The Man Who Sold Tomorrow: The True Story of Dr. Solomon Trone The World’s Greatest & Most Successful & Perhaps Only Revolutionary Salesman - Softcover

Evans, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634241908 ISBN 13: 9781634241908

Publisher: Trine Day, 2019

Synopsis

Uncover the hidden history of a revolutionary salesman and the global conspiracies that shaped the 20th century.

Delve into the extraordinary life of Dr. Solomon Trone, a seemingly ordinary businessman who found himself at the center of Cold War intrigue, assassination plots, and political revolution. This gripping biography traces Trone's journey from upstate New York to the heart of global power struggles, revealing a story of deep-seated corruption and hidden agendas.

Was Trone a pawn or a player? Explore the intersection of business and politics as Trone navigates the treacherous landscape of capitalism and communism. Perfect for readers seeking to question assumptions and understand the forces that shaped our world, this book offers a compelling reason to challenge everything you thought you knew about history.

About this title

About the Author

David Evans is an archivist and government records professional who has worked for the British Council, Oil Companies, and government institutions in Canada.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Man Who Sold Tomorrow

The True Story of Dr. Solomon Trone The World's Greatest & Most Successful & Perhaps Only Revolutionary Salesman

By David Evans

Trine Day LLC

Copyright © 2019 David Evans
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63424-190-8

Contents

Cover, 
Tite Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Epigraph, 
Contents, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
Looking for the Heart of the Revolution, 
The View from Hampstead Heath, 
Catching the Big Fish, 
Three Men in a Boat, 
The World of Tomorrow, 
The Errand Boy and the Emperor, 
The Making of Morgan, 
The News from Nowhere, 
For Love and Revolution, 
Russian Roulette, 
The Beautiful Loser, 
Get With The Plan, Comrades!, 
Betting Against the Future, 
The End of Reason, 
The View from Desolation Row, 
The Sickle Pays for the Hammer, 
The Show Must Go On, 
Fear in a Handful of Dust, 
The Blind Allie, 
Voyage of Discovery, 
Politics Gets Personal, 
Strange News Indeed, 
Hail to the Technate!, 
A Revolution of One's Own, 
Trone's America, 
New Deals and Old Friends, 
Let There Be Light, 
Discovering Trone, 
The Ironic Traveler, 
A Simple Matter of Perspective, 
A Point of View, 
Only Hope, 
Convergent Destinies, 
Seeds of Turmoil, a Harvest of Desires, 
Investigating Trone, Investigating the World, 
The Life of the Party, 
Finding Work in a Chinese Restaurant, 
India and the Plan, 
The Unplanned Promised Land, 
End Game, 
Another Future, 
Time to Forget, 
Passport to Retirement, 
Questions & Answers, 
Bibliography, 
Contents, 
Landmarks, 

CHAPTER 1

Looking for the Heart of the Revolution

The View from Hampstead Heath

Britain is not such an ugly place for an American such as Dr. Solomon Trone to go and die of old age. Instead of facing the electric chair like his friends the Rosenburgs he was forcibly retired. The place of his enforced retirement happened to be Hampstead. The exact place was right next to Hampstead Heath, in a tastefully decorated spacious flat, replete with original drawings by Kathy Kollwitz and Mayakovski hanging on the walls.

From the living room in this place one can look out onto the Heath and get an almost uninterrupted view looking down on most of London. If any of us were cast out of where we live now to such an exile in Hampstead, to live out the rest of our days surrounded by family and friends, it is doubtful any one of us would have much cause to complain. This is not how one expects America to treat those it suspects of Capital Treason. After all, Hampstead is long way from Guantanamo Bay.

Even in 1953 Hampstead England was hardly the torment of the damned; now of course it's one of the richest places on earth. Not far in the distance, on the other side of the Heath is the last resting place of Karl Marx. On this side is the last residence of a man who helped make the events possible that put Marx on a pedestal for almost a century. Foolish perhaps, a dreamer certainly, he was an engineer, a revolutionary and the best damn salesman General Electric ever had; here lived the spectacular and some would say romantic and passionate Dr. Solomon Trone.

