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Text originally published in 1923 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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THE PARLOR PROVOCATEUR
OR
FROM SALON TO SOAP-BOX
THE LETTERS OF
KATE CRANE GARTZ
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
MARY CRAIG SINCLAIR
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
INTRODUCTION 5
TO KATE CRANE GARTZ 13
THE EVOLUTION OF A “PARLOR BOLSHEVIK” 14
LETTERS OF K. C. G. 20
A FEW LETTERS TO KATE CRANE GARTZ 60
FROM MRS. SAMUEL UNTERMYER 61
FROM A LEADING LIBERAL 62
FROM A CLERGYMAN, NOW SOCIALIST AUTHOR 63
FROM MRS. GARTZ’S SISTER 64
FROM ANOTHER SISTER 65
FROM MRS. GARTZ’S ELDER SON, FREDERICK 67
FROM MRS. GARTZ’S FATHER 68
FROM A JEWISH WORKING-GIRL, ILL WITH TUBERCULOSIS 69
FROM MRS. GARTZ’S BROTHER 70
FROM MRS. GARTZ’S MOTHER 71
LETTERS FROM MRS. GARTZ’S YOUNGER SON, CRANE, AT THE FRONT 72
HELL IN WEST VIRGINIA 77
ARE WE AMERICANS BREAKING AWAY FROM THE “GOOSE-STEP”? 80
ARE WE BREAKING AWAY 81
EPILOGUE 83
ANSWERS CRITICS 84
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 86
INTRODUCTION
THESE are embarrassing days, when everyone is learning about the hidden desires of the human heart, and by the instrument of psycho-analysis we are probing the depths of our own souls, and discovering how our characters have come to be what they are. Each of us is accused of a shocking preponderance of egotism; and those formerly exalted beings called poets and artists prove to be the worst of all. So what is to be gained by reticence, and why should not anyone who has lived an interesting life write an autobiography? So I argued to Kate Crane Gartz, whose mail contains many letters from people asking to meet her and to know about her, and whose unusual personality has caused the millionaire suburb of Altadena to become known in far-off Russia and India, as well as in the office of the district attorney of Los Angeles County. Novelists, I said, go to great pains to “create” a character for a novel; they sit down and ponder how to make a heroine “real,” how to make her seem a living human being. And here you are, already alive, already real, and just as interesting as any painfully wrought heroine of fiction.
But her shyness was not to be overcome; and so it falls to me to tell about her, and to select some of her many letters of “protest”—in spite of her own protest against this step. “What value can they have?” she asked. “Each one was written at a moment when I felt that some evil thing in our community called for the outcry of some justice-loving member of the community—if such a person there were. Many of those evil things are past now and done with—at any rate, the victims are dead or forgotten.” But then, after a little thought, she realized that the evil things are not past; they are symptoms of a widespread social disease, which is not cured, but on the contrary has what may be a death-grip on humanity. And when she argued that there were other pens more capable than hers, and that a book might be a costly thing, and it might be better to give the money, as so much other money has been given by her, to enable others to voice the cry for justice—to all this I answered that a personality is often quite as effective as a piece of fine writing; an act is as important as a speech; and when a woman, born to luxury and command, dowered with every gift to shine in the so-called “great world” of pleasure and power, is moved by the elemental impulse of human sisterhood and world sympathy to step from a safe and high place, to break with family and friends, to face sneers and insults, persecution and even serious threat of arrest and prison—this, I say, is a thing of genuine social significance, and the words of such a woman, untrained as they may be, have an eloquence of their own, and go to the heart of all people of true judgment. At the very least these letters, and the glimpse of such a personality, might arouse other rich women to realize their duty in these grave and cruel days. And if only one such should be reached—how much good even one might do with the power of wealth!
If you doubt the power that is in the hands of one woman who has vision and the means to realize it, I can tell you that at least those who protect the exploiters are aware of her power. A few days ago an acquaintance of mine happened to be in the office of a public prosecuting official of this vicinity, and the name of Kate Crane Gartz chanced to be mentioned. “Oh, you know her?” said the official. “Well, I’ve been trying to get her for five years, and I’m going to get her if it takes the rest of my life!” This concerning the sister of a world-famous United States ambassador, a woman who is heir to part of one of America’s great industries, an intimate of our so-called “best society.” The reason for it is because there have been few acts of public injustice committed in the interest of California’s ruling class during the past eight or ten years that this woman has not registered protest, sometimes public, sometimes private, but none the less productive of discomfort to the masters of privilege. They know her also in other parts of the country—the post office carries her “protests” to far-off parts.
