“generation” following “luminous personalities” toward “self-immolation” (vicariously, as it turned out, except for the few who became Hope Ulanovskaia’s secret agents). They were an army of fraternal prophets. They were “the Movement.” According to Isaac Rosenfeld’s recollection of life at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, The political interest colored practically every student activity on campus, with the major division drawn between Stalinists (who dominated the American Student Union) and the Trotskyites (who worked through the local chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League). The two Marxist groups, with their symps and associates, spoke bitterly about, but never to, each other and avoided all contact, except to heckle, and occasionally strong-arm, each other’s meetings. Politics was everywhere, in a measure, one ate and drank it; and sleep gave no escape, for it furnished terror to our dreams. . . . Liaisons, marriages, and divorces, let alone friendships, were sometimes contracted on no other basis than these issues. . . . Politics was form and substance, accident and modification, the metaphor of all things. 83 It was Soviet politics, or perhaps socialist anti-Soviet politics, or rather, prophetic politics in the shadow of the Soviet Union, that was the metaphor of all things. Beilke’s children agreed with Hodl’s children that History (as future, not past) was unfolding in Moscow. The USSR might be on the straight road to perfection, or it might have taken a wrong turn somewhere; either way, the USSR is where the “accursed questions” were being answered and the “last and decisive battles” were being waged. Most of the secret agents recruited by the Ulanovskys in America were Russian Jews or their children, and there is little doubt that Trotsky’s greatest appeal was that he was both Jewish and Russian: a perfect Mercurian Apollonian, a fearsome warrior with glasses on his nose (he was, in effect, the Israel of the 1930s; or rather, Israel would become the Trotsky of the next Jewish American generation). According to Irving Howe, no major figure of the twentieth century “combined so fully or remarkably as did Trotsky the roles of historical actor and historian, political leader and theorist, charismatic orator and isolated critic. Trotsky made history, and kept an eye on history. He was a man of heroic mold, entirely committed to the life of action, but he was also an intellectual who believed in the power and purity of the word.” 84