As Zadel had hoped, Djuna took up journalism, writing articles and drawing illustrations for almost every newspaper and magazine in the city, including Harper’s. She wrote about boxers and dentists and Chinatown and the circus, interviewed Flo Ziegfeld and Mabel Dodge and Enrico Caruso. Yet she always felt journalism, and her readers, were beneath her, and many of her articles wore sardonic sneers. She wrote several tourists’ guides to Greenwich Village that were prickly with a sarcasm that mocked both the rubes and the Village. The apex of scorn may have been an article she wrote for Vanity Fair (not the one from the Pfaff’s era but the new magazine started in 1913), “What Is Good Form in Dying? In Which a Dozen Dainty Deaths Are Suggested for Daring Debutantes.” Djuna confessed that it was the sort of cutting wit that’s a front for deep insecurity and depression. As she wrote, “my upper lip . . . would persist in an attempt to curl, probably because I wanted to cry and wouldn’t. I felt cold because I wanted so dreadfully to feel warm.” Along the way she hurled herself into passionate romances with men and women that usually ended with her abandoned, enraged, and devastated. She got flinty with anyone who asked if she was gay, straight, or bi, once quipping that if she had sex with a horse it wouldn’t make her a horse. Late in life, when she seems to have enjoyed playing the cranky old lady, she would perplex those who’d come to revere her as a lesbian heroine by snapping her low opinions of homosexuality male and female.
The Players produced a handful of her odd and unsettling one-acts, such as Three from the Earth, in which a trio of rough country brothers (“three columns of flesh without one of the five senses”) confront a haughty “lady of leisure” about her love affair with their father, who has recently committed suicide. As with all of her writing, it’s easy to see autobiographical references embedded in its brief and jangling depiction of dysfunctional family life. Twenty years later Barnes would write of the Provincetown Playhouse, “Our destiny made us speak before we understood, write before we should and produce before we were able.”
Still, by 1918 the theater was so successful, the houses so packed, that it moved to a larger space a few doors down the block, a converted stable that became its permanent home, called the Provincetown Playhouse. Barnes later quipped that it “was always just about to be given back to the horses.” Uptowners joined the long ticket lines and theater critics wrote glowing reviews. In 1920 the premiere of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones was a giant, tumultuous success. As often happens in bohemia, mainstream success and popularity brought on a crisis of conscience within the group. Cook and others wanted to preserve the original amateur spirit, while O’Neill and younger members pressed for more professionalism. In 1922 Cook and Glaspell quit not only the theater but the entire country, moving to Greece, where Cook contracted typhus and died in 1924. Glaspell returned to Provincetown and continued to write novels and plays, earning a Pulitzer for her play Alison’s House in 1931.
With the Cooks gone, O’Neill continued to drag the theater away from its bohemian roots. By the 1924–25 season the name had changed from the Provincetown Players to the loftier Experimental Theatre, Inc., and it was staging some plays, such as Desire Under the Elms, in the legitimate Greenwich Village Theatre near Sheridan Square. That season Paul Robeson starred in O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings at the Playhouse, a succès de scandale about an interracial marriage that, as the Brooklyn Daily News quipped, earned “almost as much publicity as a murder.” The mayor wouldn’t allow black and white children to appear together in the opening scene, the theater got death threats, and a cordon of police ringed the entrance on opening night, which, in spite of everything, went off without a hitch. Newspapers around the country reported the story on their front pages.
By 1926 the company had lost the last vestiges of its casual bohemian origins. O’Neill moved on to Broadway and his own Pulitzers, others also moved their works uptown, and it was over by 1929. But another little theater in the Village had started up in 1924. Vincent Millay and others took over a former brewery and box factory near the bend on narrow Commerce Street to create the Cherry Lane Theatre, the name a pun on London’s Drury Lane. Through the rest of the century it would be an important incubator, hosting work by everyone from Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Clifford Odets to Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and David Mamet.
