A SATIRIC CARTOON AIMED AT THE ASIATIC GORMANDIZING OF THE RUSSIAN MUZHIK 'Scratch a Russian-' How East and West Meet and Blend in the Most Enigmatic of Nations NOR ten years the Russian people F have been obscured from vision by the Great Red Fog, a vapor compounded of the reekings of western prejudice and Marxian fanaticism. But if one approaches Moscow through its great Asiatic back yard, he gets a pretty clear view of the lineaments of Russian character before the fog thickens about him. He may even discover an opportunity to perform that minor revealing operation on the Russian soul made famous by the aphorism of Napoleon: 'Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar.' By 'Tartar' Napoleon probably meant 'barbarian'; but if he meant, rather, 'Asiatic' he spoke with that direct feminine intuition which has caused him to be quoted down through the ages. For 'scratch a Russian and you find an Asiatic' is the most fundamental truth about that people and their place in the world to-day. The hordes of Jenghiz Khan, sweeping over the Slavic people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, left their mark on the faces as well as in the souls of the Russian people. Russians, of all the varied racial strains to be found in that great land save the Balto-Germanic, are Asiatic in mentality and lack those traits which characterize the EuroAmerican. The supplanting of the Germanic ruling caste by an Asiatic group sets the seal on Russia's ostracism from the West and reaffiliation with Asia. By Upton Close We get the lie of the land even before we enter the Soviet Union, at Harbin, Manchuria, the only great city of white men ruled over by yellow. (There are soon to be others the great 'settlements' of the China coast.) On the streets swarthy Russians in Chinese police uniform patrol alongside their more slender Mongoloid fellows. Up in the municipal offices ascetic-looking Russian clerks sit side by side with sleek Chinese, their working harmony apparently not even disturbed by the inevitable problems of division of the squeeze. Along cobble-paved China Street comes a peasant cart with the typical arched yoke over the horse's neck, and in it, going to market, ride John Chinaman and his full-breasted Russian wife. With no other white people could it be quite so. As we roll leisurely the length of Siberia and on to the European plains, we are pleasantly surprised to find that we are still in the East. There is no Western rush or bustle. In Moscow it takes half an hour to negotiate the purchase of a bun in a bakery. What Western people would put up with such a system of double check and audit on every purchase? Queues of people wait with true Oriental patience to buy, to board busses, or to see governmental officials. At the Grand Hotel we wait an hour after we have finished eating for the waiter to bring the bill. To present it too soon would have been inhospitable, savoring of doubt regarding our financial integrity. When we finally ask for it the head waiter must for courtesy's sake make us wait another hour to make it clear that he is not hurrying us. We go to the Alexander Station an hour early to purchase tickets to Poland. 'Tovarish,' exclaims the station master, 'you were not going to-day! Go to-morrow. Why rush us so?' Such things, more than color of skin or systems of government, determine a people's real place in the world. Attitude toward time is, of course, a give-away. The Westerner, saying his prayers while he takes his setting-up exercises, could no more be contemptuous of time than the Asiatic of his sages. But other things are as telling. 'How can the Russians endure such material deprivation? How can they be kept from rising up and overthrowing their rulers, whether the latter be responsible or not?' are the recurring questions of Westerners. The answer is, 'Because they are Asiatic.' They look upon material comforts as do the Chinese or Indians, nice to have but not essential to life. Give three Russians a dirt floor, broken stools, and a samovar of tea and they will discuss philosophy through the night as happily as kings. Then there is the attitude toward sex, a reliable criterion. The European takes sex as a game. The Asiatic, using the term to include the Russian, takes sex as an appetite. With the average Westerner the idea of sex is always present and within the realm of consciousness. Could Western school girls, clerks, and factory girls bathe naked in the heart of a city without sex consciousness? We realize the difference as we look on. These flappers are bathing simply because they like to swim or need the bath. There is n't a sex magazine on the stands, not a bathing girl on the covers or in the advertising, and we see no girls reducing the visibility of their noses or heightening that of their lips in public places. When the men hunger, they eat and forget it. Russian women, being freed Asiatics, do likewise. hundred and forty million of them will do Being Asiatics, these Russians receive us with the comfortable mixture of courtesy and contempt and curiosity and indifference to which we have become accustomed in Japan and China. 