The Story Behind a World Plan
EASTMAN, MAX
The Story Behind a World Plan Ely Culbertson — "The Strange Lives of One Man" BY Max, Eastman ELY CULBERTSON, the bridge champion, has turned his searchlight mind from one of the least important...
...Our Black Sheep has...
...Culbertson remember...
...Only beautiful types need apply...
...If you ask them to go through the problem of disarmament, their minds will only devise means whereby the others would be disarmed or at least less armed, while they themselves would remain better armed...
...He is too detachable for that...
...Sir Stafford Cripps has told us that "the power of the air now provides an opportunity which has never before existed to control world order...
...Then he asked to have the window opened for a minute...
...There he was arrested and spent 90 days in a death-house from which every little while a batch of his comrades were led out to be shot...
...Any other method would lead to failure...
...He would comb Europe for a young girl capa'Vi of becoming another Nadya, and submit her to an environment that would assure it...
...besides his waywardness", a sentimental streak in him...
...IJERE is the most formidable stumbling * * block to overcome when the problem of enforcing peace has to be solved...
...The expenditure for such a military apparatus would shrink...
...and that they should ask now the other united nations to become partners on equal terms...
...As a first step he went to Turin, famous for the beauty of its women, and advertised in the paper for an artist's modef "Undress unnecessary...
...But he tried haid without her...
...Indeed it was from studying Spinoza in early youth that he derived that passion for inventing systems which has made him a world celebrity and a millionaire...
...The New Leader a few months ago published a brief interview with this strange personality, son of an American engineer, who was once a Russian revolutionary and once the world's bridge champion...
...Who is this man who is daring to finesse around historical realities...
...The Price of Peace-- Immediate Steps Needed Now for Coming World Order By G4ET4NO SALVEMINI III ll/HEN we have agreed that we must be pre-" pared to accept the obligation of arbitrat-: ing all disputes which might arise between us i and even the smallest and weakest people in I the world, and to abide by the ruling of the | arbitrators even if their ruling is against us, i we have to ask another question...
...Nothing except prejudice and unwillingness prevents the leaders of the A.B.C.R...
...Eastman's essay will be concluded next week...
...The "Culbertson Pursuit System...
...The door should be left open even to those who are now our enemies, after they have given evidence that they would join sincerely in the new world order...
...I would say that to enforce law and order in Europe the Air Force of the new League of Nations should have no more than one base in Sicily in the "South and one in the Danish islands in the North...
...She was absolute perfection...
...he explained...
...He thought he had to have a sys-te mthere, because Nadya had both brains and beauty, and he is not very good looking or commanding...
...URING those wander years he did not think of himself as a bum, and perhaps he wasn't...
...She was an axperienced revolutionist, and she had heard him try to make that speech, and liked him...
...And reluctantly, as a proud man descends to the line of least resistance, he went it: for a career at cards...
...Failing of a job on the docks, he earned his living for some months rigged out...
...He installed a secret printing press in his mother's garden house, used his American passport to carry illegal literature in and out of Russia, and otherwise adopted the' life of ideal criminal revolt against organized society...
...And once mimp refused to quit under fire...
...Indeed as I see Ely Culbertson, it seems to make little difference what his passion to excel attaches to...
...The Story Behind a World Plan Ely Culbertson — "The Strange Lives of One Man" BY Max, Eastman ELY CULBERTSON, the bridge champion, has turned his searchlight mind from one of the least important to the most urgent of human problems, the abolition of war...
...His rich Cossack mother got him out of jail, and begged him to go abroad and finish his education...
...Culbertson distinguished himself only by making the change according to a new and original System...
...She brought him up with a halo fastened on his head...
...Once it is attached, the energy and brains and concentration that come into play are prodigious...
...He felt, long before Trotsky ever organized its seizure of power m October i917, that the Russian revolution had failed...
...Nothing happened except his own arrest, and he was very politely escorted to the French border and invited not to come back to Spain...
...To find out whether it was or not, he stowed away on a freight boat down the coast to Acapuko...
...pi One of them invited him one day to joinfii plot to assassinate the king, Alphonso...
...New we present a full-length portrait of the man by Max Eastman—who along with Bertrand Russell, Norman Thomas, and others, have endorsed the plan...
...Instead of throwing a bomb at the King, he mover over to the Prado Art Museum and practically lived there, so that if anything happened he would have an alibi...
...Ely rushed through the rioting streets to her house, only to learn from a policeman at the door that she had been killed...
...No extravagant number of military airplanes would be needed to enforce law and order, since none except the new League of Nations would be entitled to keep such, weapons...