By the end of the 1920s hundreds of little theaters around the country offered new American and European plays, while the infiltration of the Theatre Guild and plays by the likes of Glaspell and O’Neill had brought serious contemporary drama to Broadway. After World War II, the Village’s Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater movements would show obvious roots in those first Liberal Club skits of the 1910s.
Photo Section 1
Before it was absorbed into the city, Greenwich Village was noted for its country estates, including Richmond Hill. (New York Public Library)
A pamphleteer imagines a fitting end for Tom Paine. (Library of Congress)
Edgar Allan Poe strikes a baleful pose. (Library of Congress)
The Northern Dispensary, where Poe may have been treated and HIV patients definitely weren’t. (Photograph by Christine Walker)
Ira Aldridge, the star of the African Grove. (Library of Congress)
Walt Whitman. (Library of Congress)
Jacob Riis photographed this “vile rookery” on a back lot behind Bleecker Street, circa 1890. (Museum of the City of New York)
Gay Street, once part of black Greenwich Village and later the setting for My Sister Eileen. (Photograph by Christine Walker)
Washington Square and Henry James’s “lamentable little Arch of Triumph.” (Library of Congress)
9
The Golden Age Wanes
WAY DOWN SOUTH IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
WHERE THE SPINSTERS COME FOR THRILLAGE
—Bobby Edwards
A NUMBER OF FORCES CONVERGED TO START CHANGING THE golden-age Village almost as soon as it got off the ground, scattering its players to the winds. Some were huge events outside the neighborhood: the start of the war in Europe in 1914, the United States’s entry into it in 1917, the revolution in Russia that year, and the resulting Red Scare in the United States. Some changes were ones the bohemians had brought on themselves. And as so often in the history of Manhattan, the price of real estate played a hand.
MABEL DODGE’S EUROPEAN IDYLL WITH REED IN THE SUMMER OF 1913 was to be the last time she had him to herself. On their return to the Village, Metropolitan magazine surprised him with a dream assignment: covering Pancho Villa’s guerrilla war against the government of Mexico. Where most American newspapermen sat on the U.S. side of the border and filed boilerplate dispatches, Reed embedded himself, to use a term from a later era, with Villa’s campesinos, marching and riding alongside the bandit hero. The twenty-six-year-old Reed found his writer’s voice in Mexico, a clear and virile action prose.
Then came yells and hoofs drumming in the rear. About a hundred yards behind ran little Gil Tomas, the ends of his gay serape flying out straight. And about a hundred yards behind him rode two black men with crossed bandoliers and rifles in their hands. They shot. Gil Tomas raised a ghastly little Indian face to me, and ran on. Again they shot. One bullet z-z-z-m-m-d by my head. The boy staggered, stopped, wheeled, and doubled suddenly into the chaparral. They turned after him. I saw the foremost horse’s hoofs strike him. The colorados jerked their mounts to their haunches over him, shooting down again and again.
Reed’s articles thrilled Metropolitan’s readers. The New York World and other newspapers picked them up. By the time they were collected and rushed out as the book Insurgent Mexico in 1914 Reed was a star, the most popular war correspondent in the country, hailed as America’s Kipling. His days with Dodge, and his wild Village youth, drew to a close.
Dodge soured on the Village scene herself by the end of 1914. Reed had left her, and all the talk at the Evenings now bored her. During the next two years she was increasingly out of the city—in Europe, up the Hudson, in Provincetow
n. She met and married the artist Maurice Sterne, and in 1917 they left New York for good. They fled about as far away from the city and everything it represented as they could, resettling in what was then the tiny, isolated village of Taos, New Mexico. Sterne grew bored there after a while and returned east, but Mabel settled in and stayed for the rest of her life. Like some hippies later, she renounced modern society, got back to nature, and embraced Native Americans’ traditional tribal culture, so different from the rampant individualism of the Village. She divorced Sterne and married a Pueblo Indian, Tony Luhan, in 1923. This fourth marriage ended only in her death in 1962. She became the doyenne of the growing arts community in Taos. It was there that Willa Cather finally spent some time with her, but mostly with Tony, who drove her all over the desert, the two of them appreciating each other’s quiet ways.
