Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  The many books by Will Durant (1885-1981) popularizing philosophy and history, especially the Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-volumed The Story of Civilization written with his wife, Ariel, began as a series of lectures at the Center. President Ford awarded the two of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, the highest civilian honor in the country, an honor surely much disparaged by the anarchists. Durant never claimed, however, to be an anarchist, but was always sympathetic to their cause. He was pleasantly surprised by his first encounter with them at the Center.

  I looked for long whiskers, disheveled hair, flowing ties, unwashed necks, and unpaid debts. I had been led to believe that most of these men and women were criminals, enemies of all social order, given to punctuating their arguments with dynamite. I was amazed to find myself, for the most part, among philosophers and saints.”

  Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), author of The Spirit of the Ghetto in 1902, was also part of the Ferrer Center group. Influenced by William James and Santayana at Harvard, Hapgood also published The Spirit of Labor in 1907, about the intellectual and political life of radicals in Chicago, and in 1909, The Anarchist Woman. This third book concerns, in part, a couple who holds a salon attended by Goldman and Berkman, where everyone ends up kissing one another. In describing Marie, the anarchist, Hapgood could have been writing about Ridge: “The intensity of her nature showed in her anaemic body and her large eyes, dark and glowing, but more than all in the way she had of making everything her own, no matter from what source it came.” In 1919 he published The Story of a Lover, about his open marriage. Called “varietism” at the time, the arrangement produced a series of provocative letters between Emma Goldman, her lover Ben Reitman, a lesbian interested in Goldman, and Hapgood, who had his eye on Ben. Hapgood was on the bill with Ridge in the 1918-1919 season of the Provincetown Players.

  As soon as Ridge had the Ferrer Center functioning, the anarchists wanted to get a Modern School going. Instead of training children for society, they wanted them to learn values that would transcend that society, and at most, encourage them to rebel against it. One hundred sixty-three people attended a banquet at Tenth Street and Second Avenue on June 30, 1911, to contribute to the financing of the school, with fundraising speeches by Goldman and others, including Henrietta Rodman, who was then campaigning against the firing of pregnant teachers in public schools. John Coryell, the author of the Nick Carter detective series who had trained wild Manchurian ponies in China and worked as a journalist, was appointed the Modern School’s first teacher, along with his wife Abby. They lasted only a few weeks in the chaotic atmosphere of children and anarchy.

  David Lawson traveled to New Jersey to invite 26-year-old Will Durant—only a year older than Lawson—to take over the Modern School. As Durant described it:

  It was Dawson [Lawson]—red-haired, brown-eyed, bare-headed, open-hearted Dawson—one of those who through thick and thin remained loyal to their faith in a free world. He embraced me in the most passionate French style.

  ‘What luck! He cried. Do you know I’ve been hunting all over Arlington and Newark for you?’

  Ridge met them at the Center. His description of her is the first of many that emphasize her intensity. “I stood in amazement before this strange and fascinating woman.”

  She was so frail that her energy made me uncomfortable; at any moment it seemed that her physical resources would be exhausted, and she would fall to the floor consumed in the fire of her own spirit. Every word she spoke dripped with feeling. Her large dark eyes looked out on the world with a mixture of passionate resoluteness and brooding love; she would remake this sorry scheme of things whether it consented or rebelled. I found later that she was a poetess, whose lines trembled with the ardor of the soul that made them. It was fitting that a poetess should be the head of a group of splendid dreamers; but it was extraordinary that this sensitive plant should be the director of any association whatever. I liked her so much, after a few minutes with her, that I was prejudiced in favor of anything she might ask.

  It was love at first sight, according to Paul Avrich. Durant writes:

  ‘We are organizing the Freedom [sic] Modern School,’ [Lola] said… ‘To give a libertarian education to ten or fifteen children. It will be a glorious experiment; and if it succeeds, it will affect the practice of every school in America. We want you to take charge of it. We can’t pay you well; and if you come to us you will be losing something in security and worldly position. But we thought you were the kind of man who would dare to make the sacrifice.’

