The Eagle and the Roots E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Louis Adamic’s last book: a brilliant account of Tito and Yugoslavia. Here is a first hand report on Yugoslavia, combined with a detailed biographical account of Marshall Tito, leader of the country.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1952

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Dedication

The eagles are gone: crows and daws, crows and daws…

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Troilus and Cressida, I, ii

Foreword

Because of the author’s death, the final work on this book was done by the undersigned. The editing consisted of cutting about a third of the text, along lines the author had suggested or we were reasonably certain he would have followed. No other changes were made. The body of the work is as the author wrote it, except for the following cuts:

one long chapter describing the world situation. It had grown to such proportions that the author came to the reluctant conclusion that it would have to be published separately;

a chapter about Old Yugoslavia, describing conditions that led to the revolution. This material is covered implicitly and explicitly in the rest of the book and in two of the author’s earlier works on Yugoslavia—The Native’s Return and My Native Land;

a final chapter which repeated ground already covered and which would not have appeared in its original form in any event;

routine tightening and minor deletions: footnotes, asides, references, and restatements that impeded the flow of the story.

The author often mentioned how much he appreciated the sympathetic patience and encouragement of Bucklin Moon, his first editor, at Doubleday.

STELLA ADAMIC

TIMOTHY SELDES

§

To begin with—

A TRIP WITHOUT ITINERARY… BUT OF COURSE

I MEANT TO GO TO YUGOSLAVIA

I think there is fatality in it—

I seldom go to a place I set out for.

—LAURENCE STERNE A sentimental Journey

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1

I really wanted to go to Russia first, but—

In mid-Autumn of 1948, as the Truman-Wallace-Dewey contest for the Presidency of the United States whirled to a startling climax, I found myself free to decide that I would spend as much of 1949 abroad as my exchequer and other circumstances allowed: five to ten months. I was not thinking of writing a book directly on the trip.

For a decade, off and on, I had been tossing about in my mind the idea for a narrative to be entitled “The Education of Michael Novak” (with apologies to Henry Adams) in which I would deal with aspects of the American and the world scene during the first half of the twentieth century from the point of view of a “successful” American who came to the United States in the 1890’s as an immigrant from tiny Slovenia, then a part of Austria, later of Yugoslavia. And, beginning in 1946, I occasionally felt that I was about ready to settle down to the two- or three-year work—but I kept postponing it.

In a talk at the Unitarian Church in Orange, New Jersey, in January 1947, I said: “Whether or not we can avoid World War III, I don’t know; but I feel that if we don’t at least try to avoid it, nothing else is worth doing. If we don’t try to avoid it, it is vain to wonder about the kind of curtains you will hang up in the spring. It may be pointless to write books or to read those already in print, except perhaps Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which I lately re-read and found to be a prophecy of the present moment. In that book, a character called Father Mapple says in the course of a thundering sermon: ‘…Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation…’ If we don’t try to avoid World War III, it is ludicrous to worry about being called a Red, a Communist, or whatever; or about being hauled up before the Committee on Un-American Activities. If you’re not doing anything to try to prevent another war, it may be futile to work at your job and worry about keeping on the good side of whoever can take the job away from you…”

Now, late in 1948, when a majority of less than 49 per cent of the total of qualified American voters who went to the trouble of going to the polls decided—tentatively, at least—in favor of a “Welfare State” domestic program which called for full employment, good wages, and price supports for farm products, but which was rabidly anti-communistic, anti-socialistic, and which, as such, I thought, could be partly and temporarily realized only in conjunction with a war crisis; when a preponderance of Americans were said to believe that World War III was inevitable sooner or later; and when most of the “experts” scheduled it to break out sometime between 1952 and ’55; now, it seemed to me that before I did anything else I wanted a look around to see if I could determine for myself, from direct contacts and impressions, where we were.

Not naturally a defeatist, I wished to get rid of my growing disposition to say “Yes” to the question John Dos Passos asked in 1916: “Are we not men crouching on a runaway engine?”

Naturally an optimist, I found no satisfaction in regarding as near-accurate Henry Adams’ prevision in 1901 of events at the midpoint of the twentieth century: “All we can say is that, at the rate of increase of speed and momentum, as calculated on the [basis of Industrial-Revolutionary developments of the] last fifty years, the present society must break its damn neck in… not exceeding fifty years more… If anyone told me that there is going to be Hell to pay all around, I should not care to contradict him.”

However, if I understood my state of mind and feelings, it was not so much fear of our using the A-bomb or being devastated by it at some darkly hovering date, as revulsion at the cowardice, the informing, the fear, the telephone-tapping, the knuckling-under to intimidation, the hoodlum mentality, “the fix,” that evidently had begun to creep into, if not to dominate, American life. For example: in the spring of 1948 I learned that the twenty-year-old son of a friend of mine, a university student whom I had considered a fine, intelligent young man, was spending much of his spare time in the campus book-store, not really browsing but keeping tabs on professors and students who tended to pick up a “leftist” book or magazine before a “rightist” one.

When I decided on the trip, I had no itinerary—only some ideas of where I wished to go and what I wished to do.

Of course I meant to go to Yugoslavia if the State Department permitted it. (With few exceptions, American passports issued during 1947-49 contained a rubber-stamped invalidation for entry into Yugoslavia on the grounds that the country was unsafe for United States citizens.)

My mother had written me. She was seventy-three and not likely to get younger: When was I coming? I wanted to see, too, what war and revolution had done to my native land. I expected to meet Tito and some of the other new leaders there. I was more curious about than interested in the Cominform-Tito “rift,” as it was called then. Late in 1948, four or five months after it burst into the headlines, it did not seem the most weighty business under the sun. I thought it was a mix-up of some kind, a stupid mistake or a piece of rascality, or a combination of the two: one of many such combinations rattling about the globe, each justifying itself with the others. But I wouldn’t spend more than six or seven weeks in Yugoslavia, and I didn’t care very much if they came at the start or at the end of my trip—except that, pushing fifty, I was a bit tired and I figured that a short rest in a skiers’ or mountain-climbers’ lodge na Gorenjskem, in the Slovenian Upland, might be pleasant to start with.

India interested me and Israel. Italy drew me too. But more than at any other place I wanted a peek at the “one-sixth of the globe” generally regarded as the second greatest power in the world.

In mid-December 1948—when my visa-seeking letter to Ambassador Alexander Panyushkin of two weeks earlier was still unanswered—I went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Two men in their late thirties received me and for an hour and a half exerted their talents to find out my political coloring and particularly my attitude toward the Soviet Union and the Cominform-Tito split, then in its sixth month but outwardly still fairly quiescent if compared to what it became in 1949-50.

In reply to their first question about my thoughts on the split, I told the Soviet attachés that I was more puzzled by it now than I had been by the first headlines at the end of June and early in July 1948—an article I had written in the New York Star then did not make sense to me any more. Lately I had tried to pry loose information from Yugoslav representatives in the United States, but they either couldn’t or didn’t wish to give it. And I had no idea how much I would learn from Tito or anyone else in Yugoslavia when I got there. Maybe no one in Yugoslavia would talk about it either.

Several times during the conversation I said that to satisfy my curiosity about the Cominform-Tito disagreement was only a fraction of my pursuit. The over-all purpose of my trip was to see if a non-official person could do anything, if I could presume to think I could do anything as a writer, to help prevent another war. Peace, I emphasized, was my chief concern; everything else I considered worthwhile pivoted on it. If the Cominform-Tito break was a digit in the war-or-peace calculation, I wanted to learn all I could about it. Was it? No answer. Was it a by-product of the “cold war”? No answer.

One of the attachés asked pointedly why I wished to go to the Soviet Union first. I said because in the making of peace the USSR’s responsibility was about equal to America’s. How long did I wish to stay? Six, seven weeks, or longer; I had no schedule. What did I wish to see? Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, the Volga; a collective farm, a village or two, a factory or two; and one of the Asian republics, say Uzbek or Tajik. Why Uzbek or Tajik? I wanted a first-hand impression of the Soviet federal system: how it handled the nationality or minority problem.

Apropos of war-or-peace, I said, what interested me very much was the idea, which cropped up every once in a while between blasts of the “cold war,” that the American and the Soviet systems could coexist peaceably until one or the other gradually won out in the practical side of the mind of the world; or, more likely, until the churning of forces within these systems and the passage of time rubbed them both to a compromise. Was anyone of consequence in Russia mulling over if and how coexistence could become a basis of relations, at least of a modus vivendi, between the United States and the Soviet Union? If so, could we discuss it?

One attaché smiled briefly, the other remained deadpan. Every now and then in the course of the increasingly unpleasant interview they exchanged remarks in very rapid Russian which I understood imperfectly. One such exchange had to do with “Marxism-Leninism”—that I evidently was unversed in it.

Suddenly—Did I not wish to go to China also? Of course, but, with the revolution in full swing there, how could I get in? Who gave visas to the Communist territory? Or wasn’t a regular visa required? No answer.

If I got the Soviet visa, I said, would someone in Moscow confirm or reject, partly or wholly, my tentative notion that the difficulties between the USA and the USSR were less ideological than big-power? Would anyone in Moscow care to discuss the idea which I shared with a number of other Americans, that the center of the trouble between the two great powers and in the world generally was not so much the Russian Revolution versus the American Way of Life as the whole vast Unbalance brought on by the Industrial Revolution—backwardness versus modern technology?[1] The attachés stared at me with wooden uninterest, or so it seemed to me. By-and-by one of them looked at the other, smiling uncertainly.

For Christmas in 1944, when the end of World War II was in sight, I received a book—The Superpowers by W. T. R. Fox, a conservative political scientist at Columbia University—in which I marked the passages on the possibilities of friendly, or at least warless, relations between America and Russia after their mutual military victory against the Fascist Axis, and on how the USA might act to make those possibilities a basis of its policies toward the USSR: “As between the risk of acting as if the Soviet Union will be a trustworthy partner in maintaining peace and the risk of acting as if it will not,” wrote Dr. Fox, “the lesser risk is clearly that based on expectation of Soviet good faith… If we assume faith in the motives and integrity of the Soviet government there is a good chance of agreement upon a common program of Soviet-Anglo-American leadership in peace as in war.” Without attempting to give the attachés the gist of these and similar sentences, I inquired if they knew the book. One of them asked if it was an anti-Soviet book. I said no; it was, rather, a typical American scholarly study, aiming to be objective, fair, constructive.

Whom did I represent? Nobody. With whom was I connected? Nobody. Along with such people as Eleanor Roosevelt, Jo Davidson, Harlow Shapley, Lillian Hellman, Bartley Crum, and Corliss Lamont I was—or had been—on the sponsor lists of numerous transient committees but I was not actively “connected” with any of them; in fact, I partly or largely disapproved of many of them as they showed themselves in practice. I was making the trip on my own behalf as a free-lance writer bent on clarifying my thinking if I could.

Silence. Then, a bit hesitantly: What was I politically? I laughed; then, sloughing off a reaction that it was none of their business, I decided to give them as detailed an answer as their side of the conversation would take. I said I had voted for Bob LaFollette in 1924, for A1 Smith in ’28, for nobody in ’32 because I was out of the country, then for Franklin Roosevelt three times, but I would have voted for Wendell Willkie in ’44, had he lived and been a candidate. In ’46 I had voted for H. Alexander Smith, a Republican, for United States Senator from New Jersey, because I thought Mr. Smith was a better man than his Democratic opponent. In ’48, I went on, I joined Henry Wallace’s movement because now, after Willkie’s death, he alone among prominent American political figures appeared to know, and was saying out loud, that lasting peace could be achieved by attending to the inequalities among the peoples owing to the Industrial Revolution; and that at least half of the responsibility for initiative in that direction was America’s. But this too, I put in after a pause, was a temporary affiliation.

What did I think of Mr. Wallace? Somewhat evasively, I said he was a well-meaning man, in many respects a typical American: independent, unpredictable, incongruous in his ideas, apt to produce effects other than he and his supporters desired. Why did he come out so poorly in the election? I said I didn’t think he came out so poorly, but unless they had an hour or so to spare I’d rather not go into it.

Was I a liberal? Overcoming another twinge of resentment at this interrogation, I said I had been called that, but I disliked labels which had various meanings for various people. I objected least to being called a radical in the classical sense of going to the root of issues, or a leftist in the classical sense of favoring general welfare, as the American and Soviet constitutions favored it. I had been labeled an American nationalist. I might, with some justice, also be called a conservative in the sense that I believed steps on the path of progress, or the desire for change, must include a concern and a plan for the preservation of human gains up to now; otherwise, as someone had said, “progress” was only an exchange of one nuisance for another. None of this evoked any comment from the Soviet officials. But, while vocally unresponsive, they looked very much interested.

As for Communism, that was a vast subject; but, briefly and roughly, my views on it at this time (in 1948) were as follows: Aspiration to a system called Communism was a massive fact in the twentieth century. The stimulus for this aspiration derived in large part and most immediately from the Industrial Revolution, from capitalism. Like everything else under the sun, as an ideology and a practice, as a way of life, Communism was evolving under the influence of its environment. Capitalism—in so far as it still existed and enjoyed popular support (mainly in the United States)—was an important phase of that environment. If capitalist America continued to fight the aspiration to Communism of large numbers of people in some of the little-developed and crowded regions and continents, it would be one kind of Communism; if, on the other hand, the American people recognized that aspiration as a groping drive to catch up with and share the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, and worked out a policy to help it along, it would be another kind of Communism. Conversely, I said, the American system and the American people were under the influence of their environment, in which the upsurge of the World Communist Movement was a paramount factor; and the formation in the years ahead of the American political mood and character would depend, to no slight extent, on the manner and methods of the World Communist Movement. Did they agree? Disagree? Their wordless smiles lamed the rest of my thought: that the Russians could help develop a favorable mood in America, thus helping her to understand them, by recognizing her special background and aspirations.

I broke the long pause by expressing a wish to see Ambassador Panyushkin. Sorry, the Ambassador was ill. I could return in a week or ten days: Could I hope to see the Ambassador then? No answer.

One attaché asked if I had ever written anything about the Soviet Union. No, not about the Soviet Union as a scene, a state, or a social system. How could I? I had never been there. But occasionally I had referred to Soviet Russia, basing what I wrote on what I had read. Favorably or unfavorably? Both, I said, but of late mostly favorably: this, in part, because nearly everybody else in America was riding Russia as the source of all evil. The last two or three years I had written and lectured on Soviet-American tension, maintaining that if we were to avoid a new military war we ought to cease the “cold war.” I had been stressing the need for continual friendly reciprocity. I agreed with E. C. Ropes, former chief of the USSR Division, Office of International Trade, United States Department of Commerce, that the two great countries, with their tremendous resources, needed each other. Were they aware of Mr. Ropes’ views? That he had published them in a Wall Street magazine (Dun’sReview, May, 1947)? They looked at me wide-eyed. No answer.

Then another question: What did I think, whose fault was the tension, as I called it, between the Soviet Union and the United States? I replied that efforts to fix the blame could only lead to greater tension. An attempt to press me to say who I thought was at fault in the “cold war” led me to remark that, of course, if I thought the “fault” was America’s, I wouldn’t say so in a Soviet embassy any more than I would expect them to say the opposite in an American embassy. The attachés stiffened.

Trying to provoke them into some kind of spontaneous remark, I continued that as a writer and lecturer I believed Americans and Russians should cease writing and talking mostly of their own best qualities and the others’ worst. From the Marxian vantage point, I admitted, this might be sheer utopianism, but I felt we should begin to notice each other’s virtues and give our minds a chance to come to grips with the core of the human problem, a big part of which was in the unequal distribution of technological equipment and know-how, in the disparity of our production abilities, in the fact that between half and two-thirds of the world’s population had no idea how it felt to have a full stomach, and in the possibility that the future lay not in rivalry between drives to domination and uniformity but in mutual help for aspirations to freedom and the tendency to diversity in economics and culture. If they wished, I would gladly send them copies of my articles and lectures in which I had tried to develop these views. No answer.

Early in 1947 the Bolshevik, the theoretical organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had published an eight-page review of my book Dinner at the WhiteHouse, summarizing its contents, praising it mildly, and disagreeing in restrained language with its implication that the United States was not naturally and inevitably imperialist, certainly not in the British, Dutch, Belgian, and French or German and Japanese sense. Would the Bolshevik review weigh in favor of my receiving a visa? No answer.

“I’m not getting anywhere,” I thought.

By-and-by one of the attachés smiled. Wasn’t I afraid of being summoned before the Committee on Un-American Activities if I went to the USSR? No. Why should I be afraid? That committee—then headed by Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, representing the New Jersey district where I lived, but about to go to prison for defrauding the United States Government—already had me down as a subversive. Didn’t that worry me? Not especially, I said; “subversion” was a relative matter; in the United States—and, it wouldn’t surprise me, elsewhere—everybody who was at least half alive was subversive in one way or another. Didn’t I think the Committee on Un-American Activities was very powerful? Seemingly, right now, yes; actually, in the long run, no; or at least I hoped not alongside of America’s sound qualities, traditions, and institutions, most of which derived from past “subversion” but were now obscured by the hysteria which the Un-American Activities Committee, aided by events abroad (I almost said “aided by Soviet behavior, especially by Mr. Vishinky’s speeches”), was helping to generate.

Partly to crack the ensuing pause but mostly for the hell of it, I added that my ambition was to be a free man, and I was coming to the realization that, in a period like the present, one could enjoy freedom—in relation to his environment and within himself—only if one did not give a hoot what anybody thought of him, or what happened to him. This, I hastened to explain, was not intellectual heroics. It was simply that I felt I could not afford to be afraid or to worry about Congressman Thomas’ notions of me, or what might become of me professionally. No comment. In the following silence Thoreau popped into my mind, as did my top-sergeant in the United States Army during the First World War whose motto was “To hell with ’em all but six—save ’em for pallbearers.”

But the strange and pressing importance of Tito! Time and again, one or the other attaché swung the conversation back to him. Had I read the Cominform resolution condemning him and his clique? Yes, also the Yugoslav retorts. Which did I believe? Suppressing the thought which had occurred to me months before, that neither the resolution nor the retorts were convincing, I answered that I didn’t know enough to say.

What did I think, asked one of the attachés, why was the State Department suddenly ready to unfreeze the Yugoslav gold and eager to give Tito a loan? I recalled a recent news item that, according to a State Department spokesman, an old Yugoslav application for a loan was being dusted off by the Export-Import Bank. Well, why not? Hadn’t Czechoslovakia asked for American loans too? Hadn’t Poland obtained a loan of ninety millions (with the aid of a big Washington law firm which had close State Department connections and was paid a fee of fifty thousand dollars)? Hadn’t Moscow itself sought, or was it not still seeking, a two-billion-dollar credit arrangement with Washington? Why shouldn’t America unfreeze the gold which belonged to Yugoslavia? It should have been unfrozen long ago.

That, averred the Soviet interrogator sternly, was not the point. The point was: Why was the State Department now—suddenly—anxious to improve relations with Tito, to do business with him?

I quoted a remark by Disraeli before he became Prime Minister: that international affairs were seldom what they seemed to be; he never believed anything about them until the Foreign Office denied it twice. I thought this was mildly funny but the attachés didn’t think so. Neither cracked a smile, and I was stabbed by an odd feeling—a mixture of disappointment and resentment.

After a pause, deciding to answer the question, I said I could guess the State Department’s motive to improve relations with Tito had to do with the “cold war,” taking advantage of the Cominform rift. And I was sorry about that. I favored good relations among all countries and peoples: between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, between the United States and the Soviet Union, between the United States and Yugoslavia, between Yugoslavia and Guatemala. I had long felt that, with or without ideological admixtures, power politics would play havoc with the world someday. But now, trying to think within the jagged frame of things-as-they-looked-to-me, I couldn’t bemoan the prospect of a bettering of American-Yugoslav relations, or of a loan to Yugoslavia—“we’re throwing billions around anyway.” I said the loan idea was all to the good even if it came in the wake of the Cominform break. I knew how greatly the break disturbed the Yugoslavs. The ones I saw recently in New York and Washington were deeply pained: I could tell by the way they looked when I pressed them with questions.

I was going to add my impression that Tito’s representatives at Lake Success and in Washington probably had instructions from Belgrade to say as little about the rift as possible, lest they help make it worse, but I didn’t. Righteous pleasure radiating from their faces, the Soviet attachés looked like a couple of simultaneously fanatical and smug religionists hearing about sinners hurtling to hell.

For a moment I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Russia. Then I thought of course I did—more than ever. Was Tito a part of the x in the peace-war equation? Maybe the Cominform story needed looking into more than I was able to imagine, and a part of it doubtless was to be learned only in Russia—if someone there would talk to me.

I had talked too much, too frankly, too naïvely. To get a visa, I should have tried to make these fellows think I was anti-Tito and opposed to the State Department’s current inclination to improve American-Yugoslav relations. Too late now, though. I should have tried to cash in on my crimson reputation with the Committee on Un-American Activities. But that might not have worked either.

I was glad when the attachés rose. One of them said my visa request would be referred to Moscow; when they received a reply, they would inform me. When did they think a reply might come? The attaché’s shoulders went up in a slow, heavy shrug. Would they cable Moscow? No answer. I picked up my hat and coat, and said I would be glad to pay for any cables. I meant to be off on my trip in about a month; if I heard from them within three weeks, it would give me time to arrange my transportation to Russia first.

We stood in silence awhile… Well, thank you. Goodbye.

“What a hell of a way to make friends and influence people,” I thought, walking back to my hotel. “The damfools! But maybe they can’t help themselves. Or don’t the Russians want to make friends as a matter of policy? Maybe the Kremlin feels it thrives on animosity, even on the danger of another war. Is the Kremlin crazy enough to want World War III? Or does it really think it inevitable according to the Marxian analysis as Jehovah Witnesses believe it is inevitable according to the Old Testament, or as the capitalistic Marxians-in-reverse hold it is inevitable simply because they want to see Communism destroyed?

“I probably handled myself even worse than I think I did. I should have lied.”

Thinking over the interview, I went back five weeks, to November 7, 1948. In response to an engraved black-and-gold invitation, I had gone to Washington to attend the reception at the Soviet Embassy celebrating the thirty-first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. There were a half-dozen or so high-ranking American generals and admirals I recognized, and perhaps a dozen leftists, three or four who I was next to certain were card-carrying Communists; and I was vaguely uneasy. I stayed at the reception celebrating the Russian Revolution less than an hour, partook of none of the food and drink on the endless tables (partly because I didn’t care to push my way through the great crowd to them), and caught an early evening train back to Trenton. In the car I entered was Henry Wallace with two New York leaders of the Progressive Party who I knew were non-Communist verging on anti-Communist. They invited me to sit with them. As the press and radio reported it the next day, Wallace and several of his prominent campaign workers had attended the affair as an anti-war gesture. Now the man next to Wallace, opposite me, was voicing a complaint against the Russian manner. Why were all the officials, from the Ambassador on down, so stiff, so cold? Who wanted all that damn caviar and sturgeon, champagne and vodka, if you couldn’t get a smile and a genuinely open remark from the hosts? And come to think of it, said the man by the window directly opposite Wallace, why did they bar a man like George Seldes[2] from the Soviet Union? How were we to find out what was going on there? What was going on there? Did they expect us (American liberals or progressives) to be friends of the Soviet Union sight unseen and no questions asked? What did they take us for?…

Wallace was looking out at the lights along the way, and I couldn’t tell whether he was listening or not. When the complainants fell silent, he turned and remarked, slowly, with the curiously unnatural smile I had noticed a few times before, that it wasn’t easy to be a friend of the Soviet Union: official Russians did very little to help one understand their country, to make one feel they really wanted good relations or believed lasting peace possible…

This was a factor in my wanting to visit the USSR first and foremost, even before Yugoslavia.

I got a passport with which I could enter any country that would give me a visa, including Yugoslavia.

On January 5, 1949, I telephoned the Soviet Embassy in Washington. A gritty voice, which I thought belonged to neither of the two attachés, clipped off the information that there was no word for me yet. What were the chances of my getting a visa? I was asked to hold the line a moment. I held it for three or four minutes. Then I was told again that there was no word for me yet. If word came in the near future, I said, would they please write me, or telegraph? They had my home address; their message would be forwarded.

On January eleventh I boarded a plane at LaGuardia Field and reached Belgrade via London and Prague in twenty-one flying hours. The smooth above-the-weather, non-stop flight over the Atlantic was a triumph of the Industrial Revolution, a miracle of the Machine Age: a sharp contrast to my first impression of Belgrade, where “brigades” of citizens, young and old, many of them ill clad and ill shod in near zero weather, equipped only with hand shovels—with not a single snow-removing machine in sight—were beginning to “attack” the three-foot snow that had fallen on northeastern Yugoslavia the preceding two days.

While in Yugoslavia in 1932-33, I had met a couple of Slovenian students in their earliest twenties: Edvard Kardelj and Boris Kidric. Now, in New Yugoslavia, Kardelj was Vice-Premier and Foreign Minister; and Kidric, as Chairman of the Federal Economic Council and the State Planning Commission, was in direct charge of the Five-Year Plan, of the whole national economy. Still in their thirties, both were members of the Politburo, the nine-man directorate of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia—the CPY—the revolutionary party in power.

Back in 1932-33, Kidric, whom I met several times, made more of an impression on me than Kardelj, whom I saw only twice, briefly. Unlike the ultra-dynamic Kidric, with his almost Da Vincian range of interests, Kardelj was a slight, frail chap with a subdued manner. He was just out of prison. Before he was sentenced to a two-year term for revolutionary activity against King Alexander’s dictatorship, he had been beaten and tortured in the royal secret-political-police headquarters both in his native city of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and in Belgrade. Except for a letter from Kidric in 1934, about a year after my return to the United States, I had had no contact with either of the young men. Neither is mentioned in The Native’s Return, published in 1934, for I never thought they would play leading roles in the Yugoslav revolution which appeared to me likely if not inevitable. But in My Native Land, published in 1943, Kidric occupies a good deal of space, because his name kept recurring in the information I was receiving from embattled Yugoslavia. Kardelj had just about slipped from my memory.

Early in 1945 Yugoslav representatives began to come to America for the United Nations meetings. Several were dogmatic, omniscient, smug “Marxians” whose notions of America stemmed from The Daily Worker. Their minds and feelings were pinned to a fixed idea. They wore blinders. They were appalled when I suggested they read The Wall Street Journal, and shook their heads at my unawareness that a new depression, which would kick off a revolution, was imminent. Others I liked a lot.

Among the latter was a young Serbian giant named Vlado Dedijer. He had lived in the United States briefly in 1931—long enough to learn English and win the ping-pong championship at the Lynn, Mass., Y.M.C.A.—and then been a correspondent of a Belgrade newspaper in London for a while. I had heard of him before. In March 1945 he came to America as a Yugoslav delegate to the First United Nations Conference in San Francisco. He told me about his brother, Stevo Dedijer, a Princeton graduate who had been a paratrooper in the United States Army. Before Vlado went to the Coast, I showed him around New York and Washington a little. He was impressed by the Jefferson Memorial, especially by the text of the four panels inside. (One panel reads: “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”) “Why, that’s good historic dialectic!” Vlado exclaimed.

There was another young colossus, Vladimir Popovic, a Montenegrin with an open-faced smile. He was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Tito’s first ambassador to Moscow. He asked searching questions about America.

There was Ales Bebler, a slim, young Slovenian who had learned English while he was a captain attached to the headquarters unit of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Like Popovic and like Dedijer, he openly admired many phases of American life which somehow existed despite the lamentable fact that the United States was professedly as unsocialistic as any country in the world.

All three were Communists from their early youth, figures in the Yugoslav Revolution, personal friends of Tito’s and Kardelj’s. (They became well known to those following the United Nations meetings. In January 1950 Ales Bebler was made Yugoslavia’s delegate to the United Nations Security Council at Lake Success. In May 1950 Vladimir Popovic came to Washington as the Yugoslav Ambassador to the United States.)

Every once in a while during 1945-47 Dedijer, Bebler, Popovic, and others whom I met asked me when I would revisit Yugoslavia. I said I did not know, but I would eventually, of course. Early in 1946 my brother France wrote me that people in Yugoslavia were wondering why I didn’t come: Was I angry? I didn’t explain that I was afraid the new setup there might tempt me to write another book on Yugoslavia: I felt two were enough. Nor did I explain that my heart and mind were riveted on the United States, the chief base of the Industrial Revolution and, as such, the world’s greatest power, just beginning to assume its role and apt to bungle it. Traditionally isolationist, inexperienced in international affairs, inclined to be self-righteous, America might blunder more than was safe for world peace and her security. At times during 1945-46, as well as later, I hardly knew what I meant by “America” in this context. Clearly, while events moved at supersonic speed, the American people had little if anything to do with shaping the foreign policy of the United States. That was the function of small groups in strategic positions and of purposeful individuals with easy access to those groups. Propaganda, whose main ingredient was real or make-believe fear of Communism in Russia, was the chief means used by these policymakers. The military were coming to the top in domestic and foreign affairs. Some of the big financial interests, particularly those based on adventurous, unstable “new capital” and bedeviled by day-to-day urgencies, were out for a quick killing at home and abroad, and to blazes with the consequences. Leaders of organized labor tended more and more to follow the propaganda line and go along with the big interests. With their day-to-day mentality, intimately linked to the financial-industrial superstructure of American culture, they could do nothing else. Subversive elements were in control of government departments. They disguised their aims and maintained their position, in part, by branding harmless individuals and groups subversive. Some of the State Department personnel was homosexual; much of it was under subtle British and Vatican influence if not control. And there, like the great white whale in Moby Dick, loomed Red Russia! Was she really Red? Or primarily a great power, as inexperienced as America, and undeveloped and primitive to boot? Was it intelligent for Americans to attribute to her, to the Kremlin, everything that was bad under the sun, as the monomaniacal Captain Ahab attributes all evil to the whale (“that inscrutable thing”) he hates and madly pursues to his own destruction? Wasn’t Russia “white” too? Was D. H. Lawrence’s analysis of Moby Dick right? That the strange voyage of the whaling ship was symbolic of the disasterward impulse of “the Great White Soul” at odds with itself? I was not indifferent to Yugoslavia, I could hardly be, but her future, also, depended on a lasting peace, which to me was largely a matter between America and Russia.

Much as I wanted to go to Russia first, there were moments early in January 1949, just before I left the United States, when I was almost glad the Soviet visa hadn’t come through yet. I hoped it wouldn’t until some time late in February, or until after I reapplied for it in March or April when I reached Czechoslovakia or Poland. As I say, I was tired, and I cabled my brother France in Ljubljana, who was director of Slovenija Vino (the wine trust of the People’s Republic of Slovenia), to reserve a room for me for two or three weeks at a lodge in the Slovenian Upland, and to meet me at the Zemun (Belgrade) airport if he could. I thought he might help me get oriented and expedite my proceeding to Slovenia, for I had heard transportation was extremely tight in Yugoslavia.

France came to the airport, but I didn’t see him at once. A crowd of men stood against a high bank of snow, waiting, their faces partly obscured by their breath in the cold air. I recognized three: Vlado Dedijer, Ales Bebler, and Boris Kidric. They grinned broadly, pressed my hand and pumped my arm, speaking words of welcome I couldn’t hear for the propeller whir still in my ears. Others in the group were representatives of writers’, journalists’, and artists’ organizations.

