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

Table of 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

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

Copyright ©2019 David Evans. All Rights Reserved.

Published by:

Trine Day LLC

PO Box 577

Walterville, OR 97489

1-800-556-2012

www.TrineDay.com

trineday@icloud.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931484

Evans, David.

The Man Who Sold Tomorrow – 1st ed.

p. cm.

Epub (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-191-5

Kindle (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-192-2

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-63424-190-8

1. Trone, Solomon Abramovich--1872-1969. 2. Electric power -- Russia -- History. 3. Electric power -- General Electric -- History. 4. Expatriate scientists -- 20th century. 5. Central Planning. I. Title

First Edition

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Printed in the USA

Distribution to the Trade by:

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Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

– Thomas Jefferson

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

– Jim Rohn

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them-that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

– Lao Tzu

Contents

Preface: Spiritus Mundi1

Introduction: Bloody Sunday3

1) Looking for the Heart of the Revolution (1916-1917)9

2) The World of Tomorrow (1800s-1921)27

3) Russian Roulette (1921-1928)48

4) The End of Reason (1928-1932)64

5) Voyage of Discovery (1932 - 1935)81

6) Trone’s America (1935 - 1936)97

7) A Simple Matter of Perspective (1936 - 1940)118

8) Investigating Trone, Investigating the World (1940 - 1949)138

9) End Game (1945, 1949 - 1953)158

Bibliography 176

Preface

Spiritus Mundi

At times it seems like there is a spirit at work in the world, drawing us all closer together. It is a global force pushing us into one global community, whether we are conscious of it or not, no matter whom we are or what we believe. Its magnetic pull, will not rest, it can only be resisted, never defeated. As inevitable as death, we are drawn into a world where race, religions, languages, borders and just about anything that can separate people into different groups is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Whether by design or accident it seems unstoppable.

Forced to confront the interconnection of our lives across a global network of different places and persons, we may find ourselves wondering how it all came about. Was there a decision at some point that would make all of our plans in life interconnected and interdependent? Who made that decision? Why was it made? The answer to these questions is not as difficult to find out as you might expect.

Yes, there was a decision made and I can point out exactly who was responsible and why he did it. Without him of course someone else may have made it all possible, and perhaps it was inevitable. But it was not someone else; it was a particular man, whose name was Solomon Pesach Abramovitch Trone. This book is the story of that man and how the world changed because of his decision. That he was in a position to make such a decision was largely luck. Sometimes in his long and remarkable career he was merely the last man standing at a critical juncture where something could be done by someone who knew what to do. You have probably never heard of this man and yet his role is indisputable.

At a specific time and place that force of globalization possessed Trone, who would change the nature of how we live, drawing us all closer together in such a way that we cannot separate ourselves from the global web of interconnections. He made a deal for American businesses and Russian politicians, which not only represented a new way of doing business; it represented a new way of living on the planet. It is a relatively new element that now dominates most aspects of our lives.

Trone unleashed a force that has encompassed the globe, spreading its influence everywhere, connecting us all in one great orchestrated network of plans. It is the first glimmering of a world becoming conscious of itself. A consciousness emerging to direct the development of the world, freeing itself step by step from the irrational; no longer pushed hither and thither, knowing not what we are to do next or why.

There was a specific moment when Trone made the fatal decision that would change the world. To be more precise it was a decision that was created in the moment when all other possibilities for Trone were removed, by an event both horrific and entirely unexpected. That event was the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905 in Russia.

Introduction

Bloody Sunday

There must have been for Trone a great sense of shock as the bullets went over the heads of the procession. It was reported that the people in the procession did not expect to be fired upon. The first warning shot probably stopped Trone dead his tracks, as it did most people marching. Like others who have reported being at the event, Trone was probably in a state of disbelief when the second volley was fired into the crowd. Even with the best estimates it’s hard to know what happened or how many died. Some estimates say a thousand. To Trone the number of victims he would remember from the massacre was four. Every year to commemorate the day of the massacre, Trone would have four carnations put in a vase. He lost four friends that day, one of whom was his lover.

The event of course was not just critical for Trone. The event was critical to the fall of the Romanov’s rule of Russia. It tarnished The Czar’s image in the minds of the Russian people. Delegated down the line from the Czar’s authority, the order to shoot was never condemned by the Czar, nor were any of those responsible charged with murder. Later selectively grabbed workers were taken by the military, pushed forth on their knees to be told off by the Czar, and then told categorically that he had no choice. The befuddled workers were then sent back to explain to the people how right the Czar had been. This had little effect but to assure many people, particularly Trone, how out-of-touch the government was from the people.