  How could I escape this inveigling compliment? I wanted to say yes; it would be an exciting game, this trial of teaching without compulsion or authority; many times I had felt the absurdity and the inhumanity of the discipline which I had been forced to impose upon my pupils in the public schools. But was I ready to associate myself with the exponents of the most extreme of all movements in the world of politics and industry?

  ‘You see,’ I said, ‘I’m not an anarchist.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she smiled, confidently; ‘you will be.’

  Durant came very close to converting to anarchism, just as Ridge had predicted. Rewording Oscar Wilde, he ponders: “What if the best school, like the best government, was that which governed least?” and also: “We would try education by happiness.”

  This philosophy of educational anarchy was sorely tried by the students. There were nine of them at the start. Bercovici’s son mentions in his memoir that he, along with the other students, would chase Durant around a fire in the back yard and whoever caught him would have the privilege of burning his clothes. Durant bought them off with “bribes of bananas.” “Lola Ridge,” writes Bercovici, “fulfilled the specialized functions of frying [the] bananas and telling charming stories.” She was also managing the day-to-day business of keeping the school together. When one of the students decided not to return, she wrote a letter to his father, asserting that the child was a sort of anchor to the school. In keeping with anarchist principles, the children raised funds for the Mexican revolution and protested in January 1911 against the “execution of Denjiro Kotoku and a group of Japanese anarchists in Tokyo.” Emphasizing intellectual freedom rather than rote learning, Durant lectured on anything that came into his mind, including “the facts of sex psychology,” and surprised everyone by marrying his 15-year-old pupil. The judge at the wedding told Durant he couldn’t sleep with her until she was 16. Bercovici’s son remembered the public school he attended after the Modern School with great disgust: “No discussions on sex and the revolution, no rioting, no excitement.”

  Let men be free!

  All violence is but the agony

  Of caged things fighting blindly for the right

  To be and breathe and burn their little hour.

  Ridge’s poem “Freedom” was published in the June 1911 issue of Mother Earth, six months after the Modern School opened its doors. The issue also contained a notice of the first anniversary of the Ferrer Association, the banquet celebrating the founding of the Modern School, Leonard Abbott’s article “The Ideals of Libertarian Education” that cites Dewey as an influence, and a piece by Alexander Berkman on teaching economics to children. Freedom at any cost was Ridge’s credo and, free of husband and child in the land of the free, under the tutelage of the country’s most famous anarchist, she wanted to further extend freedom’s reach. On top of her duties at the Ferrer Center and the Modern School, she proposed to publish a magazine. Goldman’s Mother Earth would do for the Ferrer Center and the anarchists, but what about the Modern School? After a year at 6 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, the Center and the school moved to East 12th Street where Ridge “started, edited, made up and saw to the printing, circulating and distributing of a magazine, the MODERN SCHOOL.” The magazine’s masthead read, “To Retain the World for the Masters They Cripple the Souls of the Children.” David Lawson designed the cover for its premiere issue in 1911. It shows a photograph of Durant and the students, two of them
with black masks pulled over their faces, and one child throwing a punch. Durant looks a bit dismayed. Like many of the influential magazines of the period, The Modern School contained fiction and poetry as well as essays promulgating its political views. Eventually it became “one of the most beautiful cultural journals ever published in America, rich alike in content and design,” according to Avrich. Although the early issues were more like a school bulletin, they gave Ridge her first experience as an editor.

  In 1914, three anarchists who frequented the Ferrer Center died on Lexington Avenue in an explosion of bombs intended for John D. Rockefeller. The soft-spoken Ferrer president Lawrence Abbott addressed a crowd of 15,000 New Yorkers anxious for explanation but told them “the real danger lies always in suppression, not expression.” As a result of the bad publicity around the bombing, Alden Freeman, the son of a Standard Oil millionaire and a homosexual attracted by the movement’s support of all sexual expression, withdrew his funds from the Center and school. Although the school had moved uptown, it was forced then to relocate in New Jersey where it persevered for another 40 years, becoming “one of the most radical experiments ever to take place in the history of American education.” The Center itself soon closed.

