Communist state’s giant socialist experiment polarised US public opinion. Most US visitors to the Soviet Union returned home with their views reinforced. Those who had come seeking alternatives to the raging social crisis in depression-hit America found hope in the socialist experiment; others who sought it found deprivation, oppression and a rising red menace. Enthusiasm in liberal and left-leaning circles for Communism tracked the ups and downs of the US economic cycle. Initially, the Russian Revolution had been greeted with wild enthusiasm, although US banks lost billions on the default of Tsarist debt. ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’¹⁴ proclaimed American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who was targeted by Soviet Military Intelligence in 1931 for possible recruitment as an ‘agent of influence’. The Soviets approached many leading left-leaning cultural figures in this period to play an active role as advocates for socialism. Most rebuffed the approaches. Some did not. Steffens refused to join up, but as an ideologically sympathetic fellow traveller, he promised to help the Soviet Union when the interests of the US and the USSR coincided.

In the 1920s, as the US economy prospered in the post-war recovery, the Soviet Union had been roundly criticised by visiting international socialists for its failings. Despite thousands of invitations to sympathetic left-leaning artists, writers and politicians to visit, the Russians could garner few friends. Some criticised the Soviets for insufficient radicalism, as they wanted a world revolution. Many found issue with the Communists’ belief that ‘the end justifies the means’. The Communists in power were too brutal for their taste. Lincoln Steffens on the other hand found convenient excuses for the bloody excesses of the ‘Red Terror’. He concluded that the Soviets were not evil per se but that dire circumstances had forced evil on them. ‘Soviet Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan enduring a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan.’¹⁵

In bohemian circles, there was still much praise for Moscow’s artistic freedom, avant-garde theatre, movies and poetry. As the US economy boomed in the 1920s, intellectual socialists were out of touch with the day-to-day issues of the working class. It was only during the crisis of the 1930s that the Soviet Union and Communism started to enjoy broader US support and clandestine help. The crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism (seen by the left as capitalism with murder) proved to be the catalyst for the growth of the US radical left. Marx’s theory of historical determinism was in vogue.

• • •

The closing of all American banks on 4 March 1933 marked the nadir for capitalism as the entire nation went into a state of traumatic shock. The illusion of permanent prosperity that had captivated and motivated everyone during the boom evaporated. The deepening economic crisis caught intellectuals such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and socialist writer Upton Sinclair unawares, but they soon recovered to take the lead in asserting that American capitalism was undeserving of support or survival. From 1930 onwards there had begun a quest that took many on a journey leading far from their social, political and philosophical starting points. Along the way some fell into the waiting arms of Soviet intelligence. This was the era when Communists joined the US government, not just to gather useful information for their Soviet controllers but also to influence government policy for Communist ends. Dozens of agents such as Nathan Silvermaster, Lachlan Currie and Harry Dexter White found careers in government service, in particular in the Treasury and the Labor Department.

The battering of the Great Depression dispelled political apathy. No one could remain indifferent to the capitalist system that was creating havoc and misery. Liberalism was the first political casualty of this political awakening. Its spokesmen had failed to foresee the catastrophe and, the radicals believed, were unable to explain its causes, cope effectively with its consequences or offer answers. In their search for a solution many turned their eyes abroad. If the Russians were achieving full employment and economic growth with their backward technology, surely the Americans could do far better with their advanced facilities? In the US, the factories were built but now lay idle, so the priority was a plan for the economy to put America back to work. The leftward move, coupled with the feebleness of right-wing opinion at the time, made the Communist movement the unchallenged attraction. The starry-eyed saw a promised paradise in the land of the Five-Year Plans, while the more grounded were impressed by the achievements of a planned economy operated on the foundation of nationalised property. A Soviet-style economic policy might provide the means of propelling the US economy forward, eliminating the scourge of mass unemployment.

• • •

Blamed for causing the Depression, Hoover won only 39.7 per cent of the popular vote in the 1932 presidential election, a dismal result, and in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced him as President. Roosevelt’s reforms derailed the leftward political momentum in the US. A stream of radicals were hired into the federal government to enact depression relief measures adopted from their leftist agenda. Faith in the vitality of American capitalism revived with the economic upturn. Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed to provide support for the millions of unemployed, to grow the economy and to enact reform to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. It was attractive for some Communists who, as members of the Democratic administration, could be anti-fascist fighters, defend the cause of labour and promote the aims of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union while pursuing a government career with a good salary. It was no wonder at the time that Soviet spy rings flourished unhindered at the heart of the American government. But New Deal reform did not extend much beyond the end of the recession in 1937, when urgent plans for war displaced domestic concerns. And as the vision of an imminent proletarian revolution was eclipsed by the war shadows, the slow journey back to a belief in democracy quickened into a stampede. Patriotic fervour swamped the radicalism of the thirties. Conservatives still depict the Red Decade as an ugly spectacle of rampant subversion in America.

