by Philip Nel
With jobs few and far between, Ruth survived the depression in part thanks to the financial support of her mother, who continued to run the Krauss family’s furrier business until March 1930, when she married Albert A. Brager, a wealthy widower and founder of the Brager-Eisenberg department store.18
In the early 1930s, Ruth met Lionel White, a journalist and writer of detective stories, who was working on an edition of Lewis Carroll’s Logical Nonsense: Works, Now, for the First Time, Complete. According to Ruth, she and Lionel met at an “Arts Ball,” where they danced and laughed together. Both were in costume: “I think I was dressed like a boy—Lionel was dressed I can’t remember how but not like a girl.” After the party, the two walked hand in hand through Greenwich Village. Ruth was in love.19
4
PUNCHING THE CLOCK AND TURNING LEFT
The ramifications of a financial panic are—SAY! … That never occurred to me! … Your dad fired! Denied access to means of producing the necessities of life! You and your mother in rags! The icebox bare— Cushlamochree! The icebox bare!
—MR. O’MALLEY, in Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 5 April 1945
In 1926, unable to afford their home of a dozen years, the Leisks moved about two miles west into a house at 53 North Prince Street (now 33-43 Prince Street) in Flushing, Queens. The new house was only ten feet wide, especially cramped for a family that included Dave’s cousin, Bert Leisk, and his friend, Jim McKinney, who had fled Britain’s postwar economic slump in 1923. Glad for a temporary escape from these close quarters, Dave sought work.1
Department stores were thriving in the 1910s and 1920s—Marshall Fields in Chicago, Filene’s in Boston, and Macy’s in New York. In the winter of 1926, on the strength of his Cooper Union art courses, Dave became the assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department, a position he described as “a glorified office boy.” Macy’s had strict rules for its more than five thousand workers: As at Newtown High School, those who arrived at work after 8:45 needed to obtain a special pass, without which they could neither enter the locker rooms nor go to their jobs. Working in the advertising department gave Dave a chance to develop skills in typesetting and illustration but few opportunities to express his creative side. Department managers requested ads, staff members drew items to be advertised, and other staff created advertisements that conformed to Macy’s style, using the company’s distinctive typefaces and trademark red star. Artists had no control over the final layout.2
If these rigid conditions clashed with Dave’s creativity, the culture of advertising could not have increased his job satisfaction. As copywriter Helen Woodward wrote in 1926, “To be a really good copywriter requires a passion for converting the other fellow, even if it is to something you don’t believe in yourself.” Naturally skeptical, Dave did not stay at Macy’s for very long, quitting just before he was fired for wearing a soft collar instead of a regulation stiff one.3
Dave next found employment hefting ice in an icehouse. He may also have played semi-professional football for the Flushing Packers. He enjoyed the game because it wasn’t much of a “passing game. It was mostly just a bumping-down-on-the-ground game.” All Dave, a big offensive lineman, had to do was lean. Dave and the other linemen would mock the alleged arrogance of the quarterback. “The slick quarterback thinks he’s the team,” Dave would say. After a pause, he would add, “We are.”4
Just two weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Dave returned to publishing, becoming the first art editor of Aviation, which eventually evolved into Aviation Week. The cover of the 7 November 1927 Aviation, the first issue on which Johnson worked, displays a photo of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis flying back to New York. Just a few months after his historic solo flight from New York to Paris, Lindbergh had undertaken an aerial tour of all forty-eight states to promote aviation, appearing before huge crowds and receiving accolades. Moreover, the latter half of 1927 saw four other successful transatlantic flights as well as the first flight from the continental United States to Hawaii, events that Aviation covered with enthusiasm.5 On the strength of his new income, Dave and his mother and sister moved to more comfortable quarters at Hyacinth Court, a new four-story apartment building in Flushing.
