wine from the brimming carafe." Public speaking Koehler was a popular, local speaker in Portsmouth and Newport Rhode, Island during the late 1930s and up until his death, sounding the warning against the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia and the danger of isolationism. In an address titled, "Soviet Union- For What?", in January 1938, Koehler spoke to the "Monday Night Club" in Newport about his personal experiences and observations in Russia during 1920-21 and his meeting with Stalin in 1933. Stalin predicted to Koehler that America would achieve socialism more quickly and directly than the Soviet Union. Koehler recalled Russia in the years after World War I, when the White Russians and Bolsheviks battled for control of armies driven into the sea as they tried to reach the Crimea, and of the great famine and atrocities that were "unhappily too true." He opined that the Bolsheviks were spurred on by an idealism of liberty that they had never enjoyed, put their hearts into the fight, and won. Sent by the State Department to Russia, Koehler described his trip disguised as a Jewish peddler, on foot across Russia to Poland, and his studies of the masses. Among the good points of the Bolshevik program, he pointed to the work-to-eat edict, education of the masses, and hospitalization for the children. But he condemned the segregation and disruption of families, organization of an industrial production program and abolition of the labor unions. Koehler said that the Bolsheviks considered unions and family life as a "menace" to communism. "There is more inequality in Russia today than under the old regime," he declared. Recalling his interview of Stalin, who asked questions about America, and warned Koehler to "Read Marx", he told of the Soviet leader predicting the U.S. would become a socialist state in the near future. In September 1938, Koehler addressed the Newport Art Association on the subject "Is Europe Headed for War; Are We?" and made the initial point that "Japan will probably continue to have victories of the kind that lead to defeat." His second point was that in a year Japan had "succeeded in giving China a unity that not all the centuries gave her." Koehler asserted that the Chinese with a bayonet is superior man to man to the Japanese. The Japanese have agreed with the Fascist powers and the German advisor to Chiang Kaishek, General Von Falkenhayn,