by Jane Brown
Alice was in no danger for Harriman was noted for his care of his own ‘perfect family’ who accompanied him on tours to Alaska and Japan, and especially proud of Mary, who had been to California with him dealing with Union Pacific labour problems.31
Mary Harriman introduced Dorothy to her Junior League, an association of friends who volunteered to work with the emigrants in the settlements of the Lower East Side.32 She was eased in, as other Leaguers were, with fundraising sales of work and ‘entertainments’ but the autumn of 1906 found her on committees discussing women’s health and children’s welfare, and projects for housing nurses and teachers, which the League funded. Dorothy knew she had a great deal to learn, so she enrolled for courses explaining employment laws and workplace regulations, and at the same time she discovered her natural efficiency: she was a stickler for time-keeping and her confidence in speaking meant that she blossomed as the most naturally talented Madame Chairman. Her friend Ruth Morgan, a civil rights activist whom she met at Grace Church and the Colony Club, described her: ‘Dorothy always takes the hard chair and the drumstick – with which she conducts the meeting.’33 She faced up to the harsh lessons of charity work; she visited a school on the Lower East Side with $500 the League had raised for food, but came away in despair, realising how quickly it would be used up and the children would be hungry again. Playing ‘lady bountiful’ was of little use and social work of a more serious kind was needed. She confessed, ‘I am filled with that terribly absorbing desire to work, and help, and carry through something which may be useful – I can’t help realizing every night how much more I might have done.’34
Mary Harriman also told her of the two greatest pioneers in America, Lillian Wald and Jane Addams. Dorothy went to see Miss Wald at her Henry Street Nurses’ Settlement in the Lower (lowest) East Side and found her very encouraging. They liked each other immediately and became the best of friends. The Settlement housed twenty-two public health nurses who went out into the streets to minister to the emigrants’ physical and mental ills of the most horrific kinds – or simply to help with the difficulties of adjusting to life in America.35 Cooking and sewing classes and advice on housing and employment were available and Miss Wald was working towards a holiday scheme and a music settlement. Dorothy – only too aware that she was useless at nursing, cooking or needlework – was able to work regular sessions in the Advice Centre, a further spur to her learning about children’s welfare, employment laws and women’s trade unions. ‘Was there anything else she could do?’ Yes, Miss Wald had long wanted an Emergency Fund they could dip into for things not covered by other allowances, ‘small things but worthwhile’. She wrote of a boy of sixteen with incipient consumption, earning $4 a week in a fish store, and his parents could not let him go to a sanatorium. When she managed to get him away he had no clothes to wear, and so the Fund kitted him out. He had been at the sanatorium for six weeks, improving all the while – ‘This stay in the mountains will probably save his life,’ Lillian concluded. The Fund also paid for summer picnics and Christmas presents; it was regularly accounted to Dorothy, though hardly exceeded $100 at any time.36
By the time of her twentieth birthday in January 1907 she had already learned something that so many people never learn, that in order to really help others you have to give of yourself rather more than you first imagined. Harry Whitney heard all his friends’ jokes about his ‘pink sister’ and perhaps scowled, he could do nothing; the society columns still dubbed her New York’s ‘Number One Marriageable Heiress’. Dorothy had her own conscience about loyalties and she divided her life as best she could. She was bridesmaid to her school friend May Tuckerman who married the banker Herman Kinnicutt, and to her cousin Kate Barney who married Courtland Barnes. In the June of 1907, with the Bends and Louisa, she sailed for Europe on the SS Adriatic with Russia in view and Anna Karenina in her book bag. She was attracted by the chance of seeing the seventy-nine-year-old Count Tolstoy on his estate south of Moscow where he was known to care for and educate his peasants, and the political mood was sunny that summer with liberal voices in the Duma and an Anglo-Russian entente in the making. Her visit had the blessing of the State Department, from Secretary Bacon, whose son Bob was to meet them in Moscow.