During his years at Aviation, Dave began taking typography and graphic design classes at New York University’s School of Fine Arts, where one of his teachers was Frederic Goudy, a master of print design who invented more than a hundred typefaces. Goudy described his work as “simple[;] that is, it presents the simplicity that takes account of the essentials, that eliminates unnecessary lines and parts,” articulating an aesthetic that finds echoes in Johnson’s later view of his illustrations as “simplified, almost diagrammatic, for clear storytelling, avoiding all arbitrary decoration.”6
Dave was also receiving an on-the-job education in layout and design. In early 1929, publisher James McGraw added Aviation to his portfolio of business periodicals. During the corporate reshuffling that followed, Dave became art editor of a half dozen McGraw-Hill trade publications, apparently including American Machinist and Bus Transportation. However, the stock market crashed less than eight months after Dave joined the McGraw-Hill payroll. The company’s fortunes declined along with the economy as circulations dropped and some magazines disappeared entirely. McGraw-Hill laid off large numbers of editorial and business personnel, and Dave and the others who remained received significantly reduced salaries.7
David Johnson Leisk, ca. 1930s. Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Like many members of his generation, Dave turned left. He joined the Book and Magazine Writers Union. He read Communist publications such as the Daily Worker and New Masses and befriended others in the movement, including Charlotte Rosswaag. He also fell in love with her.
Crockett Johnson, “Harriet Here Is Practically an Authority on Communists. She Writes Pieces about Them in the New Yorker,” New Masses, 17 April 1934. Image courtesy of Tamiment Library, New York University. Used by permission of International Publishers, New York.
Like Dave’s mother, Charlotte was a strong-willed German. Born in 1908, Charlotte emigrated to the United States with her family in 1915. Her father, Adolph, worked as a diamond cutter for a jewelry factory, while her Polish-born mother, Veronica, both kept house and cleaned others’ houses. According to Mary Elting Folsom, who knew Dave and Charlotte during the 1930s, Charlotte had a “rather plain, very lively face” and “was always laughing.” She was free-thinking and plain-spoken and shared Dave’s progressive politics. Charlotte could be blunt, but her sense of humor softened the edges of her frankness. All in all, Charlotte was “a very pleasant, laughing person, but a tough lady.” By the mid-1930s, Dave and Charlotte were married and living with their two dogs in a garden apartment on or near Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She was a city social worker, and Dave continued to do magazine layout for McGraw-Hill.8
Dave met Mary Elting; her future husband, Franklin “Dank” Folsom; and other radicals through the Book and Magazine Writers Union. Elting, a magazine editor and later prolific a children’s author, cofounded the union with Viking editor David Zablodowsky, McBride editor Elizabeth Morrow “Betty” Bacon, editor Alex Taylor, and others. Through the union, Dave also befriended Daily Worker journalist Sender Garlin and TASS editor Joe Freeman.9
“Aw, be a sport. Tell the Newsreel Audience You Still Have Faith in the Lawd and Good Old Franklin D.,” New Masses, 28 August 1934; reprinted in Robert Forsythe, Redder Than the Rose (New York: Covici, Friede, 1935). Used by permission of International Publishers, New York.
Freeman also served on the editorial board for New Masses, and Crockett Johnson began to contribute to the Communist publication, which had just begun appearing weekly. His first cartoon appeared in the magazine on 17 April 1934 and mocks self-professed experts on communists. Three months later, New Masses printed another cartoon in which Johnso
n skewers President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his concern with the well-being of the rich. Billionaire industrialist J. P. Morgan reclines on a deck chair on a luxury liner, the Corsair, a name that connects Morgan to piracy. A young man delivers a message: “Radiogram, Mr. Morgan. The White House wants to know are you better off than you were last year?”
In 1932 and 1933, 24 percent of Americans were unemployed, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. Though the unemployment rate would drop to 21 percent in 1934, the nascent New Deal had yet to produce major results. It was a time when people went on hunger marches, when police shot strikers, and when general work stoppages shut down major U.S. cities. As Michael Denning writes, “The year of the general strikes—1934—was also the year young poets and writers proclaimed themselves ‘proletarians’ and ‘revolutionaries.’”10 Johnson announced his sympathy with the proletarians and revolutionaries. In another cartoon commenting on the wave of strikes that swept the United States during 1934, a young lady at a cocktail party asks a young man, “Was it Marx, Lenin, or Gen. [Hugh] Johnson [a supposedly neutral mediator in a walkout by San Francisco longshoremen] who said: ‘The general strike is quite another matter’?” Johnson mocks a bourgeoisie that in its ignorance confuses revolutionary thinkers with the general whose comments aided the suppression of the strikers. Taking on the Hearst press, a May 1935 cartoon has a secretary from Hearst’s International News Service hand an article back to its author, saying, “Mr. Hearst says he’ll buy your farm articles if you’ll just change ‘Arkansas,’ ‘Louisiana,’ and ‘California’ and so on, to Soviet Russia.”
