The following incomplete description of the Gumberg Papers was prepared by William Appleman Williams.
Alexander Gumberg, born in July, 1887, to a Russian family of Orthodox Jewish faith then living in the Ukraine, died in New York City on November 17, 1939, of a heart attack while employed as personal confidential assistant to Floyd B. Odlum, president and chairman of the board of Atlas Corporation. It may be surmised that Gumberg's heart was not congenitally weak. It had carried him through emigration to the United States, the bitter battle of survival in New York's Lower East Side, the turmoil and tension of the Russian revolutions of 1917, efforts to effect a rapprochement between his native and adopted countries, the strains of his services to economic giants such as the Chase National Bank and the Atlas Corporation, and had sustained his great personal zest for life.
Rather might it be suggested that Gumberg had filled up the appointed three-score-and-ten ahead of time. He had, indeed, an exceptional heart--both literally and metaphorically. He lived by balancing thought and action, a style of life at once demanding and rewarding. He died because he had used himself up, not because his body proved unequal to the tasks asked of it by his mind, or because his flesh drifted into the limbo of old age.
A poet, an historian with a philosophical turn of mind, or a close friend would see a symbolic unity in Gumberg's life and death. Like all men, he had a hierarchy of values and purposes. Unlike most men, he tried to heighten his consciousness of those standards while (and by) laboring to give them meaning in the real world. Gumberg died when his values and his efforts to realize them, entered upon a period of transformation and transmutation by war.
Gumberg hoped to contribute to an improvement of the human condition in Russia and America. He sought to do this, an effort which gave meaning to his own life, by bringing both countries closer together. Such interaction, he was fond of explaining (he seldom took time to argue), would benefit both nations directly and would, by its stabilizing effect on the rest of the world, underwrite an era of freedom from major wars. Gumberg had no compulsion or desire to reform the world. He did hope that Russia and the United States would realize their respective and mutual potentials. However metaphysical the thought, it was not too surprising that Gumberg died in November, 1939. For that was an hour in which it was apparent that such an effort as his had failed for the time being and that, when taken up again, would depend upon other men.
Gumberg left a record of his efforts because he realized that the historian, like other men, can never understand the present--or what occurred in the past--unless he also knows what could have happened. The continuity of history is based, indeed, as much upon the re-emergence of developments temporarily eclipsed as it is upon the further unfolding of once dominant trends. Gumberg's papers are thus a record of a momentary failure which nevertheless gives us a revealing light, for example into the split over foreign policy within the hierarchy of corporate power in the years from 1950 to 1956. In like fashion, his records help us understand the divergence of opinion within this same class over the issue of whether to go along with the New Deal or to oppose it directly and unreservedly. And, finally, Gumberg's papers offer a revealing picture of the significance and power of the unknown and so-called secondary figures of history. Such figures are seldom given speaking roles in written history, yet their influence is often persuasive. The advisor is a key man, whether his position is formalized in a bureaucratic structure or whether he operates as a self-employed gad-fly. Gumberg functioned within both patterns, and the record of his efforts is an important tool with which to probe and understand American history from 1917 to 1939.
Gumberg's public life, of which these papers are a record, had two basic objectives. He wanted to improve the nature and tone of society in Russia and the United States. The most likely means by which to accomplish these goals, in his view at any rate, was to use his personal influence on those men in each nation who had some measure of decision making authority. His associations with three such men were of crucial importance. Two of them gave him a hearing in Russia. The first of these was his brother, who had remained in Russia, joined the Bolshevik Party, and worked his way upward to a position of trust and responsibility. The second was Leon Trotsky, on whose New York emigree newspaper Gumberg had worked as translator and handy-man in the years before Trotsky returned to Russia to help lead the Bolshevik Revolution.
The third individual was Raymond Robins, a man of considerable importance in the movement to reform the fabric of American life. Perhaps Gumberg's association with Robins, which began during the storm of the Russian Revolutions, was the key relationship. For it was Robins who gave Gumberg entree into the group of Americans such as Senator William E. Borah, Dwight Morrow, and Reeve Schley, who exercised some influence over relations between the United States and Russia. It is with this in mind, then, that Gumberg's papers need to be used in conjunction with those of Raymond Robins (also on deposit in this library).
Gumberg's activities between 1917 and 1939 may be organized into the following periods of emphasis:
(1) The period of the Revolution and early efforts to bring about some lessening of tension between Washington and Moscow, 1917-1924. Gumberg's records of this period contain key materials on the formal and informal relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, on the affairs of the All-Russian Textile Institute, and upon internal developments in the USSR. His correspondents included such leading figures as Louis Fischer, William Henry Chamberlain, William E. Borah, Boris Skivirsky (of the Soviet Union Information Bureau, which Gumberg helped get established), Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Bessie Beatty, and Raymond Robins. The organization of his correspondence for this period is exclusively chronological.