Relations between actual anarchists like Berkman and the Village’s armchair radicals broke down in 1914. In Ludlow, Colorado, the Western Federation of Miners, supported by the IWW, struck against the Rockefeller family’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation. In an effort to break the strike, the Rockefellers threw the miners and their families out of their company-owned housing. They survived a bitter winter in a tent camp. In April, after a series of armed skirmishes, state militia and company-paid toughs mounted a full-scale attack, burning tents and firing machine guns at anyone moving. Nineteen men, women, and children—or twenty-two, or thirty-three, depending on the source—died. Back in New York, Upton Sinclair heard about the massacre and was outraged. He marched down to the Standard Oil offices at 26 Broadway intending to confront John D. Rockefeller Jr., but was refused entry. That evening he gave a fiery speech at the Liberal Club—though it’s an indication of how the Villagers’ radical ardor had cooled that few other than Lincoln Steffens attended—and was arrested the next day leading a picket line outside Standard Oil. A few mornings later, a young woman entered the building carrying a loaded pistol, shouting that she intended to assassinate Rockefeller. Now worried about what he’d started, Sinclair gave another speech entitled “Shall We Murder Rockefeller?” to an angry crowd at the uptown Socialist Club. Echoing Tom Paine’s “Kill the king but not the man,” he argued that the corporation, not the individual, was the enemy.
Berkman, the East Side anarchists, and the Wobblies in town disagreed. In June three anarchists died along with a tenement neighbor in Jewish Harlem when a bomb they were constructing, intended for the Rockefeller home, prematurely exploded. Berkman hailed the martyrs but shocked Village radicals distanced themselves from the workers’ movement. Kemp later wrote: “I avowed revolutionary principles, and wrote many poems for the Cause. But inwardly I was not so sure of the innocency of the proletariat . . . I was not so sure but that the regime of the Proletariat, when it had its turn, would not bring upon humanity abuses more atrocious than any that saw day under the present system of exploiters and exploited.” Emma Goldman, who’d worked hard to be the personal bridge between the hotheaded anarchists and the Village intellectuals with their connections to funding and media, was disconsolate at the breakup.
The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 dealt a tremendous blow to the hopes and dreams that Dodge had called the “splendid plan.” Rather than a new millennium, the world seemed to be sliding back into the barbarous nationalism and imperialism of the previous century. The Masses stood squarely against it. Long before the United States entered the conflict, the magazine’s writers and illustrators condemned the Great War over and over as a territorial conflict fought by the young and poor entirely for the benefit of kings and capitalists. Reed went over as war correspondent for Metropolitan, reporting from the trenches on all sides and all over Europe. Asked what he thought the war was being fought over, he gave a one-word answer: “Profits.” He saw nothing but misery and degradation for the working-class and peasant soldiers maimed and killed in utterly futile actions. When Metropolitan rejected some of his dispatches as too left wing, The Masses published them.
Woodrow Wilson kept America out of the war through 1915, despite 128 Americans dying when a German U-boat sank the British luxury liner Lusitania that May. Liberals and, more reluctantly, the farther left supported his successful reelection campaign in 1916, hoping he would stay the course. But in January 1917 Germany gave U-boats full rein to sink any ships in the Atlantic, including American commercial vessels. Wilson severed diplomatic relations and, in April, declared war on Germany. The staff of The Masses found themselves in a quandary. Some, like Reed and illustrators Sloan and Young, remained staunchly antiwar. Reed exhorted American workers not to fight this capitalists’ war for them but to follow the lead of their Russian comrades. In the fall, he and Bryant, funded by Eastman, went to Petrograd to spend six months reporting on, and becoming part of, the Bolsheviks’ revolution. (Bryant’s book Six Red Months in Russia would come out in 1918, but it would be overshadowed by Reed’s hugely successful Ten Days That Shook the World in 1919.) Others at the magazine, however, concluded that now that America was in it, it was their patriotic duty to support the American boys being sent Over There. George Bellows even drew recruitment posters for the government.