...How is this police force to be organized ? * * * 'THE police force must consist of a certain * number of military airplanes kept at the disposal of the new League of Nations...
...He escaped to Cuba, took a boat to Spain, sit there got still deeper involved with the anfi-chists...
...He could not pretend that his filth was of any value to .the revolution...
...Who will be entrusted with the task of en-I forcing the rule of law if someone refuses I to abide by it...
...I'm sorry...
...Once more his contribution consisted of ffi-ting arrested and spending some thoughail months in jail...
...There is hardly a man 'riving who knows more different phases ot American lower class life than Ely Culbertson, the card-playfng'millionaire...
...But the thing was not going ve<* well...
...Our Spoiled Child asked for a bottle of beer and got it...
...A few weeks later he was broke again, and riding toward San Francisco on the rods of an express train—the fatest mode of locomotion, if speed is measured subjectively, that man has invented...
...He sold newspapers on 14th Street, attended night school at Cooper Union, stood in breadlines, shared lodgings with dope fiends, rode the bumpers, worked on the railroad, served as a filing clerk in Winnipeg, organized a strike on the Grand Trunk Pacific (won the strike and got kicked out), panhandled through Idaho, planted com in Oregon, dishwashed in Montana, worked in a gambling joint in Sacramento, picked fruit in Fresno...
...DERHAPS the most unusual thing about him, as compared to other fanatics of the detachable variety—they are often called Ne'er-do...
...Nadya was on their black list...
...He received a lectp're on the difference between revenge an<f (revolution, and was sent instead to a town in the Caucasus where the party was in active rebellion...
...it as "a continual Sahara dust-storm" in which among other roadbed delicacies a freshly killed snake caught him in the mouth...
...He was reconciled...
...jEADERSHIP of the people in Russia in those : days meant revolutionary leadership...
...And he wanted to know why...
...But he had seen too much of life and death to become a Yale Freshman...
...Nothing but that taboo prevents' the leaders of America, Britain, China and Russia—let us say the A.B.C.R...
...But these are minor details, whereas two facts have to be borne in mind as essentials: 1) The staff and privates of this Air Force should consist of volunteers recruited from all countries intermingled in such a way that no national groups could be formed, each country contributing to the expense in proportion to its population...
...Culbertson's father was a brilliant engineer-adventurer, who, starting from Tituseville, Pennsylvania, developed the now famous Grozny oil fiends in the Caucasus, married the daughter of a Cossack general, and put all of his fortune into Russian gold bonds of the Czarist regime...
...Those twenty-five years were filled with a series of experiences as far-flung and bizarre as though the man had set out to make a movie-scenario of his own life...
...it was a sure thing...
...He made appointments with them at quarter hour intervals at the four corners ot the central plaza, and interviewed fhem alTJ Going home exhausted and dismayed with the whole sex after the 320th interview, he found Faustina waiting for him at his door...
...Since then, various journals from Readers' Digest to Common Sense have taken ap the new Culbertson System...
...When that was done, he shattered the lamp with the bottle, grabbed the pile of money in front 9f his cheat-, ing opponent, slid through the windo wand dropped to the ground...
...Every factor, element and detail of aa world that has been madly spinning through depressions and wars has been reckoned with in Ely Culberton's amazing plan...
...That half-Cossack, half-American son was just then keeping alive giving $2 lessons in French literature, while studying to complete a long-postponed treatise on Mass Psychology...
...Although highly placed, she was, as frequently happened in the old Russia, fervently democratic...
...He thought he was writing, or getting ready to write, a treatise on The Psychology V the Masses...
...Culbertson's international revolutionary adventures, conducted with a monthly allowance of $125 and a steady income from his prodigious skill at cards, seems almost a parody of the life of an austere revolutionist like Leon Trotsky^* also politely deported out of Spain...
...He decided to go up to the University of California and learn all about anarchism...
...Or was he just perverse, a natural bom "black sheep...
...And so, this spoiled child soon found Himself on a •pap-box trying to apologize for his riches to • crowd about to march to the Governor's pal-tee/ The crowd was attacked by the Governor's Cossacks instead, and Ilya felt the sting of the Czar's knout on his neck and shoulders...
...He learned the sublimest secrets of the Religion of Humanity in that death-house, and he learned another very different thing—to play cards with skill and concentration...
...She had been informed on dark nights by ghostly voices that her child Ilya had a sacred mission in life, and' she believed it...
...g To be sure, when the present war is over.ij the most immediate problem to be solved will) obviously be that of disarming the defeated' countries...