But first, there was Paris, which did nothing to quieten her doubts about her divided life. Her Book Class had just discussed Henry James’s The Ambassadors and the Master had bewitched her mind’s eye. Walking in the Tuileries, treading the ‘long dim nave’ of Notre Dame, the little pink shades that lit up the faces at restaurant tables, all the impressions of the Paris she loved were suddenly not quite what they seemed. Bits of her own life were scattered through the book:
‘We’re all looking at each other,’ says Miss Barrace, ‘and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris – dear old light!’
‘Dear old Paris!’ little Bilham echoed.
‘Everything, every one shows,’ Miss Barrace went on.
‘But for what they really are?’ Strether asked.37
In Lambert Strether’s momentary escape from the burdensome inevitabilities of his American money, Dorothy glimpsed her mother’s need for Paris. Was she herself as seemingly innocent as Jeanne de Vionnet, the girl who resembled her ‘in a white dress and a softly plumed white hat’ – were they both pawns in a game they didn’t understand? Was her dear Beatrice Bend, now entering her thirties, as doomed to modest servitude as Miss Gostrey unless she ‘landed’ a dry-as-dust lawyer? How many of the beautiful women she met had dark secrets and cruel husbands like Madame de Vionnet? And young lovers? For she supposed that Chad Newsome, with his fortune and niceness, appeared exactly like so many of her own suitors – if Chad could simulate ‘like the click of a spring’ that he was in love with one person when it was really another, how could she ever be sure?
If The Ambassadors echoed her own predicament, then by the time their train had rattled for endless miles across Europe to St Petersburg – hot and dusty and ‘so beautiful it made me shiver’ – she had stepped into Anna Karenina’s world. In the care of the American consul they were surrounded by uniformed attachés and clicking heels, their wives and daughters dressed as in some grand opera, Tolstoy’s Dolly, Kitty, Betsy and Anna come to life, and gossiping about the Tsarina Alexandra being in the power of the wicked Rasputin. It was all so hurried and so unreal; she was trapped in a schedule that did not allow a visit to Tolstoy’s Vasnaya Polyana (or she would surely have written a whole notebook about that) but for the first time she heard the names of Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stanislavsky, the Moscow Arts Theatre and Anton Chekhov, names that would echo throughout her life. Their train left Moscow bound for Warsaw and Vienna but by the time they reached the Polish border Dorothy was overcome by ‘a great Russian tristesse’. No doubt they were all exhausted, relieved to be Americans and not bound to that beautiful land of endless suffering, which made her feel so small and infinitely helpless, that they were leaving behind.
Vienna was enchanting, with a performance of The Merry Widow as a colourful coda to her seminars on marriage. Out of it all she had come to a conclusion, ‘that a woman on her own, unless she was a fighter and extraordinarily clever could do so little’, and she felt she was neither. ‘Marriage, my marriage, was the only way.’ In Venice on Grand Hotel notepaper, she moved on from her decision:
When the right person comes along, I wonder if one has doubts, even then? Many of us are swept away into an irresistible current of love – while to the rest of us love comes walking slowly, and yet with sure steps he overtakes us and folds his arms about our shrinking forms – or is that my longing for a protective love? Of course the man one marries cannot be all one dreams of – I can’t help longing for certain things – he must be strong, and he must be tender – he must be honest and generous, and also kind and thoughtful – and oh – if he will only love me tenderly, take care of me, put his ar
ms about me, and let… [her sentence is unfinished].38
She could not marry a man without ambition because she felt ‘a great longing’ to be a true helpmeet. She could not admire a man without ambition: she admired Grosvenor Atterbury’s architectural mission but doubted he needed her as he said, for she was butter-fingered at drawing and could not assist him.39 Then Bob Bacon had been in Moscow, calling her ‘dearest Dorothy’, and ‘he has almost all I need and a political future which I find exciting’. But then ‘horrid feelings’ overcame her with the admission that a political wife had little to do with politics but was chiefly a party giver.40 Can a woman really be of help to the man she marries? She concludes it unlikely – would her chance of happiness be greater with a man of no career who would need her in their daily life? Would she be happy as Lady Falconer as her sister Pauline wished, wife to a Scots laird keeping up with the shooting parties?