One clear demonstration of the broad appeal of the radical message at the time, but not of the socialist name, was given by the writer and politician Upton Sinclair. Having founded EPIC (End Poverty In California) to pursue a solution more radical than Roosevelt’s New Deal, Sinclair came close to becoming Governor of California in 1934. He wrote after his defeat that ‘the American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket, I got 60,000 votes and running on the slogan to “End Poverty in California” I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a frontal attack; it is much better to out-flank them.’¹⁶

Sinclair was a lifelong Socialist who had become frustrated with the New Deal’s inability to end the Depression at a stroke. Rather than putting the unemployed on relief, Sinclair proposed, via EPIC, to put them to work within a state-organised ‘production-for-use’ economy distinct from the capitalist marketplace. Under his scheme, the state would take over idle farms and factories, allowing the jobless to grow their own food or produce clothing and other goods. Any surplus could be traded, through a system of barter, only for other goods produced within the system. Considered the front-runner in the election, Sinclair was subjected to intense attacks from both Republicans and Democrats as ‘a communistic wolf in the dried skin of the Democratic donkey’.¹⁷

• • •

The Soviet students tripping down the gangplank in the summer of 1931 arrived with fixed expectations and preconceived ideas about America. The views of Shumovsky and his fellow Soviet students were based on their own political ideology, reinforced by selective imported left-wing reading and popular culture including movies. Long before the Revolution, the idea of America had exercised a profound fascination for Russians, and not just for its technological successes. There was a hungry market in Russia for American movies and cheap novels about cowboys and gangsters.¹⁸ An unusual import was the staging of selected American dramas. Several American plays were produced in Moscow, notably The Front Page – famously adapted in 1940 for the screen as His Girl Friday starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell – which was rechristened Sensations for a Communist audience. Giving theatre-going Muscovites a further taste of the life and times of the windy city was a staging of Chicago, a ‘tale of America’s foremost big gun and bullet city’ depicting the life of Roxie Hart and today more renowned as a musical. Hollywood movie styles inspired domestically produced Soviet films, which often emulated the style and stunts of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops in delivering their ideological message. In one popular movie, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,¹⁹ an American philanthropist, fearful for his own safety having heard lurid tales of bloodthirsty Communists, brings a cowboy to Moscow as a personal bodyguard. The cowboy, played by a Moscow circus clown, is a carbon copy of Keaton, while Moscow’s finest do a passable impression of the Keystone Kops. The philanthropist falls victim to conniving White Guards spinning impossible tales such as that the iconic Bolshoi Theatre was dynamited by the Communists. Mr West returns to the US, and the arms of his relieved wife, knowing that tales of bloodthirsty philistines destroying Moscow are untrue. As the students arrived in America, like Klivans they felt the need to tackle prejudices about the new Russia similar to those held by Mr West and many Americans.

Two Russian satirists, Ilf and Petrov, summed up Russian expectations of arriving in depression-hit New York:

the word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.²⁰

They believed they would find a culture of exploitation in America and that ‘the rich people not only had all the money’ but ‘the poor man was down, and he had to stay down’.²¹ They had devoured in Moscow the available books on America, mostly those of socialist writers Sinclair and Dreiser about the current state of the US. Without another source of knowledge, they believed them to be the gospel truth. The students expected to find ‘a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances, immorality is exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it is under the system of chattel slavery’.²²

As devout Communists, they did not expect a warm welcome on American soil but to be confronted with cold shoulders and suspicion. And they soon learned that outside the narrow circles of intellectuals and émigrés they needed to be careful when discussing Communism. On their travels, they discovered that the deeply conservative soul of America was rooted in traditional churchgoing communities that were suspicious of new-fangled foreign ideas.

Officially, a man will never be forced out of his job for his beliefs. He is free to hold any views, any convictions. He’s a free citizen. But let him try to praise communism – and something like this happens, he will just not find work in a small or big town. He will not even notice it happening. People who do it, do not believe in God but go to church because it is indecent not go to church. As for Communism, that is for Mexicans, Slavs, and black people. It is not an American thing.²³

Russians were not yet an urbanised people, and they knew that the real America was to be discovered in its myriad small towns and villages, not its cities. Soviet visitors loved taking road trips, driving across America’s incredible highway system in the freedom of a car. On their journey they discovered in equal measure much to admire and amuse:

Americans don’t like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And indeed, why strain yourself when so many beautiful names already exist in the world? That’s right, an authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province. There’s another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.²⁴

Soviet visitors discovered in America a confusing, happy melting pot of nationalities. One remarked that ‘a Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car.’ However, they encountered racism and discrimination of a type that their revolution had eliminated: