“Reading Lincoln through the Russian Revolution”

• In Event: Race and the Jewish Radical Left

Abstract

In 1914, Rose Strunsky published her first book - a revisionist biography of Abraham Lincoln in which she seeks to address the “hero-worship” surrounding the former president. Strunsky first began writing about Lincoln as a student living between various revolutionary centers in Europe. She hoped to set the record straight and push back against how the Left and the Right had misappropriated Lincoln’s legacy over the past half-century and reclaim him for an agrarian socialist vision true to her Social Revolutionary roots in Russia. “He is not ‘The Great Liberator’ merely,” she wrote. “He is part and parcel of his class, the small homesteader who claimed an equal opportunity in the virgin forests. As such he is not a hero, he is a people.” By retelling Lincoln’s story through a populist lens, Strunsky stitched together the disparate histories of white pioneers and Black and indigenous casualties in the establishment of the US.

This paper meditates on the life, writing, and politics of Rose Strunsky - a quiet and unassuming radical who participated in clandestine revolutionary activities in St. Petersburg and Finland and was later rumored among Greenwich Village circles to sleep with dynamite under her bed. It explores Strunsky’s bizarre decision to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln while actively agitating on behalf of the Social Revolutionary Party in Eastern Europe - a context that thoroughly shaped her conception of American questions of race, violence, and dispossession in the US, and led her to uphold the small-scale farmer (race undefined) as the quintessence and future of American democracy. In doing so, this paper pushes back against the perception that East European Jewish radicals somehow “missed race” in their analyses of the US, and instead argues that their unique personal histories of migration and internationalist politics afforded rather astute observations of American inequality and racial violence. At the same time, it also hindered their ability to recognize the unique obstacles confronting BIPOC workers and offer meaningful solutions at a pragmatic level.

Author

• Ashley Walters, College of Charleston