'You never can tell what a crazy foreigner will do best just to let him go,' seems to express the mental attitude of the common people as we go about trying to 'rush' the East. Of course there is an official attitude which is much concerned about what we do, but we run into little of that until we cross those mountains composed of map-ink rather than earth and rocks which are the mythical dividing line from Europe. By that time word has gone on that we are Americans, and therefore to be treated well. Our luggage is not even examined, we are conscious of no spies, no listeners-in on our telephone calls. We even do what every official and unofficial adviser has told us is utterly impossible, carry a camera and a typewriter across Russia and any number of uncensored issues of the New York Times! It dawns upon us that these people, being Asiatics, are not obsessed with the lust for accomplishment and exploitation of their resources which obsesses us. Although they occupied the six thousand miles of territory between Moscow and the Pacific in about the same time that it took our pioneers to spread across the three thousand miles of the American continent, it is evident to our eyes that in the matter of exploitation, or developing power out of what they have occupied, they do not rival us at all. And in spite toward the crenelated wall of the of the efficiency and 'Americanization' programme of the Soviet oligarchy, one We meet another American, Vice-President of one of New York's largest banks, who has been a guest for ten days in the Kremlin itself. For his delectation all the crown jewels were brought out, and the inspection took eight hours. The diadems, swords, and clusters are so valuable as to make them literally valueless. The only way of procuring sale would be to break them up, and thus far the artistic and sentimental feelings of the régime have overcome their financial needs. It is the Armenian, Karakhan, huge, Tartar city which lures us in the dis- vigorous and suave, reminding us of an ALONG the Lubyanka, making our way NOTE THE ARTIST's unconscious use of both European and Asiatic racial types. From left to right From Byezbozhnik, Moscow elephant with a panther's tread, who gives us the official Communist viewpoint on America. Since his Chinese experience as Russian ambassador to Pekin, during which he embarrassed to mortification the ministers of the Western powers, he has been chief of the largest and most important division of the Russian Foreign Office, the Asiatic. It has three subdivisions, Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Near Eastern, and he retains concurrently the headship of the first. 'It's foolishness to talk about "the revolution" in America for another hundred years. We have given you up as utterly unregenerate for this generation at least. It is utter waste for a nation which has one pair of boots to every nine people to spend money propagandizing idealism within a nation which has motorcar to every five people. We must make our masses rich first. By that time your masses will be getting poor under the capitalistic concentration of wealth and tendency toward serfdom.' OSPITALITY is one of the most ingrained traits of the human being, and the more primitive the people the more pronounced it is. We have found this in Asia and we find it in Russia, which is of Asia. On the trains through Siberia or the boats on the Volga, where we buy our roast geese and hams and cheese and milk and great loaves of bread hit-andmiss from the peasant women at every stop, we are always offered a portion by some fellow traveler who likely has less than ourselves. And the muzhik's bed will always hold one more. Propaganda, like education, has some strange influences on the travelers. We are crossing Siberia when the news of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti reaches the train. The dear, illiterate, old mother who, with her engineer son, shares our compartment has been concerning herself with our comfort. Suddenly she turns aloof, and regards us for half a day as deplorable creatures of some blood-thirsty and savage race. But she forgets it over the brewing of the evening tea. Commenting on the same incident young Attaché Huten of the Foreign Office, a member of a noted Polish family, says in excellent English: 'We are shocked terribly shocked! You have hurt us to the soul.' His Geypeyoo has just executed thirty alleged spies said to be in the service of England! As we come out through the Stolpce customs house we Americans receive attention first, then a Japanese traveler. The Germans enjoy the most informal camaraderie, the least official attention. Russian-speaking Americans, particularly those of Jewish extraction, are, A SICK MAN WRITHES WITH PAIN From Byezbozhnik, Moscow WHILE HIS ATTENDANTS pray over him: a satire directed at the Russian's Asiatic scorn for the value of time and the relief of human pain however, closely examined and queshowever, closely examined and questioned. One investigator for an American-Jewish philanthropic society tells us that he found it desirable to pretend no knowledge of the language. Admitting it now would at once get him into a Geypeyoo jail. When it comes to the red tape of visas, however, we all stand equal. Days