  By then Ridge was long gone. After the second issue of The Modern School in 1912, she and Lawson abruptly left New York to travel around the country for five years. Was her leaving a result of a disagreement with Goldman? “There was something of the stern authoritarian in her [Goldman] which made a strident discord with her paeans to liberty,” writes Will Durant. “Where she could not dominate she could not work.” As Ridge wrote in her 1940 diary: “We parted spiritually—in silence—neither speaking of that which had parted us. It was only that she could brook no independence of action in any associate—indeed she did not want associates but disciples—and I realized sadly I was no disciple.”

  Perhaps Ridge was also uncomfortable about working at the Modern School. How did she feel, surrounded by children every day, debating how their education should proceed, while her son was living in California, being taught—or not—at the orphanage? Her soon-to-be best friend, the novelist Evelyn Scott, gave her own son very little schooling, and when he became an adult he blamed his mother for the extreme difficulty he had finding work without an education. Perhaps Ridge’s son was lucky to have had at least some schooling at the orphanage. Surely Ridge wouldn’t have wanted him taught formally after her exposure to the Modern School precepts. In 1914 she published an essay criticizing public school education that was either hypocritical or filled with buried guilt:

  In the first place, no gardener would think of giving each plant the same amount of air and sun, and the same quality of soil. Yet this is exactly what you are doing to your children, and there are as many different kinds of children as there are different kinds of flowers. Why pay more attention to the cultivation of a vegetable than to the development of a human being? Each child requires individual attention, individual understanding, and individual mental food.

  Why didn’t she send for Keith in 1911 when the Modern School first opened? Davy was working, and she had a job. It wasn’t until 1914 that she saw him again. “In New Orleans,” Lawson remembers in his interview for Anarchist Voices, “we sent for her son who was living out West.”

  Chapter 10

  “Small Towns Crawling Out of Their Green Shirts”

  Do you remember

  Honey-melon moon

  Dripping thick sweet light

  Where Canal Street saunters off by herself

  among quiet trees?

  And the faint decayed patchouli—

  Fragrance of New Orleans

  Like a dead tube rose

  Upheld in the warm air…

  Miraculously whole. (Sun-up 65)

  When Keith arrived in New Orleans sometime after January 21, 1914, he was 14. Ridge must have kept in contact with him, despite all the business with assumed names, and somehow money was found to transport him to her. The suitor he met, David Lawson, was only 28. He and Ridge had already been traveling the countryside together for two years. Did the boy Keith argue with Lawson as Gladys Bernand-Wehner, Keith’s daughter, born two decades later, suggested? Time had not stopped for him, he was nearly an adult with six years of loss behind him. But even in the grow-up-fast era of 1914, it is hard to believe that a 14-year-old would want to alienate the only family he’d ever known. Did Ridge refuse to split her allegiance? The poem she published in the Bookman Anthology eight years later puts a child in a curiously fatal Ben Franklin-like situation, and the kite he’s holding is hers.

  Child and Wind

  Wind tramping among the clouds

  That scatter like sheep—

  Wind blowing out the stars

  Like lights in open windows—

  Wind doubling up your fists at the tall trees

  And haling fields by the grass—

  Keep away from the telegraph wires

  With my kite in your hand!

  In New Orleans, the family lived together, perhaps in “a small house on a side street/off Canal Street in New Orleans/near the Catholic churchyard,” a location that Ridge mentions in a poem written much later. They then traveled to upper New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, and Detroit. Were they helping Goldman on her tour? In 1915 Goldman spoke three times in Detroit on such topics as “Frederick Nietzsche, the Intellectual Storm Center of the European War,” “The Philosophy of Atheism,” and “The Right of the Child Not to Be Born.” She also lectured 18 times in Missouri between 1912 and 1915, spoke 13 times in Albany in 1915, spoke 26 times in Ohio between 1912 and 1917, and 32 times in Pennsylvania. Is it a mere coincidence that these are many of the same locations that Ridge visited? Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t easy. “I know we’ve done it together before—when I was able to scrub, wash and work my hands off, [but I] can’t do these things now,” Ridge writes years later to Lawson.

