8 The Young Broz
Young Josip’s initial plan was to become a tailor, as he liked elegant clothes.
But the village schoolmaster, an authority for the local community, considered
him a restless boy, not suited for a sedentary occupation. Josip first found work
at an inn in Sušak, a nearby provincial town, but after a short time moved on to
a local blacksmith’s workshop, and then to another one in Zagreb, Croatia’s
capital. Perhaps the schoolmaster was right after all, because Josip did demon-
strate a restlessness and refusal to stay put. The moment one apprenticeship
ended, in 1910, he set off on a series of jobs that were really an excuse to travel
in Croatia, Carniola, Bohemia, Bavaria, the Ruhr, and Upper Austria. At one
point he even tried to emigrate to America, believing that he would become
a millionaire if he could make it there, but he got only as far as Trieste. There
his lack of funds would have landed him in trouble had it not been for a local
branch of the Social Democrats who organized shelters for poor proletarians
like him.^7 That same year, now back in Zagreb, he joined the metallurgical
trade union, and the following year signed up for the Union of Socialist Youth,
a sociopolitical fraternity through which he would become a member of the
Social Democratic Party.^8 The prominent cultural figure and writer Miroslav
Krleža, who knew Broz early on, described that time in fairly bleak terms: “Our
youth was spent in those boring, grey streets of the lower city of Zagreb...
where the inns are poor and stinking, the shops smell of flour and dried cod,
as does most of this gloomy province, and in ugly two-storied houses dwell
grey, badly paid employees of a grey, dull Empire that is on its deathbed.”^9
In the autumn of 1913, Josip was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army,
quickly rising to the rank of sergeant major. By age twenty-one he was one of
the youngest petty officers of the Imperial and Royal Army.^10 As a member of
the patriotic sporting association Sokol (Falcon), he was an excellent sports-
man in various disciplines: skiing, riding, fencing. His fencing prowess was so
great that he nearly won an army-organized tournament, claiming later that he
lost out in the end because he was a Croat and his opponent a Hungarian
count.^11 Despite this, he never nourished hostile sentiments toward the Habs-
burg monarchy, always considering it an orderly state, although at that time he
was already attracted to the idea of an independent Yugoslavia^12 capable of unit-
ing Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Slovenes under a single political entity.
When Milovan Djilas, later one of Tito’s closest associates, scornfully described
the pre–World War One king of Montenegro, Nikola Petrović, as a “character
from an operetta,” Tito protested on his behalf: “No, no! We young folks con-
sidered him with sympathy. He had guts, he was a patriot, a Yugoslav.”^13
Nevertheless, he would always remain attached to his Croatian fatherland.
In 1971, during a dramatic political power struggle with “liberal” party leaders in
Zagreb, whom he deemed too weak in their approach to dealing with local