of waiting in line for the permit to be stamped, having it expire before one can get to the head of the line, making it necessary to wait in line to get a new permit, only to wait in line again to have it stamped - these are the traveler's only unpleasant experiences in Russia. And one can, of course, hire the waiting done for him. But he cannot buy service from the officials. The men clerks are impervious to gifts more discouraging still, the buxom young women to flattery. For three centuries Russia was forced into European make-up by the Germanized Romanov dynasty. You cannot, of course, artificialize a nation like Russia or China. About one-tenth of the people were changed - the upper tenth. And the hatred of the nine-tenths for the onetenth was as much that of the hearty Asiatic for the affected European as it was of the economically impoverished for the wealthy. Even into the Communist Party this race struggle was carried. Lenin, half-Asiatic and half-European, succeeded so well because he combined the Asiatic hard-boiled' practicality, ac ceptance of conditions and capacity to compromise, with a European idealism. The result was his unsurpassed opportunism, which could tack with the wind and yet receive credit for honesty. When he died there was no man possessing this rare combination of qualities to succeed him. Followed the struggle between the purely and bluntly Asiatic Stalin, Tomski, and Voroshilov on the one hand and the purely idealistic and uncompromising Jewish Trotski, Zinoviev, and Radek on the other. Do I confuse 'European' and 'Hebraic'? The Jew has always been, in mentality, the most Europeanized element in Russia, and the non-compromising and idealistic type of Jew is the exact antithesis of the Asiatic mind. The pure Slav, between the Jew and the Tartar, has been on the whole a neutral element, artistic rather than executive, dreamer rather than actor, or else phlegmatic and colorless altogether. Stalin wins. We deal with a Russia that is frankly and purely Asian now, but which has adopted as its fetish 'Americanism,' meaning, to it, regimentation and mass production. Amazing combination: 'go-get-ism' as a national policy, not an individual ebullience, based upon Asiatic fatalism. Under the Red Fog, Asiaticism and Idealism are combining; and these opposing elements can come together only because they are overlaid with the lineament-hiding glue of Slavic mysticism. Scratch a Russian, and this is what we find to-day. E The World Looks at Hoover By William R. Willcox Chairman Public Utilities Commission, City of New York, 1907-13; Chairman Republican National Committee, 1916-18 UROPEAN eyes are focused, just now, on the presidential campaign in America, for Europeans are aware that on its outcome may depend the immediate future of such matters as the American tariff, war debts, and the related question of reparations, with which their own interests are so intimately bound. Of course Europe is looking most of all at two men. Governor Smith is something of a puzzle. Hoover, in a way, Europeans think they understand. He has lived much among them. He won world-wide fame in Belgium. He is a familiar figure in France. For some years he resided in London. And during the most critical years of the war, as director of the interallied food control, he made his name known in every home and his economy programme felt in every kitchen between No Man's Land and the Mediterranean. In general the European journalists who undertake to interpret the approaching American election seem to find the Republican presidential candidate a good deal easier to comprehend than the methods by which he was nominated and those by which, so many of them predict, he will be elected. A European beholding an American political convention for the first time, observes the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 'will be as much amazed at its vast size as at its total lack of political discussion,' adding cynically that only a very few Americans ever know what really does go on.' The Tory Morning Post, which usually contrives to be more thoroughly condescending than any other London newspaper, comments sardonically upon American elections and the curious scenes of synthetic enthusiasm by which conventions are accompanied. 'It would never have occurred to the most enthusiastic Conservative,' it continues, 'to have provided himself for the last General Election with a gigantic portrait of Mr. Baldwin, so that in the hour of victory he might bear it triumphantly along the Strand. Nor could the Central Office have conceived the idea of gathering in London a bevy of the most beautiful girls to strew flowers before the victor.' Naturally, Europe thinks first of Mr. Hoover's services as a 'specialist in national disasters.' The Indépendance Belge, referring to his work as head of the From the Passing Show, London HOOVER IN BRITISH EYES DAVID WILSON, a British caricaturist, famous for his ability to put people on paper, has a try at the Republican candidate Commission for Relief in Belgium, declares that it was there, though without any desire on his part, that his political career and his great rôle in the political life of the United States began. It was there that he revealed his qualities of inteiligence, energy, authority, and his capacity as an organizer.' 