There were reporters and a photographer. To Vlado Dedijer, then Director of Information in the federal government, I said I wished the papers wouldn’t report my arrival. He turned to Kidric and the rest of the crowd: “Look what this Amerikanac is trying to do—censor our free press! He’s four years late in coming, now he wants to suppress the fact that he has arrived!”

Laughter… I wanted to explain that I was trying to get into the Soviet Union, and that I was afraid publicity in Yugoslavia would not help. But Kidric steered me into the unheated airport restaurant. On the rough, coverless table were slivovica (plum brandy) and “coffee” (chicory, really, and roasted barley). There were questions about my trip. And I forgot what might get into the papers.

Two weeks later I read a New York Times clipping:

BELGRADE GREETS ADAMIC

GIVES AUTHOR BIGGER WELCOME THAN IT DID VISHINSKY

It was a Belgrade dispatch based on items in the Yugoslav press. The gist of the “story” was that Boris Kidric came to the airport to greet me, whereas no member of the Yugoslav Politburo met Vishinsky, then Soviet Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, when he came to Belgrade as head of the Soviet delegation to the Danube Conference in the summer of 1948, about a month after the Cominform outburst against Tito.

“If this does not finish my chance of getting a Soviet visa,” I thought, “it certainly reduces it.”

In the next three weeks, however, the realization that I had never had a chance began to form under my thick cortex. I was born in Yugoslavia. Worse yet, I had written approvingly of the Tito-led social revolution. I had not recanted during the cross-examination by the two Soviet attachés in Washington. To have ever had a good word about Tito was after the Cominform’s anti-Tito resolution as goading to Soviet officialdom as it had long been to the Chicago Tribune and the Brooklyn Tablet, to Westbrook Pegler and other columnists using the Un-American Activities Committee’s “protected” or libel-proof materials originated by turncoat Communists and self-confessed spies. The difference was that the “Un-Americans” branded you a Stalin stooge and Tito-tooter, a Communist, pro-Communist, or fellow-traveler, which they beforehand made synonymous with son-of-a-bitch and equivalent to their own definitions of un-American and subversive; while in the Soviet or Cominform book now—in 1949—you were suddenly a fascist beast, reactionary shark, American spy, Wall Street warmonger, or imperialist cannibal.

In mid-February, near the end of my vacation in the beautiful Slovenian Upland, my youngest brother Joze—who had a job in Zone B, the Yugoslav-occupied part of the so-called Free Territory of Trieste—sent me a copy of a Slovenian anti-Tito paper called Demokracija, allegedly financed by the Anglo-American Intelligence Services and published in the “Anglo-American” Zone A, which reported that I had lately come to Yugoslavia to write another book in support of Tito’s police state, or perhaps to induce the Belgrade dictator to knuckle under to the Kremlin again: for, according to unnamed sources in the USA, to which the editor had a pipeline, I was a long-time Soviet agent or spy.[3]

One evening a while later I was turning the shortwave knob on the radio set in my brother France’s apartment in Ljubljana, and happened to get the tail end of an American newscast from Frankfurt, bits of a BBC commentary, and a Radio Budapest attack on Tito. The attack, in the Serbo-Croatian language, was a paraphrase of numerous violent Cominform broadcasts on the same subject I had listened to, with waning interest, during my stay at the mountain lodge; and, bored after a few minutes, I was about to give the knob another twirl to see what else the East European air-wave had to offer, when lo! I heard my name in the Yugoslav pronunciation: Luj Adamic. The Budapest speaker said that I, a well-known White House lounge-lizard, State Department agent, and Wall Street pimp, had lately reached Yugoslavia to propel Tito and his gang deeper into the imperialist camp, then (before the Atlantic Treaty) in the process of being organized by Western warmongers aiming to attack the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies. Why this action by me should be necessary, Radio Budapest neglected to explain: for in recent weeks Radios Moscow, Prague, and Budapest had said again and again that the nefarious, terroristic Tito clique had maneuvered Yugoslavia all the way into the Western imperialist camp months before.

What influences or what finally determines one’s actions is not always clear. My decision to write and then my need to rewrite and rewrite this book under various working titles, finally settling on The Eagle and the Roots, may have been determined by an unusual experience I tell about later.

Chapter 2

The native returns again

First impressions amid fortuitous circumstances

The White city is really white, also very red and somewhat blue

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

—Jean de la Bruyère, Caractères, 1688

You have no business with consequences;

you are to tell the truth.

—Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life, 1784

Tell the truth and run.

—YUGOSLAV PROVERB

At the Prague airport, the official in charge of the Belgrade-bound Yugoslav plane introduced me to the pilot, who shook my hand with great energy. He was a short, well-set Dalmatian in his early middle years. A beaked nose jutted out from a seamed dark face, and bushy brows from over deep-sunken blue eyes. His head had the immutability of a piece of sculpture, till he smiled; then all of him burst into life.

“The captain has just become a millionaire,” said the official, and both of them smiled and waited for me to react to the information.

“A millionaire? In dollars, pounds, francs, kronen, zloty, dinars, or what?”

They laughed. It was a joke that needed further help from me to bring it out.

“I thought Yugoslavia was a socialist country,” I said. “If you still have millionaires, then the Cominform accusation that you’re back-sliding into capitalism is true.”

They roared. “No, no,” said the official when his laughter subsided enough so he could talk. “The captain is a socialist millionaire, a Tito millionaire. Yesterday, between Belgrade and Prague, he completed his millionth kilometer in the air.”

I congratulated the captain, and said, “In America there’s a saying that the first million is the hardest to make—meaning capitalistic dollars, of course. I hope this also applies to socialistic kilometers.”

After we left Prague, looking out of the little window by my seat, I noticed TITO scrawled big on the wing; and a couple of hours later, over southern Hungary, when the captain popped out of the cockpit and sat down beside me, I asked, “Who did that?”

“Oh, some groundman at Zemun, no doubt.”

“Why?”

The captain looked as if my question struck him as a bit foolish or ignorant. “Marshal Tito’s name,” he said, “is lettered all over Yugoslavia.”

“Why?”

“Because… because—I find it hard to say why. I’m a flyer, a mechanic, a simple man. To me, to many of us Yugoslavs, Tito is everything. Especially of late.”

“Since the Cominform hit you?”

“Yes”—dismally.

I said: “I read that before the war, the names of Hitler and Mussolini were painted on walls all over Germany and Italy.”

