RUSSIA: Travelers to Moscow

Between April, when the Moskva thaws to liquid life, and November, when it freezes over, a few hardy U. S. citizens venture each year to Moscow.

This summer President Samuel M. Vauclain of the Baldwin Locomotive Works talked draw-bar-pull and horsepower hours beside the Moskva. Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks talked a Russian cinema trust. Potent hydroelectric engineer Hugh Lincoln (“Muscle Shoals”) Cooper proposed to harness the mighty Dnieper with dams and turbines. These purposeful people came to Moscow on business, have returned with the reticence of those who have set themselves to accomplish definite ends. Last week the press noted pronouncements of another sort of U. S. traveler to Russia.

“Sherwood Eddy’s mission to Russia of which I was a member was filled full of bunk!” Eager newsgatherers scribbled this statement as it fell from the lips of one William Rosenwald, son of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Chairman Julius Rosenwald.

Sherwood Eddy himself, the tempestuous Asiatic Secretary of the Y.M.C.A. and ten members of his mission had signed and posted a letter to President Coolidge requesting the immediate recognition by the U.S. of the U. S. S. R. (Union of Socialist Soviet Republics). Previously President William Francis of the Chicago Y.M.C.A.—no Communist—had demanded the resignation of Mr. Eddy from the Y.M.C.A. At Moscow, fearless Sherwood Eddy had debated the existence of God before a great gathering of Atheists. A Chicago Tribune correspondent, shocked, cabled lurid rumors of Mr. Eddy’s Communist leanings. Last week Sherwood Eddy refuted this heresy, declared: “I am a Capitalist!”