In a long game of a cat and mouse, or, to be more accurate, spy versus spy, Trone had one opponent who hunted him off and on through four decades of his life. J. Edgar Hoover first became wise to Trone shortly after World War One, when as a young Justice Department employee he created a list on which Trone's name was included. It was not, however, until after World War Two that Hoover was presented with a dossier of Solomon Trone's industrious pursuits, to which he remarked with trembling enthusiasm, "This is an amazing story." Trone, always one step ahead, was more than aware by this point that Hoover was closing in on him.

J. Edgar Hoover when he had just got out of law school had begun a career with the Department of Justice by compiling a list of dangerous radicals. Like the list sung about in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta the Mikado, it was a "little list" of "society offenders" whom, if executed "would not be missed." And just like the list in the Mikado some have speculated, "it really does not matter who you put upon the list," because the real purpose of the list was primarily to calm the fears of the American public.

What the American public feared was both the real and imaginary threats from anarchists and others. If this meant taking the innocent with the guilty J. Edgar Hoover did not appear to mind. Officially the list was supposed to comprise those who were considered a danger to the state during the Red Scare that swept America at the end of the First World War and into the 1920s. Like the lists of suspected communists created during the McCarthyism of the 1950s, this earlier list contained a lot more than a collection of names of those assumed to be guilty of treason.

At this time of Red Scare hysteria, when bombs, set by self-proclaimed anarchists, were exploding Wall Street and rumours abounded of foreign agents invading America it was not a good time to be a known political radical. It was J. Edgar Hoover's job to make a list of all the radicals so they could be monitored, captured and then dealt with appropriately, especially as it turned out if they were Jews and Russians living in New York. These two groups were of particular interest to Hoover.

The Espionage List based upon the Espionage Act was broad enough to cast a very wide net including many who were neither dangerous nor politically radical. The Espionage List brought together a diverse set of people. It contained those who had wanted a German victory in the First World War, and pacifists who wanted to end the same war. It named also union activists who had no opinions about the war but whose motives were simply to build "One Big Union." The list even contained older ladies who started a "Knitting Cooperative" not realizing to do so was like declaring to J. Edgar Hoover that they were bomb throwing anarchists working directly for the Kaiser of Germany. Why? Because their organization contained the word "cooperative" which Hoover thought was a code word for anarchist.

Like every good drama, needing its cast of heroes and villains, not everyone on the Espionage List however was innocent. There were, of course the usual anarchist suspects who did advocate violent actions and who were still at large. These people were also prepared to take their war against the state and the rich to a higher level.

Solomon Trone, playing multiple roles, was not only on that list, he was also actively pursued in New York and the surrounding area by agents of the newly formed FBI who were determined to find him. His name had been given by several informants, who claimed that Trone was either a Bolshevik revolutionary or a Czarist agent, depending upon the political inclination of the informant.

To the left-wing socialist oriented Lieutenant Governor of New York, George Lunn, Trone was a dangerous agent of the Czar, while to others, such as a Russian exile devoted to the Czar Trone was in the pay of the Bolsheviks aiming to overthrow the United States government by force. To the 24-year-old Hoover, Trone well and truly deserved to be on the list, although he may not have known exactly why. The investigation of Trone that started in 1917 was left incomplete. As we shall see later Trone evaded the investigation in America until 1921, then he escaped to work in Berlin where GE had shifted its headquarters for working with Russia.

After almost four decades J. Edgar Hoover had almost forgotten about Trone. This in itself is interesting. Trone was never far away from the antennae of the U.S. government's numerous intelligence agencies. Trone himself even said he had been interviewed by every intelligence agency the U.S. government had several times over. Trone also made it a point to visit the U.S. Consuls and Ambassadors un-announced whenever and wherever he traveled abroad, to discuss politics without dissimulation and give his opinion regarding world affairs. The U.S. embassy officials were invariably glad to see him and took his advice and opinion with a good deal of enthusiasm. One American secret service agent in the Middle East was so taken aback by the extremely talkative hardleft radical, Trone, that he could hardly believe him to be an agent of the Soviet Union.