The captain looked at me sharply, unhappily. Then he decided to calm down and rearrange his expression before he said: “If I didn’t know you were a friend of Yugoslavia, I’d resent that. My dear gospodine Adamicu, there’s a great difference between those signs in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy and the sign on the wing of this plane.” He rubbed his chin, trying to find words for the rest of his thought. “It’s no use,” he said after a while. “I’m a simple man—”

“Forgive me,” I said, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I know, I know,” he said, reaching for my hand and pressing it, with bitter solemnity. “The world is poured over with anti-Yugoslav propaganda. But you’ll stay in Yugoslavia awhile, won’t you?… Only a few weeks? Even so, you will see for yourself that the comparison you made—perhaps just to tease me, to see what I would say—is unjust. I’m not the man to explain; all I know is airplanes, and not too much about them; everything else I feel in my heart. I love my country and all I can say is: Tito is everything to us. Everything.” He fell still, looking at his clasped hands. Then he glanced at his wristwatch and rose abruptly and looked down through the window. “We crossed the Yugoslav-Hungarian border a few minutes ago.” He beamed. “Welcome to New Yugoslavia!”

“Thank you, Captain.” We shook hands again. “How are things in New Yugoslavia?” I asked.

“Hard but wonderful, or I could say, wonderful but hard.”

“What do you mean?”

The captain rubbed his chin again. “We’re in a wonderful moment, making a new beginning in our history. This is difficult, very difficult. But as Marshal Tito said in his New Year’s radio address two weeks ago, when did we Yugoslavs ever have it easy? However, this snow which fell in recent days is good. It may mean a big harvest for a change.” He looked at his watch again, and smiled embarrassedly. “I came out of the cockpit to ask you about American airplanes, for I was informed you flew all the way from New York. Instead, we started a political discussion!”

“From New York to London,” I said, “I came in a huge four-motored Constellation, non-stop in slightly over fourteen hours. Not a bump all the way; we flew above the weather.”

The captain’s dark face glowed. “Boga ti! Someday Yugoslavia will have such planes.” Again he gripped my hand. “I must go back in now.”

“Congratulations again on your first million, Captain, and the best of luck on your second.”

The “Tito millionaire”—who, I thought, was not a simple man at all—smiled broadly, bowed and saluted, and disappeared into the cockpit. Fifteen minutes later he brought the plane down in a swirl of snow.

At the long, rough table in the chill, bare restaurant in the Zemun airport (we sat in our overcoats) I was wedged between the irrepressible Brobdingnagian, Vlado Dedijer—nearly seven feet tall, weighing about three hundred pounds—and my quiet, smiling thirty-nine-year-old brother France.

“How is everybody at home?” I asked France. “What are they doing? How’s Mother?”

“Mother works hard as ever,” replied France. “We keep telling her to slow down but she won’t. Everybody else is fine too. Their main occupation right now is waiting for the prodigal. Only this time,” he chuckled, “there won’t be a fatted calf.”

“Why not?”

When I returned to my birthplace in 1932, after nineteen years in the United States, my family killed a calf and gave a feast.

“Well,” smiled France, “this time you took only sixteen years to come home.” Then, earnestly: “So much was destroyed in wartime; we’re trying to build up the animal stock again, and there’s a tight control: every head must be accounted for.”

Boris Kidric—“the economic dictator” in the Western press during 1947-49—was grinning at me across the table.

“You’ve grown older, Lojze,” he said, using the Slovenian form of my first name. His voice was as I remembered it from sixteen years back: vibrant and emphatic even when he was not saying anything very special. One of his feet, close to mine, tapped in nervous rhythm under the table. His whole body seemed to vibrate, except the square face with the strong chin and the intent, amused eyes.

“I’m a bit tired,” I said, “and I’ll be fifty in a couple of months. But why bring that up? You aren’t the youngster yourself I once knew, though you look like the same volcano of energy.”

“Only now,” mumbled Vlado Dedijer, “the volcano is in a state of eruption.”

Laughter. “In a state of constant eruption,” someone else suggested, “constant but planned and controlled.” This was a gibe at Boris’ official title: Chairman of the State Planning Commission.

“Let’s change the subject,” said Boris. He turned to France: “What about the prodigal and the calf?”

Vlado Dedijer broke in to tell about the feast my family gave when I returned in 1932, and that I described it in The Native’s Return.

“Then there ought to be a calf this time,” said Boris.

“Oh no,” I said, uncertain for a moment whether he was joking or not. “I don’t like veal any more.”

Boris looked at Vlado, mischief leaping in his eyes. “If a calf was slaughtered in Old Yugoslavia,” he said, ignoring me, “and is not in New, he’ll write about that. Then the West will have further ‘proof’ that socialism is a failure and a misfortune, and the Cominform will seize on it as fresh ‘documentation’ that Yugoslavia is about to collapse because she went into the imperialist-capitalist camp.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I have no intention of writing anything about Yugoslavia.”

“He has no intention of writing anything about Yugoslavia,” said Boris mock seriously, looking around the table. “Just the same, we ought to be on the safe side, no?” To France: “If your family has a calf, do you think the people’s committee would issue them a permit to slaughter it?”

“We can ask for it and see,” said France.

“No, you won’t,” said I. “No special favors.”

Vlado Dedijer announced he was on my side: the calf should be allowed to grow up into a bull.

“What are your plans?” Boris Kidric asked.

“Nothing definite. If I get a Soviet visa, I’ll go to Russia right away. If I don’t fairly soon, I’ll stay in Yugoslavia six or seven weeks.”

They waited for me to continue.

“First I want to see my family, then stow myself away somewhere for a couple of weeks and catch up on sleep. Until I do, I’m not much interested in anything, in Yugoslavia, the Cominform, anything—”

A somewhat awkward pause. Then one of the men—Dr. Ivo Andric, president of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union—raised his slivovica glass, giving a toast welcoming me in the name of the organizations represented around the table. Unable to think of an appropriate response, and vexed with myself, I said merely, “Hvala lepa—thank you very much.”

Boris said, “Kardelj intended to come with us but was held up the last minute.”

“I’m glad someone in Belgrade has something better to do than meet me. How’s Tito? Why didn’t he come?”

No one laughed and the moment turned stiff. Had I offended them? Their silence felt like a rebuff to me. Hours later, mulling over this, I wondered what kind of man I would find Tito to be. His name seemed to have acquired an exalted meaning. Apparently, it wasn’t good form to crack jokes about him.

After a while, in a (for him) flat voice, Boris said Tito was fine, and added: “He hopes to see you before you leave for Slovenia.”

