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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 2, 8 January 1938, pp. 1 & 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
While the powers that be in Washington and Moscow continued all last week trying to make up their minds what to do about the “Robinson”-Rubens case, which now bids fair to be a Frankenstein monster capable of devouring its creators, a few facts leaked into the capitalist press for the first time, penetrating the wall of silence which had previously prevailed.
A significant dispatch from Washington, published in the New York World Telegram of January 4th, confirms the analysis of the affair made by James P. Cannon on December 17th and repeated in these columns last week.
The World-Telegram dispatch follows in part:
“Informed Washington circles said today it is now believed that the mysterious Donald L. Robinsons, Soviet prisoners in Moscow, were former Soviet secret agents.
“The Washington theory, it was learned, is that the Robinson arrests were to be followed by a new series of confession trials in Russia.
“Major objects of the new trials would have been an attack upon foreign Trotskyist movements and a spy scare against Japan. It was reported that the American publicity given the Robinson case had been received with great satisfaction by Soviet authorities as ‘a fine build-up.’ ...
“A series of coincidences, developed by the investigations here, have drawn Washington’s attention to the secret agent theory, originally put forward by Max Shachtman and other American Trotskyist leaders.”
“It was learned that new study has been given to the part played in the case by Helen Ravitch. director of the Drama Travewl League Bureau, who receipted the Robinson passports sent in her care.
“Washington advices recalled that Dr. Solon S. Bernstein, husband of Miss Ravitch, had been physician to William Z. Foster, American Communist leader, during his Presidential campaign in 1932.”
“They also revealed that the Robinsons had spoken in Moscow of extensive travel in the United States and of a visit to Leon Trotsky in: Mexico. In the United States, they were said to have spent some time in California, believed to be a subcenter of espionage activity.
“In checking the strange career of Adolph Arnold Rubens in New York, believed in some investigating quarters to be linked to the Robinsons, it was learned he had told friends here he was a foreign correspondent, an identity which would be useful in espionage.”
It is not diffiucult to imagine who the “informed Washington circles” are. The Department of State, the Department of Justice, and the Post Office Department have all had agents working on this case in New York and elsewhere for about a month. In all likelihood, the heads of these Departments, or at any rate, Mr. Hull, know exactly what is at the bottom of the “Robinson”-Rubens “mystery”. They are probably doing their best to bottle up the truth, ut a faint glimmer of it seems to have come through.
The G.P.U. government is arranging a new frame-up. The press, and particularly the Hearst press, has been giving them a “build-up.” A number of examples of Hearst’s distortion of the news on this case along lines suitable to the G.P.U. were cited in last week’s Appeal. On December 30th, the New York Mirror (Hearst) added another touch to the “build-up.” Their “reporter” approached Professor Horace M. Kallen of the New School for Social Research. Dr. Kallen is well-known in the cooperative movement. He is a liberal who does not endorse socialist doctrine, and who has repeatedly and publicly expressed strong political opposition to the left-wing, which in turn is uncompromisingly opposed to Dr. Kallen’s politics. Dr. Kallen, however, as a member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, having associated himself with it for the same reasons which moved many other well-known liberals.
The Hearst reporter asked Dr. Kallen whether he was acquainted with Mr. “Robinson”-Rubens. According to the Mirror, Dr. Kallen stated that, he was not. Apparently Dr. Kallen was surprised by the question and asked the “reporter” what gave him the idea. In any event, the “reporter” pointed out in his article that he thought Dr. Kallen’s connection with the American Committee might give him information about the mysterious Rubenses. One may wonder whether even the Hearst imagination could have produced such a result without a little hint from some good “friend of the Soviet Union.”
The State Department has obviously not made up its mind whether to go along with Stalin in the international united front for peace via war. Nor has it made up its mind whether to cooperate with the G.P.U. in staging the projected “Robinson”-Rubens frame-up. The State Department may well feel that the typical G.P.U. frame-up botch works in Russian, but that it doesn’t “stick” very well in the United States.
While it tries to make up its mind, however, the State Department is playing its own game. Beginning with the “Robinson”-Rubens angle, and working down through former Tammany County Clerk Marinelli’s office, the Federal men, according to the press, have come upon a chain of small-time East Side Democrats, who seem to be less than 1,000 miles removed from some kind of passport racket, and for whom there would be plenty of room, according to Dimitroff’s latest effusion, in the People’s Front. What the press does not record is that a state of jitters prevails in certain Stalinist circles.