With the U.S. entry into the war and the Bolsheviks’ disturbing coup, the government moved to strike back against radicals and extremists in America. Congress passed the Espionage Act, making it a crime to interfere with war recruitment efforts, in 1917; in 1918 it added the startlingly harsh and broad Sedition Act, which made it a crime simply to criticize the government. In the summer of 1917 the U.S. Post Office seized the August issue of The Masses under the Espionage Act, primarily because of Reed’s writings. The magazine took the government to court and the periodical’s lawyers had the good fortune to argue their case before the liberal judge Learned Hand, who agreed with them that dissent was not espionage. He ordered the post office to mail the issue. The government instantly found a conservative judge to block Hand’s ruling. Meanwhile, when the September issue was presented for mailing, postal service authorities informed the editors that their second-class mailing privileges were about to be revoked. Because the August issue hadn’t been mailed, the argument went, The Masses was no longer a regularly distributed periodical permitted by law to use the second-class mails.
With two issues now held up, Eastman et al. decided that whatever they tried the government would figure out how to prevent them from selling their magazine, and they soon ceased publishing. The government pursued them even after the magazine died. In April 1918 it brought Eastman, Dell (with Vincent Millay at his side), Reed (still in Russia), and others to trial under the new Sedition Act. The judge summarily excused one young woman accused of sedition for writing a poem in praise of Emma Goldman. He read the free verse and decided it wasn’t a poem at all; therefore she was innocent. For the others the trial ended in a hung jury, and so did the retrial several months later.
Eastman started up a successor to The Masses, called the Liberator, in 1918 and continued to publish Reed’s overseas dispatches. In 1926 the Liberator would morph into the New Masses, with O’Neill, Dos Passos, Sinclair, and Hemingway as early contributors. It looked and read like the old Masses for a few years, then turned less literary and more doctrinaire as Eastman and other originators dropped out and hard-line Marxists took over. As the failures and horrors of Stalinism became known, Eastman’s socialist ardor cooled. By the 1950s he’d completed a transit from the left to the right. He supported Joseph McCarthy, helped William F. Buckley Jr. start the conservative National Review in 1955, and wrote Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, published that year. He died in 1969.
The government moved against socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies on a broad front. Eugene V. Debs was arrested in 1918 for a speech exhorting workers to avoid the draft. He got an extraordinarily hard ten-year sentence and had his citizenship revoked. He would win almost a million sympathy votes running as the Socialist candidate for president from behind bars in 1920. The winner, Warren Harding, pardoned him in 1921. He died i
n 1926. The American Communist Party (CPUSA), founded in 1919, rented office space on West Thirteenth Street in the Village; over the next few years “too Thirteenth Street” became newspaper and magazine editors’ code for articles they found too left wing to print. In the spring and summer of that year terrorist bombs, some sent through the mails, exploded all up and down the East Coast. One went off outside the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C., blowing out the windows of the house across the street, where Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt lived. Palmer retaliated with sweeping raids against leftist organizations, known as the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare. In a few months his agents arrested ten thousand leftists. Haywood, Goldman, and Berkman were all imprisoned. Mother Earth shut down. The government deported eight hundred foreign-born radicals, including Goldman and Berkman.
Reed and Bryant continued to speak in support of the Bolsheviks and continued to be charged with sedition by the government. Reed helped form the splinter Communist Labor Party and sneaked back to Russia through White army lines to ask for the Comintern’s official support; instead, Moscow directed the CLP and CPUSA to merge. Trying to get back out of Russia with this directive in early 1920, Reed was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Finns. On his release, a physical and emotional wreck, he returned to Petrograd. Louise meanwhile made her own extremely hazardous journey into Russia, joining him in Moscow. He died of typhus that October and was given a hero’s funeral, the first American interred in the Kremlin.
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