I asked France when we were going. Did he have the railroad tickets? He said he had just returned from a wine-selling trip to England, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, and was obliged to take care of some business at the federal Ministry of Foreign Trade during the next several days. Would I mind waiting for him so we could go to Slovenia together? He would hurry his affairs.

I was asked about my flight from New York to London, how conditions were in America, whether I knew Dean Acheson, the new Secretary of State—and the talk flowed naturally again.

There was something very refreshing about “these guys,” as I called them in my mind. Their humor was warm, genuine. I knew and liked Vlado Dedijer and Ales Bebler. I thought I would like Boris Kidric. Suddenly, my memory of him in 1932-33 was very vivid. I wanted to have a long talk with him and learn what generated that tense restlessness, how he felt about Russia now, how the Cominform split affected the Five-Year Plan, how he saw Yugoslavia’s perspectives—

All at once my weariness lifted; the prospect of staying in Belgrade for a few days was exciting.

“Beograd”—the Yugoslav form for “Belgrade”—means White City, and it really was white. The previous two days a heavy snow had fallen in northeastern Yugoslavia.

“White manure,” said Vlado Dedijer, in whose car—a 1942 Plymouth—France and I rode from the airport to the city, across the Danube. “Worth two, three billion dinars. It means the promise of a very good harvest this year, the first since Liberation; I should say, the first since before the war. In wartime much of the land lay fallow.”

The snow and cold had brought to a standstill the huge “New Belgrade” project at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The uncompleted buildings, some barely started, looked desolate in the midday winter sunlight.

“This,” said Vlado, as we passed one of the largest and farthest advanced structures, “will be Predsjednistvo [the Presidency, or the main government building]. That’s the principal hotel, about half finished. Over there is a section of the new university.”

“Isn’t this project one of the grounds for the Cominform charge that ‘the Tito clique’ is smitten with megalomania?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Vlado. “But we need these buildings and hundreds more. We’re terribly overcrowded. In Belgrade alone we could use four, five new hotels and hundreds of apartment houses. A large part of the town was destroyed by Stukas on April 6, 1941, the first day Hitler attacked Yugoslavia. More was demolished in ’44 as the city was liberated. Since then over a hundred thousand people have poured in, and more come daily. In a few years, according to present indications, Belgrade will be a city of half a million.”

Among the skeleton buildings were rows of wooden barracks. “For voluntary labor brigades,” Vlado explained. “Young people come from all over the country and donate their labor; all they get while on the job is food, workclothes, and a place to sleep. But in wintertime only a few thousand are here, mostly peasant boys. By spring the site will be an ant-heap of activity with twenty or thirty thousand volunteer workers.”

On barrack walls, on unfinished buildings, on scaffoldings were slogans: People, Party, Tito: We Are One… Tito Is All of Us… Hard, Conscientious Work Is the Best Answer to Slanders… The More They Slander Tito, the More We Love Him… Our Future Lies in the Successful Building of Socialism… Long Live Tito!… Hero Tito… Tito Is Everything… or, as on the wing of the plane, just Tito.

I wondered what these signs meant: perhaps the same as the Jesus Saves inscriptions along the American roadsides: or that, as someone (was it Robert Louis Stevenson?) said somewhere, man subsisted not by food alone but chiefly by catchwords. My interpretation, I soon discovered, was wrong. As I subsequently wrote in my diary, I really knew almost nothing about “Tito’s Yugoslavia.”

With skid-chains on the tires, the squeaky old Plymouth bumped along over the hard-packed snow behind an overloaded truck. Here and there straggly groups of men and women, bundled in frayed shawls, with rags wrapped around their feet, shoveled or stood resting, their breath visible in the cold air.

“What a few dozen modern American snow-removing machines could do with this mess by tomorrow morning,” I thought.

On the Zemun side of the restored Danube Bridge a large inscription was lettered neatly in Cyrillic: We Are Tito’s, Tito Is Ours.

Who are “we”?… But the silent treatment accorded my jocular inquiry why Tito had not come to the airport, not to mention my experience with the “Tito millionaire” on the plane, inhibited me temporarily, and I kept the question to myself. I continued to wonder about the slogans. Many were newly painted. Were they a reaction to the Cominform—Yugoslavs talking back to Stalin? Also encouraging themselves? And a manifestation of pride? Did the people paint them spontaneously? (And who are “the people,” and who are not?) Or were the signs inspired and engineered by the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus?

France, who sat in front, showed me the title of a book he picked up from the seat between him and the chauffeur. It was Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan in Serbian translation. Vlado remarked that Bosko (the chauffeur) was a great Dreiser fan. I asked Bosko how he liked The Titan. He said he was only about half through: Was it a true portrayal of an American capitalist? I said I thought it was—“of one type of American capitalist of about fifty years ago.”

Vlado told Bosko—a thin, sharp-featured Serbian; a good driver (whom I was to see often in the ensuing months)—that I had known Dreiser. After a while Bosko asked me if I knew Duke Ellington. He was disappointed that I had never met the jazz-maestro or heard his music, so far as I recalled. All I could tell him about Ellington was that he had a band which played in night clubs and on the radio, and that he was popular. A relative in Butte, Montana, had sent Bosko a collection of Ellington records and he played them over and over. He liked American jazz. No, not better than Dreiser; but he thought America must be quite a place to produce both Dreiser and Ellington.

In Belgrade proper, vehicles were stalled in the snow, and shovel gangs were out everywhere. I caught a glimpse of one small tractor with a snow-plow attached. It was stalled too.

Vlado reminded me that in 1945, when he came to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, he stayed at my farm in the Delaware Valley for a few days.

“Now you should be my guest,” he said, “but we have no room.”

“I want to go to a hotel.”

“All filled up. They’d have to put someone out, and you wouldn’t want that. I’m taking you to Krleza’s. Remember him?”

A Croatian, Miroslav Krleza was already the foremost Yugoslav writer when we met in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in 1933.

“He lives in Belgrade now, temporarily,” said Vlado. “He’s working on an idea for an international exhibition of our medieval art. [The Yugoslav Medieval Art Exhibition was held in Paris through most of the spring of 1950.] You know, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the South Slavs had an artistic flowering—hundreds of years ahead of the Italian Renaissance… Last night Krleza had to leave on a trip, and he telephoned me to tell you he was sorry he couldn’t be here to welcome you. He said to make yourself at home. Marija will take care of you, and of France too.”