Especially tragic was the nature of the slaughter. As Trone well knew, working for the government and its military, this was not a country unaccustomed to harsh repression and brutality. What really shook people, including Trone, was the surprise of the incident. If you expect something, when it happens, good or bad, you can be prepared for it. But this was odd, odd in a sense that it made no sense.

Trone was a man who prized reason and rationality above anything else. To this event there was no reason, it served no purpose. The Czar’s most devoted subjects led by a loyal priest, who was even in the pay of the police force, arrived before the imperial palace to pray for the Czar, on their knees, to pray that the Czar would hear their prayer for better working conditions.

Trone had joined in a procession of workers who were not demanding power, or even making demands. They were hoping just to let the Czar know that things were quite bad, and they wanted to pray for the Czar to be able to do something to help them. What Trone would have seen at the end of the procession was the indiscriminate shooting and stabbing of these same poor subjects of the Czar. As they held Holy Icons and prayed for the Czar’s health and the sanctity of his semi-divine Emperorship, they were killed. The whole thing would have been the height of the irrational for Trone, as it was for the vast majority in Russia and the world.

It struck a spark that soon had revolution raging throughout the Russian Empire and turned Trone into a Revolutionary who was eventually imprisoned that year for revolutionary activity. Unable to fully organize the revolution failed. Like Trone, no one was expecting or planning to take power, with no specific plans or unity the revolution fell apart. Revolutionaries, such as Trone, ended up imprisoned. In many cases the revolutionaries ended up shot, tortured and exiled. Russia fell city by city, region by region, back into the Czar’s clutches once again.

The 1905 Revolution, though lost, was really just a dress rehearsal for Trone. Like so many others caught up in the uprising of 1905 for Trone this was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of real preparations that would eventually see the end of the Romanov Dynasty. All throughout the Russian empire, people such as Trone and groups were dedicating themselves to going all the way next time, getting really organized, making alliances, making sure they were prepared take power and keep it. For Trone his connections and preparations would prove perhaps the most pivotal and would have the most ramifications for the world as a whole.

The trigger that started this chain of events, that would start Trone on his career, was something that he should never have been. His incredible career as a Revolutionary Salesman, surely a contradiction in terms, began in a place where he should never have been. He was a director for General Electric’s Russian subsidiary and he was a Jew. He had no official business out on a protest march for Russian workers where no Jews were allowed to take part. This is not something strange for Trone however. The most amazing aspect of Trone’s life was that he was always where you would not expect him, and where you would expect him he was never there.

He liked to talk and be with friends. On this day of the massacre, on either side of him, they would all be dead from gunshots fired by trained soldiers of the Czar. The march was only for good ethnic Russians who worshipped the Czar as the semi-divine defender of the Orthodox faith. Trone was a Jew and did not worship the Czar. Why was he there? He knew some political activists, probably members of the Social Revolutionary Party, or the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The people he knew and the fact he was incredibly social, meant that he would have showed up anyway because his friends were there, not caring if he was supposed to be there or not.

When the bullets hit, the reports say that everyone was in shock initially. The Narva Gate was in front of Trone and in the street behind him there must have been thousands of people crammed in tight, pushing forward. Trone must have felt the push from the people in front and the wild cries, as people panicked realizing what was happening.

Trone would have been in the right place to see the Cossack cavalry marshaling their horses. The charge made at the crowd would have been directly toward where Trone was standing. Either he was watching them as they approached, brandishing their sabres, or more likely he would have been pushing his way out of the crowd to any place of safety.

To most people and probably to Trone, the initial moments of the massacre appeared like a nightmare; as if it could not be happening. The day had been one of hope. For a person who was almost always brimming over with hope it is not hard to imagine that Trone was looking forward to a successful conclusion to the procession. The people would get to present their petition to the Czar. But here Trone was staring death in the face, death in the form of a cavalry charge of sabre wielding Cossacks.

Trone never quite recovered from 1905, his whole life was somehow predicated by it, framed by it. The measure of his worth until the end of his days was in respect to the revolutionaries he knew when he was young who died in the massacre. The slaughter of 1905’s Bloody Sunday created for Trone a moment when fear melted into a certainty that death and the necessity to act were one and the same. To die was nothing compared to the essential act of truly living for something meaningful. He would constantly offer himself as a sacrifice for beliefs that he shared with those friends who died.