Mrs. Gartz was one of the first of the so-called “parlor Bolsheviks,” a phenomenon of our social order which astounded Blasco Ibanez when he came to America. When I was considering what I could do to entertain the distinguished guest in Pasadena two or three years ago, I asked him, should we gather the literati of the bourgeois world, the poets and screen writers, or would he like to meet our “parlor Bolsheviks.” “What are ‘parlor Bolsheviks’?” he asked at once. “Millionaire Socialists,” I said; and he was incredulous. This was a paradox! Could such a thing be? I insisted it was true, and set the day for a dinner to prove it to him. A few hours before the event his secretary telephoned to know if dinner-clothes were proper—which showed that he still could not believe that the thing really existed; these “parlor Bolsheviks” must be cow-boys or ranchers who had “got rich quick,” through striking oil or gold, and had not yet had time to forget the sorrows of the common people—or to obtain dress-clothes! Ibanez was amazed to meet eight or ten well-bred “ladies and gentlemen” in fashionable dinner-clothes. The writer and her husband were the only ones who were not millionaires; and everyone had inherited his millions, and had come to his radicalism as the result of intellectual and moral conviction.
When I first heard of Kate Crane Gartz and her interest in the Socialists, I thought it might be a passing whim, the perverse notion of a spoiled darling of fortune. An old girlhood friend of hers assured me that such was the explanation. “She got interested in such people through charitable activities and settlement wor
k with Jane Addams. Having been opposed by some of her family and friends, she persists in it in a spirit of defiance.” But I know better now. I have seen her weep too often; I have seen her tried too often; I have seen her dragged hither and thither in discomforting fashion, sharing crises in the lives of those who called upon her for help. I shall never forget the night that the editor of the “Dug-out” was thrown into jail in Los Angeles. All of us knew that he had served three years as a volunteer in the trenches; also we knew the doctor who had examined him and found his throat rotting away as a result of being gassed. We knew that his wife and child were destitute; we knew that his only crime was that he had opposed the use of returned soldiers as strike-breakers in Los Angeles. So, the night he was thrown into jail, we thought of his weak physical condition, and that a sojourn in that filthy hole might result in pneumonia. I telephoned Mrs. Gartz the news, late at night, after she had retired. In fifteen minutes she had risen, and driven her own car alone through the dark suburbs to my house—arrayed in a heavy coat and her night-gown! Early the next morning she placed seventy-five hundred dollars in cash in the hands of an attorney, and the radical editor was out of the physical filth and mental agony of jail.
Nor was this an act of mere emotion. She knew what she was doing. She was not “rescuing the fallen brother,” as other club-women and charitable people do. She was enabling a fighter for social justice to go on fighting. For Mrs. Gartz reads and studies; she has found out what is wrong with America, and with the world, and what is to be done about it. Great tests came to her—world crises, and also domestic convulsions; but nothing ever diverted her. She moves with elemental certainty; her kindness is never to be frightened, her love is as persistent, as determined to have its way as a river. To the victims of oppression, one and all, she is, quite simply and as a matter of course, a mother; while to the doers of oppression she must be as a great fly forever buzzing in the room. She will not let them alone!
You may think that many of these letters were thrown into someone’s trash-basket. But not so; for every now and then a newspaper takes up one of them, and puts it on the front page; now and then a press agency sends one all over the continent—such is the magic power of wealth! It is the old story of the persistence which wears away the stone. You will note that quality in these letters—they are very simple, they deal with fundamental truths, and they are not afraid to repeat the same thing—forever and ever, until somebody does something about it!
You may be disposed to imagine her as of the “fire-eating” type; but just the opposite is true. She is above all things maternal, and personally loving; naturally a very grave and dignified type of woman. When she finally gave her consent to the publication of these letters, the reason that moved her was characteristic: she would have them in convenient form, to be given to friends and members of her family, who might come at least a little better to understand what she is trying to do! This persistence in love, and the simple homely aspect of it, such as family reunions and birthday parties, and “presents”—often following cruel clashes of opinions—has seemed to me one of the proofs of that grain of love in the human psyche which forbids us to despair.
Kate Crane Gartz was “one of those pacifists” during the war; and she suffered in more ways than one. All the maternal instincts of her very maternal being were horror-stricken at the spectacle, the wholesale “slaughter of the innocents.” Her own young sons were in the service, against their mother’s sincere conviction that not only was war wrong, but that all the European governments involved were equally greedy and militaristic, and that each had the spoils of war as its chief aim—something which has since been amply proven. The “peoples,” including the German people, were being victimized by selfish rulers.
To risk the loss of her sons in such a cause was agony to her. To see the sons of a whole world of mothers sacrificed to settle political questions drove her to a very dangerous outspokenness. Federal agents and spies prowled around her home and beset her friends. This, however, did not disturb her. She looked on it, naively, as a chance to make converts! I remember one day when I was much upset by an agent who appeared at my home and questioned me about her; I went to her and told her that I thought she was running great risk of arrest, pointing out to her that the government was not confining its attention to the “poor and lowly” pacifists; her position was not impregnable—even if her brother was entertaining Woodrow Wilson at his country home!