Then she dropped her bombshell. ‘I have seen only one man that comes near to what I long for – only one man that I would really like to marry – at least I think I would; altogether he fills up most of the holes and niches and I know he is much too good for me.’ 41 She had seen him first at Alice Roosevelt’s wedding, and met him properly at dinner at the Harrimans. His name was Willard Straight and he was working for the State Department. He was posted as consul to Mukden in Manchuria, and he was also reporting on railways for ‘Papa’ Harriman, who was clearly very fond of him. Nothing was said but she had gathered that Mary was very much in love with him. There was nothing to be done.
She kept this admission a secret, even from Beatrice. Back in Paris they met the Bacon family again and she realised that Robert, who had long been as affectionate as a second father to her, was more handsome and attractive than his son. Shades of The Ambassadors with herself as Chad, the Bacons as the Vionnets! At home in October she discovered what she had missed, that Mary Harriman and Willard Straight had become secretly engaged, that Mary had gathered her courage and told her father, who was furious, and she had threatened to run away to be with Willard. At home and alone in the August she had been wrong-footed by a New York Times reporter who splashed the whole story and ‘Papa’ Harriman was even angrier; he liked Willard, and loved his daughter, but they were too alike, ‘lacking in balance and stability’. Mary had been swept off her feet by a man she hardly knew – ‘there had never been an engagement’, he growled at the pressmen, ‘and would never be a marriage’.42
Dorothy’s life grew sombre. In late November her uncle Charles Barney shot himself after the declared bankruptcy of his Knickerbocker Trust, and she tried to comfort her aunt and Kate. Working in Henry Street was easier. Then her oldest friend Gladys Vanderbilt announced her engagement to the Austro-Hungarian Count Laszlo Szechenyi, and she was bridesmaid at their wedding in St Patrick’s Cathedral, where she had hardly been since the days of Ma Bonne and the Ash Wednesday ashes. Gladys was going to live in Budapest and they vowed to meet in London or Paris whenever they could, but Dorothy was fearful for Gladys, haunted by her Russian experiences and the rumours about Gladys’s cousin Consuelo’s unhappiness as Duchess of Marlborough.
Discovering that Jane Addams was to be in New York she managed to spend ‘a wonderful morning’ with her, hearing how her inspiration as a pioneer social worker had come from a visit to Toynbee Hall in London’s East End, meeting Canon Samuel Barnett, Octavia Hill and Beatrice Webb.43 ‘Canon Barnett,’ said Miss Addams, ‘had rejected a comfortable parish to work in the truly Dickensian slums of the Docklands [Dorothy winced with shame at her ignorance of that part of London] and it was his expressed belief that top-down charity did more harm than good, it demoralised both the giver and receiver, and improving living conditions had to be a shared experience.’ She had based her Hull-House in Chicago on these precepts, and they now helped two thousand people every week.44 Dorothy found Hull-House to be a friendly and busy place, full of good humour and fellowship and she was amazed at the range of facilities which went beyond personal needs to education for all ages, to music, drama, crafts, including a book bindery, and an employment bureau. Miss Addams insisted that Settlement work was not charity, she kept emphasising that there was a crucial distinction between ‘doing good to or for other people and doing good with them’. She was determined that ‘Hull-House was a collaborative, experimental bridging of class cultures, it was not philanthropy, which – however it was packaged – was likely to be morally disastrous’.45
The formidable Miss Addams was hardly encouraging; she may well have thought Dorothy too expensively dressed and too pretty to be serious, or simply too young at just twenty-one. However, Hull-House had a special compensation for Dorothy, for there she first heard the name of John Dewey. He had been professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago for eight years, and with his wife Alice had run the Laboratory School in league with Hull-House. Dewey believed in education for democracy, that children’s talents were to be fostered to make them social beings, finding self-realisation in becoming part of a community. The Laboratory School had just closed when Dorothy was in Chicago, but its ethos lingered. Dewey had moved to New York to become a professor at Columbia, and she was determined to find him and his book, The School and Society, for this was worthwhile work that she felt was within her grasp.46
In 1908 she took her last trip to marriage-market Europe and it was supposedly full of ‘gaiety and fun’. Her sister Pauline (Polly) was in poor health and they needed time together, with Polly’s daughters Olive and her name-child Dorothy, aged three. Polly had arranged for them to stay in Scotland with Lady Kintore in Aberdeenshire; there was the son Lord Falconer whom she thought handsome and kind, but she was perfectly able to see that his estate needed her money, and so she said ‘No’. Sheldon Whitehouse, four years her senior, ex-Eton and Yale, and secretary to Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, was her escort to Henley Regatta and a ball at Buckingham Palace; he was such good company that she was sad to reject him.47 In London she and Beatrice contrived to elude Polly’s watchfulness and slip out to buy the Votes for Women newspaper sold by the Suffragettes, and they managed to see something of the colourful banners and thousands of beautifully dressed women on their demonstration marches to Hyde Park.48 At home the franchise was creeping slowly from the Midwest (Wyoming had given women the vote in 1869) but progress had stalled in Idaho; Dorothy would revive the cause at the National Junior League level. Grosvenor Atterbury met her in Paris, they walked in the Tuileries, and again she refused him.49 At least she was now certain she was doing the right thing, but she blushed at the thought of the trail of wreckage she left behind.
