(See front cover)
The arrival in Manhattan of Mr. & Mrs. Leon Trotsky as exiles was uneventful. He was born a Bronstein, she a Rosenfeld, and The Bronx is full of Bronsteins and Rosenfelds. Among these kinsmen some soon appeared who helped Mr. & Mrs. Trotsky find a suitable three-room flat on Vyse Avenue, The Bronx, enabled them to buy $200 worth of furniture on the installment plan by signing as endorsers their promise to pay. The local Russian-Jewish newspaper, Novy Mir ("New World"), took on Comrade Trotsky as an assistant editor at $15 per week, and although his spoken English was extremely halting his sharp eye quickly took the measure of Manhattan, his sharper pen promptly produced this editorial in the most brilliant Bronstein vein:
Chewing Gum In The Subway
"The car of the subway is jammed. At the station strong-bodied attendants pushed the passengers in the stomachs with their knees in order to be able to shut the steel doors of the cars. . . . The working population of New York has left today another part of its life's energy in the temples of Capital. Some of the people have become weaker; others have grown richer. In the subway are those who have become weaker. The color of their faces is greyish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim. . . . Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation. . . . What are they trying to find in this miserable, degrading chewing? . . . When an infant, exhausted from hunger and crying, is pathetically moving its dull eyes, and there is no milk in the mother's breasts or in the bottle, the mother pushes a rubber nipple into the child's mouth— and the child sucks it desperately. . . . F'or a while it deceives itself by the movement of its own lips.
"Thus it is with these people in the subway. . . . Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid. ... It has therefore adopted measures. ... It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws. . . . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital."
It was on March 10, 1917 in Manhattan that Exile-Editor Leon Trotsky came out with this greatest of all Communist exposures of chewing gum, five days before the abdication of Nicholas II. Last week it was just as apt as it had been 20 years ago. And Leon Trotsky was once more a newly-landed exile in America, only this time he was in Mexico. After the Norwegian Government got tired of having him around (TIME, Dec. 28), put hin aboard a Norwegian tanker and landed him in Tampico (TIME, Jan. 18), he promptly began to receive appropriate honors as World Revolutionist No. 1. The Republic of Mexico is ruled by a political party whose orators refer to themselves with enthusiasm as "The Revolution! "* Mexico is today the only major Latin-American state whose Government admires Big Reds.†