He signed his first cartoons simply “Johnson.” By August 1934, he began signing them “C. Johnson,” sometimes reverting to “Johnson” and once to “C. J. Johnson.” Whatever name appeared on the image itself, New Masses nearly always printed his byline as “Crockett Johnson,” the public debut of his pseudonym. The first cartoon to bear that name was published on 7 August 1934 and showed a wealthy capitalist wife complaining, “Just because your greedy workmen decide to go on strike I can’t have a new Mercedes. Somehow it doesn’t seem fair.” Thoughtful, soft-spoken art editor Dave Leisk had become radical cartoonist Crockett Johnson.
5
FIRST DRAFT
wits
stars
tough and terrible times
two boiled potatoes
and you in my bed
—RUTH KRAUSS, “Poem for the Depression” (1960)
While Dave and Charlotte were making friends with leftists in Greenwich Village, Ruth and Lionel were living nearby, in the West Village. She was at 325 West Twelfth Street (between Greenwich and Hudson), and he was two blocks north, at 78 Horatio Street (between Washington and Greenwich). At least, those were the addresses they gave to the Coast Guard in November 1934.
In 1934, Lionel and Ruth decided to travel down to Baltimore by boat for Thanksgiving. They joined writer and artist Richard Barry, who was taking his forty-foot cabin cruiser, the Henry S., to Florida and would stop in Baltimore along the way. The trio embarked on the evening of 24 November but got only as far as Long Branch, New Jersey, before the Henry S. ran out of gas and began to drift south toward Asbury Park. Barry took a gasoline tank and set off in the cruiser’s dory in search of fuel. But rough surf overturned his little boat, and “Mr. Barry was so exhausted by his efforts to reach shore that he was taken to hospital.” The Coast Guard ultimately rescued Ruth and Lionel.1
Ruth’s years with Lionel were exciting and difficult. Born in July 1905 on a Los Angeles farm, Lionel White moved east with his family as a child. His father worked for automobile manufacturers in Cleveland and later in Buffalo, where Lionel grew up with his twin brother, Harold, and sister, Betty. At eighteen, Lionel fell in love with and married a beautiful, volatile young Russian émigré named Julie. After a couple of years as a police reporter for newspapers in Ohio, he and Julie moved to New York, where he worked as a rewrite man and sports editor for several different papers. He was a gifted storyteller as well as a self-described drunk. Julie, too, was a heavy drinker, prone to leaving home for a few days on drinking binges. After taking off on one of these episodes, she simply failed to return. When Ruth came into his life, Lionel was writing and editing stories for pulp magazines. Following Lionel’s lead, Ruth began to write pulp adventure as well as detective stories, although she apparently published these works under a pseudonym, probably because pulps were considered a sensational venue not suitable for women writers. In the mid-1930s, the number of pulp magazines peaked at more than two hundred, and many writers tried their hand at the genre.2
It was a precarious existence, and Ruth and Lionel moved frequently, living in Dutchess County, New York; Bernardsville and Pittstown, New Jersey; and in small towns along the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But the two were in love and decided to marry in the fall of 1935. Her mother, her aunt, and possibly her stepfather drove up to Philadelphia for the wedding on 25 November. In anticipation of meeting Ruth’s well-to-do relatives, Ruth and Lionel polished their car with bacon fat and bought a hat for Lionel and a four-dollar ring for Ruth. Donning the best clothes they could gather, Ruth and Lionel drove to Philadelphia, married, and immediately drove back to return her wedding band. They needed the four dollars more.3
Their early married life was difficult. Ruth later wrote, “We were literally ‘broke’—we’d get up some mornings—nothing in the house—no coffee, no salt, no soap, no eggs, no nothing.” The winter of 1935–36 was bitterly cold, and “we had 3 fires going in 1 room—a fireplace, a pot-bellied stove, and a ‘cook-stove.’” Ruth’s mother had no idea of her daughter’s financial circumstances and sent the young couple oriental rugs, which they hung on the ceiling and walls to keep the cold out. They slept huddled together in their clothes. The cottage lacked indoor plumbing, so Ruth and Lionel bathed in the river. To comb her hair in the mornings, Ruth first had to “unfreeze the water-container”; her newly combed hair would quickly freeze, “stand[ing] up stiff with ice like spikes.” They washed their clothes with water hauled from the river with a bucket on a rope. In March 1936, rising temperatures, melting snow, and an abundance of rain combined to cause flooding along the Delaware River that killed more than a hundred people and injured four thousand. The water topped the cabin’s roof, but Ruth and Lionel had already fled to higher ground.4