...These weapons cannot be produced in secret...
...I submit that the first members of the supernational police force should be drawn not from the so-called Great Powers, but from the lesser European Powers such as Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, which have always given examples of decent behavior to the big dogs...
...2) No country would be entitled to maintain an airforce, or warships or tanks or heavy artillery of its own...
...system—from pledging themselves now to abide by the rule of arbitration in all their eventual disputes after the present war is over...
...then, our Leader of the People made a clsan jump from a flophouse in Odessa to Yale University...
...No doubt Russia and China would follow suit, and the smaller nations would agree...
...And small arms like guns or machine guns would be of no use against bombers from the air...
...The League of Nations had no police force of its own...
...In California he ran into a small rancher named Johnson who was an intellectual anarchist...
...I wanted to know," he says, "the lowest classes of America...
...Zapata's uprising seemed to he the vd(y thing Ely had been reading about...
...If they took but the pledge of running to the rescue of their neighbors, and even if they kept their pledge in dead earnest, this method would be much more clumsy and inefficient than setting up a specialized police force...
...To begin with, he is not by natural disposition a man to go crazy over pieces of cardboard...
...His father contributed to this devastating burden the admonition that whatever he might decide to be, Whether saint, scientist or revolutionist,-he must be "the greatest on earth...
...weels—is that the major portion of those two years would have been spent in a library...
...It is a fantastic story—the story, in one aspect, of a Prodigal Son, a rich boy raising hell...
...No, he would study history and psychology, and "find out why the Russian masses had no interest in their own liberation...
...It is idle to ask technical committees of generals, admirals and other military experts to find out the means of disarming...
...Instead ot going befit and being a good boy when released at the B-quest of the American consul, he moved to fie East Coast and got involved in another insfi rection, one led by Felix Diaz, against fie moderate republican regime of Madero...
...He speaks - live languages with fluent case, and has attended ;six great universities...
...to a trifle for each nation...
...A large kerosene lamp hung low over the table, and it got hot...
...Instead of going back to a "bourgeois" life when she was murdered, he went to the local chief of the Social Revolutionary Party and volunteered for the assassination of the Governor...
...In-** tellectually Culbertson had hold of a question that Trotsky, like all Marxists, dodged and evaded all his life long—the question of the PSX-r chology of the masses, the question of Socialism and Human Nature...
...He moved to Switzerland and continued his studies in the University at Geneva...
...and joined the revolt...
...If we ourselves, after disarming the vanquished countries, are not willing to disarm ourselves in favor of a supernational, body, we shall never have peace...
...His mother was • passionate and mystical woman—beautiful, he says, "with the moist glistening beauty of leaves after a storm...
...They could now start enlisting volunteers among those officers and privates who are now under the colors of the different United Nations and who would be willing to join the ranks of the police force as soon as the Anglo-American armed occupation has accomplished the immediate, task of occupying and disarming the defeated countries...
...Xall That did wake him up, because he has vivid intuitions about people's unexpressed thoughts He knew the man was a provocateur, and inferred that he himself must be under police surveillance...
...The Black Hundreds, the Czar's vigilantes, instigated a pogrom in his home town of Yekaterinodar, and under cover of the confusion raided the houses of known revolutionists...
...Therefore, supervision to avoid deception would be easy...
...there, wasn't any revolution...
...She sensed his brilliant gifts in infancy, and taught him that he was to be a leader of the people...
...Professional soldiers are persuaded that war is eternal and cannot be avoided...
...We are told day in and day out that the only key to world peace is British-American cooperation...
...He did move over to Berkeley and bury himself for another long five months in books...
...The way these two women embrangled him was by setting him too high and arduous an ideal...
...Bakunin...
...Twenty years later he was playing bridge with Ahphonso XIII as a partner—the king no longer a king and he no longer an anarchist That particular Hummer he spent with his father and brother at Ostend in one of its swankiest hotels...
...We, the civilians, have to solve the problem in our souls...
...At this point, another problem arises...
...Nobody tells as that by dreaming plans and ambitions far beyond immediate realities, while ignoring more modest but managerable tasks, we are escaping our real responsibilities and are aiding and abetting those who want to evade actual and vital issues...
...The behavior of the socialist parties in all conri-tries confirmed his despair of the masses, and he could not find in hin researches the formula that would make future socialisms any mere successful...
...But sooner or later, and the sooner the better, that "super-national" police force ought to be established, if the promises which are being made to us of a better world order, are not rtieant to turn into a dastardly deception...