(2) The years 1924 to 1933, during which time Gumberg became extremely effective behind the scenes in his efforts to reestablish relations between the United States and Russia. He worked on two levels: the institutional and the personal. Institutionally, he served as personal advisor to Reeve Schley of the Chase National Bank (a connection he made via Raymond Robins, who introduced him to William Boyce Thompson of the House of Morgan while all three men were in Russia); organized the cotton and textile trade with Russia; and helped found Amtorg, the Russian trading company in the United States.
In these same years, moreover, his personal influence expanded rapidly. He became a close friend and confidant of Dwight Morrow and other Americans interested in improving relations with Russia. These associations, coupled with his friendships in Russia, enabled him to function as a go-between and as an interpreter of conflicting points of view. His several trips to Russia during this period helped prepare the way for the well-known contracts between Russia and the Ford Motor Company and General Electric. Likewise, his reports on the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1927-1928 provide revealing information on Soviet and American Diplomacy.
Gumberg's relationship with Reeve Schley of the Chase National Bank was of key importance in the reinvigoration and further development of the old American-Russian Chamber of Commerce. This organization, working through such men as Spencer Williams (its representative-in-residence in Moscow), G.M. Trone of General Electric, and W.M. Cooper of the Cooper Engineering Corporation, became the clearinghouse for American interest in economic relations with the Soviet Union. Gumberg was the driving force of the organization. His knowledge of Russian conditions, his friendship with such men as Peter Bogdanov of Amtorg and Dwight Morrow in America, and his willingness to invest himself in the business of developing new trade interests (such as machine tool exports) and maintaining old ties (such as cotton sales) make his files an invaluable source of information on the rise of American-Soviet commerce. For this reason, Gumberg's separate files from the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce have been left as a topical unit within the Organization Records.
Gumberg left the Chamber in 1932 to begin working with Floyd B. Odlum. He did so for two reasons. Odlum offered him far more money than had the Chase National Bank, and this was important to Gumberg, then thirty-four years old and lacking any significant savings. Secondly, Gumberg felt he had done all he could to establish American-Soviet commerce on a sound basis. In a sense this was true. The Chamber did go on to play a crucial role in forcing the Hoover Administration to relax its policies toward Russia, in organizing the political and social campaign for the recognition of Russia, and in developing the Russian market during the early years of the depression. But no individual stepped in to replace Gumberg. The organization rapidly declined in effectiveness after 1934. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to concentrate on domestic economic projects played a part in this, as did Russia's own internal developments, but the organization lacked the leadership to carry through on its early successes.
Gumberg's subsequent career had two centers of attention: his activities within the framework of the Atlas Corporation, and his continued interest and involvement in Russian and Russian-American affairs. Gumberg's personal file concerning the Atlas Corporation has also been left intact in the Organization Records. But many of his activities, such as his connection with Atlas' interest in the workings of the Security Exchange Commission and the abortive political maneuvering of Philip La Follette of Wisconsin are to be followed within the main body of Correspondence that is arranged chronologically.
As has been suggested, Gumberg's papers contain a vast amount of material bearing directly and indirectly on internal developments in Russia. Letters from men like Louis Fischer, Spencer Williams, and Walter Duranty are filled with such data. Perhaps the most dramatic material in this collection, however, is the record of the Soviet purges as they affected Gumberg's brother Veniamin Gombarg, a significant figure in the administration of Russia's economic programming (vice-president of the Chemical Syndicate), in the internal crises during the early Five Years Plans and the rise of Japan and Germany (see Pravda, February 8, 1930).
His position was weakened as a result of Alex's emigration and subsequent association with American financial leaders. Alex invaded the letters-to-the-editor column of Pravda (April 7, 1930) in defense of his brother, and did much in later years to supply his family in Russia with extra money and other assistance. The record of his brother's exile to Siberia and subsequent rehabilitation (to the point of lecturing on Marxism in Leningrad) offers a particularly balanced and valuable case study of Soviet affairs in the 1930s.
Gumberg's interest in and association with Russian affairs came to something of an anti-climax in the mid-thirties. His associates within and around the Atlas Corporation seem clearly to have played a significant part in the appointment of Joseph E. Davies as Ambassador to Russia to succeed William Bullitt. Gumberg himself had several long conversations with Davies after the choice was confirmed, and appears to have provided Davies with access to certain levels of Russian officialdom. But Gumberg's relationship with Davies was in no sense as important as his earlier associations with Senator Borah, Raymond Robins, and Dwight Morrow. More important was Gumberg's friendship with and knowledge of some....