According to rumor, the nervous way in which some people take a glass of tea these days would seem to indicate that the Federal men are getting on to a few things. Of course, this may just be Union Square chatter, but one can hardly believe that the G.P.U. is entirely pleased with, the fact that a lot of investigators are busily digging in.
The World-Telegram is entirely correct in pointing out that Miss Ravitch, the lady who now remembers that she signed the receipt for the “Robinsons” passports, is married to none other than Bill Foster’s physician. The physician, incidently, also has had some connection with the International Workers Order. The Daily Worker of September 1932 made Dr. Bernstein rather famous.
Foster was then running for president, but he wasn’t putting on much of a campaign. The Daily Worker said he was sick. A columnist named Heywood Broun, who has since grown up to be an ardent admirer of the Daily Worker, printed a charge that Foster was in excellent health but in the political doghouse. The Daily Worker printed a cartoon showing Broun as a drunk and called him liar. In order to support its position, the Daily printed a number of bulletins from a doctor who declared that Foster was in a real physical decline, in addition to his other troubles. The doctor was none other than Dr. Solon Bernstein.
The World-Telegram makes a most interesting remark when it says that the “Robinsons” told people in Moscow that they had visited Trotsky in Mexico. This is all that was needed to complete the picture! There always has to be a visit to Trotsky. Sometimes it is in a non-existent airplane and sometimes in a non-existent hotel. But usually one doesn’t hear about it until the “defendant”, having thought profoundly on the subject of Stalin’s virtues in the secret chambers of the G.P.U., grabs a microphone in a Soviet court and “confesses.”
This time, however, since what is wanted is an American “build-up”, we are told that the “Robinsons”, after having registered in November at a Moscow hotel, under a name which the whole world knew since last July was proscribed by the G.P.U., ran around the city telling Americans that they were pals of Trotsky. The indictment seems to be not that, Trotsky has secret agents, but that he has secret agents who are first-class idiots.
It is not quite clear what the Telegram is saying about California. It is reporting that in Moscow people say they were in California? Which people? Who told them? Or does the Telegram mean that in the United States it is being said that they were in California? Either is possible. In any case, in New York a number of Stalinists have been whispering the glorious name of California in connection with the “Robinson” case. This at a time when not a single newspaper prints any indication as to who the “Robinsons” or Rubens really are.
How do American Stalinists know that California enters the picture? Why hasn’t the Daily Worker printed the great revelations? Why is the Daily Worker printing on the whole less news about this affair than any other paper in New York? Are they afraid of spoiling the first night by a pre-view?
The new frame-up, as the Hearst approach to Dr. Kallen and other developments indicate, is not to be directed primarily at opposition elements in the Soviet Union nor solely at Leon Trotsky and his political associates. It is to be a grand affair, run on the principle that if you throw enough mud some of it sticks. While it is still too early to say whether the G.P.U. has “discovered” that the defense of the Oxford Pledge made by the Quakers, the liberals, the Thomasites, the Lovestonites and other anti-Trotskyite groups at the recent American Student Union convention at Poughkeepsie was really a Japanese plot arranged by the Trotskyites, it is at any rate clear that if the Soviet Government finally decides to dig up the mysterious “Robinsons”-Rubens, the latter may be expected to tell a juicy story involving definitely non-Trotskyite circles which the Kremlin regards as an obstacle to its plans for a totalitarian People’s War Front in the United States. It is reported that the World-Telegram article and other developments
of like nature have caused a number of well-known liberals, particularly some associated with the “small” navy movement, to begin to watch the development of the “Robinson” mystery with interest. What they are particularly wondering about is whether the “confessions” now being rehearsed in Moscow will be released for public consumption at the time of the scheduled Congressional debate on the Naval Appropriations Bill. Both Stalin and the reactionary big-navy crowd in this country would welcome a Japanese spy scare at that moment more than at any other. But the whole fabric of the case seems to be so full of holes that one wonders whether Moscow can get ready to stage a “Robinson”-Rubens trial for some time to come.
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