Black on White

Two American millionaires, man and wife, are so convinced that “the revolution” is around the corner that they have taken out double insurance, as it were:

First: they have placed themselves on record as friends of the Bolsheviks—not actually members of the Communist Party but on its periphery. The kind of Communists who receive invitations to Soviet diplomatic functions, attend dinners of the Friends of the Soviet Union and are ready to carry on the great experiment bravely, ruthlessly, to the last Russian.

Second: they have bought an interest in a safe and sunny retreat in the South Seas. When the barricades are thrown up, and the liquidations begin, these two will simply retire to a Polynesian paradise.

The South Seas project interests me particularly. The wealthy couple are not the only “Bolsheviks” in it. Associated with them are a number of people whom I know through their activities in Moscow, self-styled liberals and public friends of the downtrodden masses.

Their plans look to the establishment of a cozy retreat for superior Americans, desirous of escaping the sorrows and annoyances of the world. The island has already been acquired and a sort of cooperative “club” is being organized to finance, maintain and use it.

For a portion of the year, at least, the members will be able to abandon the madding crowd and the crowded madness of civilization. Their promotional literature on the subject says nothing about this—but one of the major annoyances they intend to escape is Jews. When they expose their “Aryan” tummies to the Polynesian sun, there will be no Semitic skins to mar the picture.

That another club from which Jews are barred is in existence is not in itself news; it is too commonplace to deserve notice. The virgin beauty of an uninhabited South Sea island can be smudged with anti-Semitism as easily as a Florida beach or a Long Island golf course.

What makes it remarkable is that the membership includes these near-Bolsheviks. One of them, in fact, is always held up as an example of a foreign writer who (unlike myself and other backsliders) is doing right by the Soviet experiment.

How thin and meaningless is the “Bolshevism” that has become the fashion among comfortable American intellectuals! It is no more than a transparent veneer of their essential Fascist natures.

I have seen roomfuls of them. Stripped of their oh-and-ah enthusiasm for everything Russian, they are the garden variety reactionaries. What attracts them, really, is the hard-boiled, dehumanized technique of the Bolsheviks. It makes them feel a part of a tremendous machine of power that moves forward relentlessly, that plows down lives with a superman “firmness,” that treats human creatures as so many guinea pigs.

The thrill-hunters are lionized by the genuine radicals. The fact that the “best people,” intellectually and financially speaking, are going Bolshevik warms the cockles of their meek hearts.

Before the war the radical movement had its “millionaire socialists,” its Stokeses and Wallings and Bullards and Bross Lloyds, as decorative fronts. Now that fashionable embellishment has been acquired by the Communists. The first breath of reality, the war, tore down the decoration two decades ago. The first breath of revolution will send the new group running where their natural instinct leads them.

One of these days I shall write an article entitled “Pent-house Bolsheviks or Ritzy Rebels.” It will include word pictures, among others, of the following:

1. The son of a multimillionaire. He is overshadowed by his father’s name and his father’s wealth. In his own circle he is just another offspring. Eventually he finds himself in Bolshevik circles. In that setting his every act becomes news. Because of his wealth, his ideas are treated with a disproportionate respect. Previously he was just another millionaire. Now he is an important and glamorous personality—a millionaire Bolshevik!

2. A neurotic lady of excessive means and flesh. She has tried theosophy, table rapping, Christian Science. Now, at last, she has “found” Communism. Something real, immediate, powerful, with an entire nation under its control— yet comfortably far away, and practiced on a lot of Russians. My dears, it’s too wonderful.

3. A well-paid literary critic. He knows that he has more brains than his boss, the owner of the paper, whom we may call Moneybags. He wreaks a subtle and satirical revenge by using the columns of the Moneybags publications to undermine the whole capitalist system. Not love of the proletariat (whom he despises) or faith in Karl Marx, but the joy of sticking pins into Mr. Moneybags and getting paid for his trouble.

Seriously, it is my conviction that the extent to which American Communism has won adherants among its natural enemies—and lost the support of its natural friends—is a significant development. It should cause a few of the leaders, here and in Moscow, to consider a return to the idealism and humanism which inspired the Russian revolution in its preparatory and early stages.