"But," said I, "I have no mandate from any American Negro workers to say that. There is an official mulatto delegate; perhaps he has a message from the Negro workers."
I said to Eastman, "Why don't you speak?" He said he would like to if they would ask him. Certainly the American Communists had in Max Eastman the finest platform personality to present. Unlike me, he was as pure a Marxist as any of them there and had given the best of his intellect to serve the cause of Communism and extoll the Soviets in America. But because of petty jealousy they cold-shouldered Eastman in Moscow. Perhaps if they had been a little diplomatic about him, he probably would be one of them instead of a Trotskyist today.
I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an agitator. When his messenger interpreted what I said, Zinoviev's preacher face turned mean. He was most angry. But I did not mind. My personal triumph had made me aware that the Russians wanted a typical Negro at the Congress as much as I wanted to attend the Congress. The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow. I had mobilized my African features and won the masses of the people. The Bolshevik leaders, to satisfy the desires of the people, were using me for entertainment. So why should I worry about Zinoviev's frown? Even though he was president of the great Third International, I knew that there was no special gift I could get from Zinoviev after the entertainment was over and ended. I could never be a radical agitator. For that I was temperamentally unfit. And I could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet.
And now I was demanded everywhere. Sometimes I had to participate in three different meetings in one day: factory meetings, meetings of soviets, youth meetings, educational conferences in colleges and schools, the meetings of poets and writers, and theatrical performances. I was introduced to interesting sections of the new social and cultural life of Moscow and Petrograd.
I was always asked to speak, and so I prepared a few phrases. The Russians adore long speeches, which it did not interest me to make. And so they lengthened mine by asking a lot of questions. I had listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation. All the speeches of the American delegates, the tall rhetoric, the purple phrases, conveyed fundamentally a common message, thus: "Greetings from America. The workers of America are groaning under the capitalist terror. The revolutionary organizations have been driven underground. But the American Communist Party is secretly organizing the masses. In a few years we will overthrow American capitalism and join our forces with the Russian Communists. Long live the Revolution...." I heard the chairman of the American delegation say: "In five years we will have the American revolution."
The Russians from these speeches pictured the workers of America as denied the right to organize and the rights of free assembly and free speech, as denied representation in Congress, as ridden down by American cossacks, banished in droves from their homes to the Siberias of the Far West, with their imprisoned and exiled leaders escaping to Canada and Mexico and working underground to overthrow the capitalist system. Briefly, the American situation, as they understood it, was similar to that of Russia under the Czarist régime just before the revolution.
The police raid on the illegal Communist party meeting in the beautiful woods of Michigan had been spread all over the Russian newspapers. Everything about that funny raid was so Czarist-Russian-like that the Russians really believed that it was typical of American conditions.
Truly, I could not speak such lies. I knew that the American workers in 1922 were generally better off than at the beginning of the World War in 1914. I was aware, of course, that labor organization in this country was far below the standard of labor organization in England, Germany and France, that American labor was not organized as a political weapon, that in some sections of the country and in certain industries labor was even denied the right to organize, and that radicals were always baited. But Leavenworth was not Siberia. And by no stretch of the imagination could the United States be compared to Czarist Russia.
How, then, could I stand before the gigantic achievement of the Russian revolution and lie? What right had I to tell these people, who had gone through a long death struggle to conquer their country for themselves, that the American revolution was also in travail? What could I presume to tell them? I told them that it was a great honor for me to be there to behold the triumph of their great revolution. I told them that I felt very insignificant and dumb before that wonderful thing. I said that I had come to Russia to learn something, to see with my own eyes and try to write a little of what I had seen.