'He entered politics accidentally,' says this newspaper. 'Without the war, he would probably never have done anything of the sort. There is nothing of the politician about him,' and it ends by observing that if Herbert Hoover is elected President, there will be in the White House a strong personality whose action may include some surprises.' In Paris, Le Temps describes him as 'an example of the American realist and organizer, with profound knowledge of the world's needs and a very definite feeling of the economic solidarity of all nations.' Stéphane Lauzanne, editor of Le Malin, praises him because he does not 'indulge in sentiment at the expense of reason,' and because he is 'the leading business man in a country which has the greatest business men on earth.' Under Mr. Hoover's administration, if he i elected, 'America will never perish c cold, hunger, or privation' - which doe not, however, seem alarmingly probabl in any case. In the Echo de Paris, the acid Pertina unbends sufficiently to describe Hoove as the inspired repairer of disasters. He is, according to this famous observe of international affairs, 'retiring, im perious, laconic more genuinely la conic, perhaps, than President Coolidge for he has not at the tip of his tongue the pat, ready-made vocabulary of the professional politician.' In Germany, the Frankfurter Zeitung avers that the Republican Party has 'done the wisest thing it could have done.' 'As his career demonstrates, Hoover is a man of superior qualities. In his seven years as Secretary of Commerce, he has shown himself not only a superior organizer and administrator. but also the possessor in high degree of the gift of statesmanship.' In spite of this, however, and in spite of the fact that he has the gift of knowing what to do in critical times,' the Frankfurter Zeitung predicts that he will have a hard fight, partly because he is not sufficiently known, partly because of his 'political neutrality,' and partly because of the forces arrayed against him. The Neu Freie Presse, of Vienna, asserts, howeve 'No one can deny that he is known. Ho is somebody, he holds high rank in his profession, and his profession is no mere restricted specialty. Wherever he has had an opportunity to show that he is a practical man with practical organizing ability, Hoover has proved his worth.' Neutral Switzerland, where one might expect Mr. Hoover to have impressed himself less than among the late belligerents, is most enthusiastic about him. 'It would be unjust and ungrateful not to remember,' writes William Martin. the famous editorial writer of the Journal de Genève, that if Switzerland somehow or other managed to live through the war, it was in part due to Mr. Hoover's work.' He is, says the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 'one of the greatest organizers and doers in modern business life." In the opinion of the London Daily Telegraph he is 'the best example of the man whom modern America admires most, viz., the successful super-organizer,' and 'in times of special emergency it has grown to be the habit for all eyes to be turned in his direction.' The London Sunday Times-which, by the way, has no connection whatever with the Times (London) says: 'Mr. Hoover stands as Disraeli stood, "on his head," on his efficiency, on the sheer excellence of his record as an executive officer.' THE HE editorial commentators of all nations are quite aware of the significance of the American elections for Europe and the world at large, and they take obvious satisfaction in the thought that the next President may be a man so intimately acquainted with world problems as Herbert Hoover. The London Observer, edited by J. L. Garvin, who is also editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, calls him 'one of the biggest men alive,' who 'knows more of the world at large than any former president, even more than Roosevelt knew.' In the Journal de Genève, William Martin also declares that the next American President will be arbiter of the world's destinies.' Mr. Hoover, if elected, however, will not in his opinion be 'a European president.' Continues Mr. Martin: 'Europe does not look for a president of her own in the White House. But she will be glad to see there a man who knows that she exists and understands her needs.' Very much the same attitude appears in the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), which says: 'It is of special importance to us that the new President shall not favor isolation, that he shall carry on the peace policies that Coolidge began and that Kellogg yesterday carried further, that he shall make his voice eard on behalf of righteousness in the great international assemblies.' Pertinax humorously points out in the Écho de Paris, however, that Hoover has an engineer's passion for efficiency and that Europe was made to scandalize him, by the excessive number of its national compartments. What waste! What loss! What folly! What absurd complications!' In far-off Tokyo the Asahi declares editorially that, no matter who is elected, 'the national as well as the