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