...That wan hi tJte winter of 1912, when Zapata first broke redo print as the leader of a revolt of the Mexionr, peons...
...The insurrection was a dud, and moreover it was against, not for, td)e people...
...Culbertson began more modestly by trying to get a girl named Nadya to love him...
...A MERICA and Britain should take the initi-ative now...
...Although he could talk little English, he was an American citizen, proud of it from childhood, and the move seemed natural...
...This was not just maternal ambition...
...I doubt whether Ely, even with Nadya's help, would ever have been much of a revolutionist...
...But age, tint, shape and dimensions, were specified very exactly...
...Who will set up the supernational police force ? The answer is at hand, or rather it would be at hand, if the leaders of the Nations which are now fighting Germany, Italy and Japan were willing to do away with the sacred cow of unrestricted "national sovereignty...
...His faith was reinforced by her tenderness, and when that tenderness ripened into love his zeal for the revolution knew no bounds...
...I didn't know things were so bad...
...Strange as it may seem, this pro fessional cardplayer was the first to tarn, as many thoughtful minds are now turning, from economics to psychology to find the causes of the failure of the Russian Devolution...
...In New York, on New Year's Exe of 1921, he confessed to his son that he had applied without success for a job as a night-watchman...
...by this time to his allowance...
...He has a large, or at least a widely spattered, education...
...Instead of going to school, he put on a workman's clothes, and went to iive among the stevedores in Odessa...
...That should have taught him something about anarchism, which is at bottom a prtmidjlr belief in salvation through the magic ritefif insurrection...
...His zeal in acquiring this knowledge did not, however, prevent him from enjoying a poker game whenever one could be contrived...
...A ST) yet there was more to it than that...
...This Would be a "supernational" police force at the service of a "supernational" body, the new League of Nations...
...Let me repeat that nothing but prejudice and unwillingness prevents such a plan from being immediately announced and put into operation...
...to live with them as they lived...
...Portrait ^ITH the final formulation of the Culbertson system for world peace and federation, the grand slam has been introduced onto the table of world politics snd history...
...After ihc storm had passed, while he crouched bleeding in a harrow alley, Nadya appeared out of nowhere' and wiped his wounds...
...out as a cripple and begging in the streets...
...Father," he said...
...And Vice-President Wallace in an address last December said: "Possibility of enforcing peace upon the world by air power, * consisting of adequate numbers of planes and strategically located bases, will make the task an easier one that might otherwise be impossible...
...In batting around the world, flirting promiscuously with strikes and insurrections, he was driven not only by a thirst like the hard drinker's for a big quaff of life—partly that, but partly by the demor of this question: What is the flaw in all th* talk of revolutionists, no matter of what schont or party, about "the masses" ? Why do tS masses always fail them, or they fail the masses ? * Accordingly, after a summer as a gay gentftj-man at Ostend, Ely entered the School of Economic and Political Sciences in Paris, and went seriously to work on the theoiy of government the history of socialism, and the new science, then much talked about, of "mass psychology...
...At least he thinks so now —and they fell in love...
...On the whole ha- made more money that way than he did working...
...A spoiled and precocious child, endowed to bewilderment with both intellect and passion, hounded through life by an ideal, struggling fitfully to excel the greatest philosophers, gam-Whig in the interludes, he was swept finally into the card business by/a mere wind of chance...
...After four months of trying to keep awake in classrooms, always a hard job for boys accustomed to a private tutor he turned over his allowance to his brother ($125 a month spending money) and departed for the Bowery...
...He cherished too exalted—or too perverse —a desire to see more...
...They {establish a police force entrusted with the task df keeping in his senses anyone who encroaches on the rights of his neighbor...
...I.do not mean that there was anything halfhearted about that career...
...system from forming now the first nucleus of the supernational police force...
...His ¦ eyes and-brow are fine, but he has a childlike voice, and his nose is just like the one you put in a jack-lantern...
...At the end of a year his work was interrupts* by the First World War, which he reeoBae against and hated...
...An international air force could reach the most remote corners of the world and could strike at any who sought to break the peace for their own advantage...
...Here is the highest price we must pay for peace...
...He was blissfully happy with that exciting life and Nadya, and fairly sure that he was going to be "the greatest revolutionist on earth...
...He may well live in history, if history lives, as the first man who ever had the directness and audacity of imagination to draw up a complete, detailed, informed, circumspect, and not in the least fantastic, system of World Federation...
...And since everybody would manage to reach the same goal, they would never agree...
...Kropotkin, the great anSf-chist classics, almost by heart...
...His brother found him there, and persuaded him to come to the big hotel and clear, up...