foreign policy of the United States will not be affected'; but later in the same editorial the somewhat inconsistent view is expressed that the change of the chief executive, his personal worth, and the advance of the times may bring phenomenal features into international life.' What he hopes one of these 'phenomenal features' may be, the editorial writer points out specifically. Mr. Hoover is 'a THE WORLD LOOKS AT HOOVER Californian, but a professed friend of Japan,' who 'will probably undertake to solve the immigration question.' Le Temps says that 'whether victory goes to Hoover or to Smith, there is every reason to think that the presidential elections will bring to the White House a new policy as well as a new man. In view of the United States' large share in common action for the solution of the great problems now confronting the nations, we have here a fact of immense significance for the entire world.' 'Should destiny bear him to the White House,' says the New Statesman, a London weekly which supports the Labor party, 'Mr. Hoover would be the first of the American Presidents to represent in any full sense the world of American Big Business in its international aspect, and he would have the advantage of a personal experience rightly to be described as unique.' 35 is an Anglophile, though Germania, organ of the German Catholics, while recognizing his post-Armistice services to Germany, accuses him of a 'clearly British complexion' in his international dealings. Few British papers even mention the accusation, and the Sunday Times curtly dismisses it as 'preposterous' and intended to mislead voters 'who still cherish the ancient grudge.' Several foreign editorial observers are already predicting a Hoover victory. None suggests the likelihood of defeat. The Indépendance Belge says: 'All our hopes are that this great-hearted organizer of human happiness will be elected to the place at the head of the American people once occupied by the man who liberated the slaves.' The Sunday Times (London) thinks there may be 'as close a fight as in 1916,' but the Times (London) regards a Hoover victory as 'unquestionably the probability.' In Japan, Osaka Mainichi says that the election 'is likely to go in favor of Mr. Hoover.' If he becomes President, the Neue Freie Presse is careful to remind its readers, Mr. Hoover's position will not resemble that of the more or less powerless presidents who have succeeded kings and emperors in most European countries. In Europe, the real power remains in the hands of the prime ministers. American presidents, on the contrary, 'are their own prime ministers and, during the four years for which they are elected, possess such powers as monarch ever had, even in the good old days of the monarchical idea.' The London Observer is even more emphatic: 'No monarch and no premier has the home-power and world-power belonging to a president of the United States.' Pertinax, in the Écho de Paris, says the same thing more succinctly 'imperial power unequaled in this century.' At a time when the acquisition and protection of foreign markets is an increasing preoccupation of American manufacturers, says the Times (London), 'Mr. Hoover seems admirably fitted to control the machinery of government in the interests of foreign trade. By the circumstances of their apprenticeship in State politics, most American Presidents and Senators, and many American Ministers, know little of the world which exists outside the wide boundaries of the States. This is a defect in the organization of American public life which is coming to matter more and more as American interests abroad increase in importance and complexity. That the Republican Party should choose as its standard bearer a man who is not only not a politician, but who is credited with all the business man's contempt for the politician's calling, is a proof how completely the party accepts the dictum of President Coolidge that "the business of the United States is business." The praise have upon an American Bolshevist organ Pravda, in Moscow, expresses somewhat the same view, but laments the nomination as 'a final capitulation' to the bourgeoisie. Mr. Hoover, according to the Manchester Guardian, 'is a public man of the world's newest type, and as such is all the more significant when seen against the background of American party politics the most unreal and mechanical politics in the world.' It refers to his nomination as an event of the highest moment to the world.' The British press does not take seriously the suggestion that Mr. Hoover seriously the suggestion that Mr. Hoover no HAT effect can pæans of foreign WHAT presidential election? An estimate is difficult just now. But it is known that the powerful newspapers published abroad, in addition to their regular subscribers in the United States, influence profoundly the foreign language press of the United States, read by millions of voters. From this it follows that in a closely contested national election the enthusiastic support of the newspapers and periodicals of Europe and the civilized world outside of the United States might constitute an asset of substantial importance. Next Month: 'The World Looks at Al Smith' |