Of course the intelligence agencies especially the FBI would have been well advised to read a popular comedy book of the day. That is, of course, if they had known which popular comic novel to read. Unlike others who were accused of being spies or foreign agents Trone gave his opinions extensively in a popular book of the day which was read by millions and was available in many languages. He was the major figure in a book about the United States written by famous Russian writers. Trone took no steps to disguise himself or his opinions which were now widely available due to this book. It is impossible to conceive that Trone was a spy considering how open he was to the world generally.

Little Golden America by Ilf and Petrov was published in English in both America and England in the 1930s and again in the 1940s. The novel gave Trone a starring role which allowed him to give a full account of himself and gave a platform for his political opinions. Appearing in the role of Mr. Adams, Trone and his brilliant wife Florence gave the two top Russian writers of the day a road trip review of the United States from New York to San Francisco and back. Alexander Ilf even said that Mr. Adams was Trone in his published letters and journals. There was no attempt to disguise Trone or his opinions.

Perhaps it may be reasoned Trone had hidden from the two Russian writers his intimate knowledge of the powerful political circles that he was familiar with in the Soviet Union and America? Nothing could be further from the truth. It was Trone's vast knowledge of the powerful political circles, and his personal connection to them, in both the Soviet Union and the United States that was the real substance of Little Golden America not simply the road trip.

Shortly after they had got to know Trone for the first time the writers Ilf and Petrov said something very unusual. They stated after their first full conversation with Dr. Trone that they were convinced they knew absolutely nothing at all about how the Soviet Union or America was run by its leaders. They said before Trone they were innocents, they "were like new born calves." Trone told them just about anything and everything, much of which is recorded in the novel.

Well into his sixties Trone travelled across the United States with the Russian writers. His wife had to drive both him and the writers as he could no longer drive. He could not drive because he was unable to concentrate due to his relentless and increasing desire for endless conversation. He talked and talked from one coast to the other and back again. At one point Ilf and Petrov even pretended to be asleep so as to escape the conversation of Dr. Trone. Ilf and Petrov discovered the trouble with Trone was not getting him to talk, and prying the important secrets out of him; the trouble was getting to grips with the sheer volume of knowledge that Trone was freely given to talk about.

It is not that Trone was a boring conversationalist, far from it, everyone found him fascinating. Trone was in turn fascinated by life and world around him. With several science degrees, having circled the globe several times, and visited dozens of countries, he was relentless in his desire to know the world as it was and build a better world out of it. Due to his unusual education, which we shall look at later, Trone's vision grew straight out of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment. He wanted to see a world re-founded on rational principles like those set forth by his heroes Voltaire, Kant and Hegel. Much more than this though, he saw himself on a mission to enlighten himself and enlighten everyone else as well.

Enlightening or to define it a little further, supplying a broader rational understanding of the world is just what he did. He engaged others in conversation to such a broad degree that it seemed to some as if he had been compiling scientifically an understanding of all the major social groupings on the planet, as if he were a latter day Darwin searching the world for specimens of animal and plant life. With the same vigorous pleasure he would engage Indian farmers, American presidents, and obscure Russian religious sect members in conversation. Trone was at home both in the corridors of power and the homes of the powerless. He crossed the many degrees of social separation that divide the world up and down, as easily and as effortlessly as if those degrees of separation did not exist.

This is perhaps the reason why Trone is so unknown today, and his contribution to history so little recognized. Fixing Trone in time and place, pinning him with a description of the group to which he belonged is futile. Bolshevik, revolutionary, advisor to U.S. presidents, scientist, salesman, dreamer and realist, all these and more are just as equally applicable and inapplicable to Trone.

Hidden in plain view Trone said exactly what was on his mind, when and where ever he chose. Only at very rare moments did Trone ever conceal his aims. At most he merely did not say those things that no one would have believed anyway. Such a person defies description, and therefore is left without a description, undocumented precisely because he refused to be limited in what he said and did.