  Surely they traveled by train.

  Train Window

  Small towns

  Crawling out of their green shirts…

  Tubercular towns

  Coughing a little in the dawn…

  And the church…

  There is always a church

  With its natty spire

  And the vestibule—

  That’s where they whisper:

  Tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz…

  How many codes for a wireless whisper—

  And corn flatter than it should be

  And those chits of leaves

  Gadding with every wind?

  Small towns

  From Connecticut to Maine:

  Tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz… (Sun-up 52)

  When they settled in Detroit sometime in 1917, it was a beautiful Midwestern city in the midst of tripling its population, with musicians playing on steamers that took city-dwellers to island parks, and wide avenues lined with striking hotels and office buildings. Ford proclaimed the $5 day in 1914, upping his laborers’ wages dramatically, and a year later, the one-millionth car came off the assembly line. In the face of America’s involvement with the approaching war, Ford became a “fighting pacifist,” and chartered an ocean liner to cross the dangerous Atlantic to try to help prevent the conflict. Perhaps Ridge became a “fighting anarchist,” and assisted at the Detroit Ferrer School, which was then at the height of its anarchist presence.

  In 1917 she and Davy left Keith in a Detroit boardinghouse, never to see him again. According to his daughter Gladys, Keith wrote to Ridge while at vocational school, but those letters have not been shared. Gladys said they were full of declarations of love. Keith was by then seventeen, old enough to stay behind and get a job. Perhaps he went to Cass Tech High School, a progressive trade school located in the middle of the city, with brand new facilities in 1912. Employees actually paid students to attend, which would have relieved Ridge of providing for him. Keith was an avid reader of the “Electrical Experimenter” that ran an ad for t
he New York Electrical School whose “graduates…have proved themselves to be the only men that are fully qualified to satisfy EVERY demand of the Electrical Profession,” and asked his mother if he could attend. Its address was 39 West 17th Street, not far from where Ridge eventually settled. She must have discouraged him.

  Although Ridge intended to visit Detroit en route to Chicago in 1919, “staying with people I know,” there is no indication that she visited him. Later in her life, she avoided traveling to Los Angeles and San Francisco because going there would be “too painful.” She alludes to her son only twice in the letters held at Smith. In the first, he is mentioned by her friend Evelyn Scott in response to something (he wouldn’t even care if I were dead?) Ridge had written in 1930:

  I don’t want you [Ridge] to dream of being dead, even with the pain smoothed from your dear forehead, though I think Keith may be looking at you even now in a way to smooth some of it out. I’m afraid he has your own rather demoniacal pride and would keep at long range even so, but I can’t but believe he is old enough now to have read and realized something of what is in you and has been so wonderfully expressed. I think your child would have to recognize his mother in beauty.

  Scott tried to console Ridge by suggesting he would be proud of her, how she hoped her own son would feel. It must have been easier for Ridge to think that Keith was dead than to have him hate her. In a letter to David Lawson six years later, Ridge herself writes:

  I remember the night of August 4th 1914…a warm, fragrant, sultry night in New Orleans…the doors and windows open…my little boy… my dead boy (yes I know now that he is dead; it is one of the things I have not told you; the knowledge came to me here in Mexico, last November) ran out on his always willing feet and brought in the paper…I remember the great black headlines “Ghosts”…as Ibson’s [sic] Helen muttered.

  It doesn’t sound like a letter you’d send to someone who had rejected your son. Ridge was writing out of maternal guilt, having been the one to reject him. In the first place, he was not a little boy in New Orleans, he was a teenager who had lived with them for three years, long years if the adolescent was not happy with the arrangement. But Ridge persisted with a fantasy of the small boy she had abandoned in California. He may as well have been dead to her after such a separation, he was a child she could never recover. Why was she fabricating this dramatic scenario for Lawson?