In the New Year of 1909 she was in Washington, as the guest of the Meyers – George von Lengerke Meyer was ambassador to Russia and one of the president’s oldest friends – for the dinners and balls that marked the end of the presidential term. She found herself sitting next to Willard Straight at a dinner, and later danced with him at the White House. She was there again for President Taft’s inauguration in March and the parade in the Mall moved her to tears of pride for her beloved country. Payne and Helen Whitney included her in their party to visit Havana and meet President Gómez. Her feet hardly touched the ground for she was then immediately bound for London for the Albert Hall rally of the Women’s Social and Political Union. She had made good her word from the year before and urged the National Junior Leagues to take up the cause, with the result that she was elected their representative. With such an impressive mandate she was naturally seated on the platform, where a press photographer caught her looking pensive as the lively audience cheered speaker after speaker who recounted her maltreatment in prison or at the hands of the police. Dorothy, whose innate pacifism prompted her grave doubts about militancy, the smashing of windows and ‘rushing’ of the House of Commons, felt increasingly uncomfortable; she was puzzled that such a seemingly intelligent audience could be roused by Christabel Pankhurst’s fearsome power into a baying mob, screaming for ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ and so betraying their intellige
nce. Dorothy thought of ‘justice’ for her New York seamstresses burned alive in locked factories, and of the chill of ‘liberty’ for those refugees in her Settlement houses, and somehow protest in Kensington had a hollow ring. Bitterly disillusioned she crept away, only to be rescued by Sylvia Pankhurst, known to differ from her militant sister, and shown around Sylvia’s East London Federation of Suffragettes for helping working women.50
Willard Straight
At the end of her return Atlantic crossing she retreated thankfully to Old Westbury. The May weather was lovely, her neighbours were sociable and she soon encountered Willard Straight, who was between postings and staying with her Long Island neighbours, Harry P. Davison of J.P. Morgan’s Bank, Willard’s sponsors. On morning rides, which Dorothy enjoyed for the first time since her stepmother Edith’s accident, and at tennis teas they dovetailed: Willard was tall, taller than she was, slim and carelessly elegant in his dress. His birthday was a week after hers, on 31st January, he was seven years older and also an orphan. His father Henry Straight had taught natural sciences and was a disciple of Louis Agassiz, as her mother Flora had been. Professor Straight had died when Willard was five, and his mother Emma had taken him and his sister Hazel to Tokyo, where she was teaching, until she too became ill. She had brought them home to guardians in Oswego on Lake Ontario, where Willard and Hazel had grown up. He had inherited his mother’s talent for drawing and so he had gone to Cornell University to study architecture. He enjoyed Cornell but concluded that progress in architecture was too slow for him, and his flair for languages, and a quickly accomplished course in Mandarin, fitted him for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, which represented the Great Powers in Peking under Sir Robert Hart, whose secretary he had become. The American Minister in Seoul, Edwin V. Morgan (another of Dorothy’s Long Island neighbours), had taken Willard to Cuba as his assistant, where he had made the arrangements for Alice Roosevelt and Nicholas Longworth’s honeymoon stay. Alice’s father had made Willard consul-general in Mukden.