Trone was a student of philosophy, and he had learned that the purpose of philosophy was learning how to be prepared to die, again and again, in situations throughout the world during six decades of constant travelling. Never can the word fear be found in any of his writings, his letters or his conversations recalled by friends. In learning how to die well, he learned how to live well. It was as if he expected to die, had been prepared for it by the death of his friends in 1905.

He faced danger after danger in order to fight for the ideals of those he had loved and had died on that day. He never forgot them, nor was their place in his life ever anything but central, they were the foundation of his life, they encompassed his every act. It was to be, by any standard, an incredible life.

He began at that moment a strange career where he travelled in Siberia alone by dogsled, was perhaps the only Jew ever chauffeured in comfort to over thirty concentration camps and slept in a luxury hotel every night during that tour, he evaded the FBI for forty years, he witnessed his friends tried and executed by Stalin, and at one point he got to sit strapped into an electric chair with the metal plate on his head in Sing-Sing prison. He was a man staring death, catastrophe and hardship in the face for most of his life from 1905 on, never flinching in fear, never shying away from the struggle.

What happened to Trone that day in 1905? Before that day he was on way up the corporate ladder. His political days were passed and he had not participated in anything seriously political for almost a decade. Then there was 1905. They had all marched in what was expected to be a loyal procession, only smaller groups such as the Bolsheviks gave any warning that this was a suicide.

Most adventures begin with a critical decision by one man to face the trials of nature or society. As if he was a single point of light in the darkness. This is the picture of man alone, a Robinson Crusoe moment; the hero deciding to pit his wits and determination against the world, against nature. Not so with Trone. In the gloriously happy days before 1905, he had become quite content, and had become a relatively affluent executive. The time however was out of joint, and he was created to put things right as a revolutionary at that moment at the massacre. Using his wit and skill he was driven forth by an event that was not of his choosing.

He had a wife, child, lover, and plenty meetings with his friends in coffee shops to discuss politics. He once had burning ideals, the revolutionary ideals of his youth, and had once even got arrested. As punishment he had to serve in the Czar’s army for a few months. But those days were long gone. Now he was comfortably numb to the burning desire to make a stand. To him was allotted the poison of hope, that everything would be okay and all the problems could be resolved just by asking politely for it. Well all those with his sense of optimism gathered together and asked for it, and they received something they did not expect.

Do great historical forces create men or do men create great historical forces? Of course it is both. The time and place of the massacre created Trone, he moved from that moment inextricably to make a deal with the Bolsheviks that would change the world. He felt at the time that no other group could be trusted to act decisively enough to change Russia permanently, from a medieval state where blind illusions ruled a land of slaughter and famine.

If history is the nightmare that we are trying collectively to awake from, Trone tried to wake us all up a little earlier. As we shall see the world as a whole desired to keep sleeping, engrossed in its dreams, that are no more than illusions, for just a little longer.

Perhaps the greatest illusion, truly the only real enemy of Trone was that the individual does not need facts to live, to act, that somehow his will makes reality. If you are powerful enough truth is a beggar at your court and can be spurned. Truth seen as an irrelevant affectation of the weak, nothing can be outside the possibility of the truly great man. The will to power is the will to truth; you create the truth out of the greatness of your power. If we want it so, then it is so.

Trone was in the business of giving people power, power that tipped the balance in the great struggles between nations. It was the power of rational thought, independent thinking, looking reality in the face, seeing things the way they are before us, not as we would have them be.

Before the massacre, Trone seemed very comfortable with the autocracy, with the Czar, and his comfortable existence with his dalliance in polite politics, it was a very pleasant life. He electrified the Czar’s military installations, built the electrical power stations for the idle rich in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who lived off the labour of the peasants who starved ignorantly living a barbaric existence. Trone was a servant of the powerful, with illusions to being a child of the enlightenment, a humanitarian lover of the people and true rationalist.

In 1905 with the dead surrounding him, mowed down by rifle fire and hacked like meat in a butchers shop by the Cossacks, he was forced to see a version of reality that had escaped him before this point. Forced to look at the truth before him, he would spend a life time never allowing himself to look away, a persistence to see in all the horror what any of us would rather not know. Before 1905 he fled from the truth, after 1905 the truth was his constant pursuit.

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 story¹." 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 radicals². 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