Despite the tribulations, Ruth enjoyed her bohemian years. When her mother sent packages of coffee and tins of caviar, Lionel and Ruth would host gatherings of their neighbors, all of whom were in similar financial straits. And as Ruth later wrote in her “Poem for the Depression” (1960), she may have had only “two boiled potatoes,” but she did have someone to share her bed.5
In 1938, however, Ruth discovered that Lionel had never divorced his first wife and was already seeing another woman, Anna Maher. Then living in New Jersey at “a small store house on a great Estate belonging to a man I had once had an affair with,” Ruth learned that Lionel “had ‘committed bigamy’ with me.” Heartbroken but hanging on to her marriage, Ruth went with Lionel back to New York City, where they checked into Greenwich Village’s Marlton Hotel. Determined to drive Ruth away from him, Lionel came up with a convincing lie. Walking east along Eighth Street, he told her that Maher was carrying his child. Ruth became so upset that she literally fell into the gutter. Only then did she decide to divorce Lionel.6
Ruth moved into a fourth-floor apartment at 36 West Tenth Street and slowly began to regain her bearings. The building’s owner, an older woman, lived on the second floor and frequently visited Ruth to chat. The landlady gradually furnished the room with a “small but comfortable compact armchair” with a “tiny diamond-shaped patch” on its upholstery, an “old-fashioned” green wing chair, and a new lamp with a chipped china base. When the room was relatively empty, Ruth felt empty, but as it filled, she grew comfortable and found solace in her new home: “I came to cherish its calm. If I had been out, I would look forward as I came along the street, to the awaren
ess of entering it.” Eventually, “just sitting in my room became an affirmation to me. The coffee table and the two armchairs before the black fireplace were particularly good to look at…. I enjoyed so much sitting in the small yellow armchair with a cup of coffee before me on the table and a book or paper to read.”7
A few months later, Ruth boarded a ship for England, though she had no specific plans for what she would do when she arrived there. Another passenger, a “dopey guy” named Elwyn, suggested that she stay in London with a friend of his. Joan, a twenty-something teacher at the University of London, had a flat off of Trafalgar Square in St. Martin’s Mews that became Ruth’s home base during her stay in England.8
Ruth and her “newly acquired rucksack” joined two sixteen-year-old Cockney lads, one couple, and a German refugee who was studying at the University of London and “spent a week wandering … from hostel to hostel” around southern England. The episode later reminded Ruth of J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions (1929), in which a group of people from diverse backgrounds meet and form a traveling theater troupe. Ruth subsequently set off on her own, traveling by bicycle, on foot, or by bus when she was “sick or it was too cold and raining or [she] was too tired to go on.”9
Ruth Krauss and unidentified person, ca. 1939. Image courtesy of HarperCollins Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
In Kent, she spent a weekend with the Newnham family in “a wonderful and a slightly crazy” cottage. The family’s five children included a college girl who brought “the ‘intelligentsia’ and the Artistic and journalistic crowd” to the house. Ruth arrived at night and was shown to a room with two beds. A girl was asleep in one bed, so Ruth climbed into the other. When she awoke, her bed had three people in it, and the other bed had four. “It turned out this was the girl’s side [of the hall]. Across the hall was the boy’s side.” A pup tent in the yard housed another five people. Though Ruth spent “a pleasant dizzy week-end” with the Newnhams, she was also keenly aware of the hardships they faced. The family raised chickens and vegetables, bought milk from local farms, and ate red meat only “when guests bought it.” Mr. Newnham had not held a regular job since World War I. The weekend that Ruth was there, the Newnhams had a job picking hops for beer, for which they were paid a shilling a bin, “the bin being a rather huge affair and hops pretty frail things with which to fill it. I doubt if they made a shilling a day.” Twelve-year-old Mary worked “in a florist shop in Tunbridge Wells to which she traveled daily by bicycle and bus, several miles by bike before the bus. Her weekly salary was something like twelve shillings.” Mary “could not continue her schooling because she fainted each time she took the tests into what would be our equivalent of public high-school.” To attend a nearby vocational school, where she could learn the more lucrative skills of stenography and typing, Mary would have needed to pay a guinea per year, which her family could not afford. After leaving Kent, Ruth sent the Newnhams the money to send Mary to school.10