...He iearado Proudhon...
...Notwithstanding these precautions he got 820 replies...
...since he could not find an ideal companion, to create one...
...He spent the next three years fulfilling that program...
...To enforce peace in the new world order a police force will be indispensable...
...He had lost his mother now as well as Nadya, and in a sense he was seeking them both.- Briefly his idea was...
...There have been few theoretical creations in social science like it...
...But there is as much pathos as humor in what he did...
...AT the age of 17...
...But that was in 1907, just when a triumphant leaction was drenching Russia with blood...
...Conceivably you could hitch his brain, his ever-present ego, and his faculty for focussing emotion, on to almost anything, and he would disappear from all other haunts of effort or amusement and turn up at the end of two years, gaunt and pale as Dante in exile, with dark rings under his eyes, and with a SYSTEM for doing it better than it was ever done before...
...He seems a sort of accidental or detachable fanatic...
...Nobody tells us that we should be content with as little as we can get now, but we must be determined to get that little now at any cost and leave something for our children and our grandchildren to do...
...No workingman would listen to him when he talked of that far-off divine event He decided then, under his brother's persuasion, to go abroad and study—but not to abandon his religion...
...But he was still "consecrated"—or else he did not like to quit under fire...
...It is almost a tradition in Russia, when losinff faith in revolution, to fall back on sex-adventure...
...Spinoza corralled the whole universe with his system, or tried to...
...It was twenty-five years before the card-playing supplanted the religion in his heart, and its triumph was never secure...
...Agon he almost lost his life, this time in a atrfit fight—and for nothing...
...He thought he was pursuing the knowledge of the masses, and of the "way out" for the revolution...
...We are confronted here not with a technical but with a moral, nay religious problem...
...Cm this point wide agreement seems to exist in Britain and America...
...he laughingly calls it...
...i To answer this question, let us see what do ! men and women do when they renounce a share j of their personal liberty, and pledge themselves | not to resort to violence but to go before | courts of justice to settle their quarrels...
...Nay more, there are organizations which advocate a world government with a constitution which is being defined with pedantic care in all its details, niceties and minutiae...
...The basic obstacle is in our minds and not in any objective difficulty...
...And then we have to tell the military experts that they are expected to go home with good pensions, with all possible honors, but with no political powers...
...Until such time, then, as we are prepared to put first things first, let us stop talking cant about the Anglo-American union, 'the New World Order, the Four Freedoms of Roosevelt, the Eight Points of the Atlantic Charter and all the other pointless poiats with which we are afflicted, day In and day out...
...But it did not teach him mufi...
...In Edmonton he got lured into a game in an upstairs room where the door was locked, and four hard-faced gentlemen took their places behind the chairs, making it plain to the suckers that they were to lose their rolls with a good grace, and walk out politely...
...A spontaneous revolt would occur, and men would just stop trying to rule over each other and become brothers...
...He can talk as interestingly about Spinoza or Karl Marx as about contract bridge...
...Culbertson is very Russian in his ravenous love of books, and the intensity with which he lives the life of ideas...
...More accurately, it was the Russian Bolshevik revolution which confiscated his immense inheritance, left an ageing father and a full set of destitute relatives on his hands, and compelled him to make a profession of what had been a vice...
...Once more his American paga-port saved him from death...
...This plan would act as an efficient weapon in our political warfare against the Axis Powers, in so far as it would arouse among their populations hopes for a better future, hatred for their present misery, and the urge to break away from their leaders...
...I never played bridge, and I have moreover-an irrational prejudice against bridge fiends, but this more serious achievement having brought me into friendly relations .with the arch-fiend, I want to report my impressions of his extraordinary Hfe and character...
...And she, I think, more than anybody else after his mother, was responsible for the mess he made of his early life...
...Their task is making war and preparing for war...
...Germany's, Italy's and Japan's sea' and air forces, tanks and artillery must be surrendered.- The armed forces of the Allied Nations, among which those of Britain and America are bound to be foremost in Europe, will have instantly to get hold of the strategical key positions of Germany and other Nazi vassal countries, thus doing away with their "sovereignty," and they will have to remain there until the "supernational" police force is in readiness to take their place...
...Nadya fell in love with him in spite of his system...
...Yet nobody starts' a campaign to tell us that Britain and America should vow permanently pledge themselves to arbitrate all their disputes: that they should set up now a first nucleus of the police force for peace...
...and he was captivated by the mystic sweetness of the anarchist doctrine...
...Like all the dreamers of a better worm he was pretty well heart-broken by the war...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 8