Intelligence agents and historians look for where his loyalties lay, who paid him, what were the ideals he would die for. In looking for these things, the search comes up empty. His homeland was the future; his loyalty was to an enlightened world that did not exist, a world without borders, without leaders and almost certainly without the ideological certainties of those who were investigating him.

Catching the Big Fish

"... blood-curdling and incoherent stories have been circulated about me, it is no wonder that the average human being has palpitation of the heart at the very mention of the name Emma Goldman." This was the description that Emma Goldman, or Red Emma as she was known, gave of herself when asked by a popular newspaper. Today it seems that the name of Emma Goldman is mixed with ten parts fantasy, one part truth. In the movie "Reds" one gets the picture of a rather dour and dedicated pessimist who unequivocally condemns anything and anyone that she disapproves of. Such is the reality about Emma that this picture could not be further from the truth.

In her day, she was a star of international renown. Young, beautiful, smart, she was so full of drama and theatrical panache that she charmed America and was considered by many to be the best show in town. Crammed to the walls with spectators, people of all political stripes would fill theatres and chant "Emma, Emma, Emma," banging on the walls, stamping on the floor, just to hear her speak. They wanted to hear what she was famous for; something deliciously mind blowingly radical about "Free Love" or violently taking on the immense power of the Robber Barons and Politicians.

Perhaps this was because she was so passionate, with such a mischievous look in her eyes whenever she spoke on stage; there was something mesmerizing about this beautiful young Russian immigrant when she engaged the public. She burned with an intensity of purpose. No dramatic opportunity to say something radically disturbing was wasted. When the president was assassinated she publically said she was glad, not caring about the danger it put her in. When the postmaster general wanted to stop her distributing birth control advice to women, she called him a eunuch. Whether she was physically whipping a male opponent in public or advocating Free Love on the stages of New York, Emma Goldman was a sensation. Conventional wisdom, conventional morality were thrown out the window in what she saw as a battle for the soul of humanity and in particular the struggle for the liberation of the female soul; to love and live on her own terms in a world that was full of oppression.

By 1917 Emma Goldman was well known, as famous as she was infamous. She was brought to trial with her one time lover and fellow Anarchist Alexander Berkman. They were both part of a group of people rounded up and arrested earlier in the year, just when America had entered the First World War. The defendants were on trial for resisting America's entry into the war. They were, according to the police, encouraging men not to enlist and fight in the war. In truth, Emma saw no reason to become "a party to the world slaughter."

Emma's defence was impeccable. Even the judges, so keen and convinced of her guilt before, during and after the trial, could not help but say how impressed they were with it. Conducting her own legal defence, the arguments she made were concise; she spoke with effect and clarity and never indulged in anything beneath the conduct of the most respectable of lawyers. The judges even lamented how sad it was that Emma was against them, she could have been so valuable to state and the world of business if she had only chosen a different path.

Her closing speech is surely one of the most defining in her career. The speech was such a clear and comprehensive statement of her political philosophy that she thought the jail term imposed but a small price to pay for having had the opportunity to so fully speak her mind to an American public who were following the trial closely. To Emma what she was being tried for was her definition of what America was and what it should be. To Emma, the America she loved was the America of Freedom and vast dreams of a better life.

"Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. So we, too, who know America, love her beauty, her richness, her great possibilities; we love her mountains, her canyons, her forests, her Niagara, and her deserts – above all do we love the people that have produced her wealth, her artists who have created beauty, her great apostles who dream and work for liberty – but with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her cant, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the altar of the Golden Calf."

To the broad mass of the people in the United States at this time, America was about being patriotic and answering the call when necessary to fight for a version of "Freedom" that was not so vast, nor so dream-like and Utopian as Emma Goldman would have liked.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Man Who Sold Tomorrow by David Evans. Copyright © 2019 David Evans. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trine Day
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1634241908
• ISBN 13: 9781634241908
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192