ABSTRACT
The separate paths which brought this unique collection of real and would-be revolutionists to Brooklyn show how complex and far flung were the social and political forces moving in the direction of the American Communist movement. A month later, in 1917, Trotsky did lend his name to a different kind of public demonstration by the increasingly aggressive Left Wing. The conduct of the meeting was described by one of the participants, the Right Wing lawyer, Louis Waldman: This was the stormiest meeting I ever witnessed in a long career of stormy meetings. Trotsky went back to become the first Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then Commissar of War. Bukharin was put in charge of Pravda, the central organ of the Bolshevik party. It is revealing that Trotsky should have sensed at the Brooklyn meeting, twenty-four hours after his arrival, that what the Left Wing needed most was a publication, an "organ."