“But I ought to be in jail!” she replied. “Look how many others are there for saying no more than I say!”
“You are talking nonsense,” I said. “You couldn’t stand it a minute. You love comfort and cleanliness. In jail the filth and vermin——”
“Ugh!” She shuddered, and tears came into her eyes. “Just think how many are there now—and only for opposing this murderous war!”
“But you can do more good outside—bailing the others out,” I told her.
“That is probably true,” she said, and so I thought I had succeeded in winning her to caution. I was sincere—believing she could do more good in the way I proposed; and besides, I was supporting the war!
The next night she dropped in and told me quite casually how an agent had been to see her that morning. “What course did you take with him?” I asked, and she exclaimed, with great vexation, “They don’t want to see the truth! I asked him if he wasn’t ashamed to be supporting war—and in such a way—sneaking around spying on people! I invited him to stay to lunch, so I could have longer to talk to him. I thought I might convert him.”
“Did he stay?” I asked
“Yes—but it’s no use! They don’t want to see the truth. I did not get to say all I had to say, as there was so little time at lunch, so I invited him to drive in with us to the concert. But he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to hear any more!”
But this was not the only side to the story. To her naive surprise, she was winning the suspicion and hatred of the whole community, where formerly, as a benefactress and patron of charities, she had received only affection and respectful consideration. At club meetings and other gatherings people pointedly avoided her—and she was not accustomed to that! Clergymen were curt to her, and bankers asked her to withdraw her accounts! Incredible as it may seem, a certain pastor of a very wealthy church in Pasadena applied to her for personal aid—and at the very time that he was refusing all-sympathy with her ideas, and to those who suffered for expressing them. He and his wealthy parishioners were in cordial agreement on all social questions, but they did not allow him sufficient income, and so he relied upon Mrs. Gartz’s kindness of heart to supply him with a thousand dollars to pay his personal debts!
This sort of thing is not conducive to the happiness of a sensitive person. I think the way in which it hurt her most was the disillusionment of it. She tries so hard to believe that human beings are all naturally loving, and eager to do justice to one another—if they could know what justice is! Every disillusionment is a moral crisis in the development of an individual soul, a point at which one turns either toward hope or despair, toward love or bitterness. In her position, of dispenser to those in distress, Mrs. Gartz has naturally had many disillusionments. She has been sought and sometimes imposed upon by all sorts of grafters, from the crudest to the most subtle. The very fact of having so much of the selfish and mean side of human nature brought to one’s attention is enough to drive one to despair. But in the seven years that I have known Mrs. Gartz, she has established in my mind a record as the most consistent and persistent exponent of the Christian ideal of any person I know. Never, even in the face of the most discouraging case of selfish deception, have I seen her turn to hatred or to cynicism.
Not even when she discovers that the public authorities of her own city are taking advantage of her kindness of heart! I remember one case of a woman who applied to her for help; the mother of seven children, whose husband was fighting for the allies, and who was left destitute. I personally went with Mrs. Gartz to call at the o
ffice of the city’s Welfare Association, an organization supported by the charity of some of our very numerous millionaires; also upon one of the gentlemen who held office on the commission which at that time governed the city. I listened in amazement while this man argued with Mrs. Gartz, to persuade her that it was her duty to take care of this case; and because Mrs. Gartz was too honest to conceal her intention to help this woman, in case the city would not do so, the official refused all but a pittance of aid, and left the job to her! This particular case cost Mrs. Gartz more than five thousand dollars before the mother of seven was out of debt; yet at the same time, both publicly and privately, these charitable “fellow-citizens” would criticize Mrs. Gartz as a dangerous member of the community!
So Mrs. Gartz had her full share of sorrow during the war; and so she was made into a radical. And this has made permanent the separation from her accustomed environment—from the friends of a lifetime, from those to whom habit and affection had bound her. It was then that she laid aside all hesitations as to where her duty lay; she allied herself definitely with the uncomfortable world of the dispossessed—and found herself not always understood even there! I have heard it argued that the working-class movement has no time to fool with the whims and caprices of those who have only money to give; what the movement needs is understanding—and how could a rich woman understand? Surely no one could expect such a woman to be capable of “sticking”! The letters here published ought to be sufficient answer to such criticisms.
A woman such as Kate Crane Gartz gives to the movement not merely her money and her time; she gives a thing which some radicals are unwilling to recognize, but which nevertheless is real: she gives her prestige. “You are disgracing your father’s name!” her family and friends protest to her; but she gives that name—and I suspect that if the founder of the family could come back and look the scene over, he might not be as much outraged as these complacent friends and members of the family. I have been reading the story of the old Chicago “ironmaster,” as revealed in newspaper clippings and letters lovingly preserved by his daughter. The family and friends remember his works of charity; but some of them have conveniently forgotten the bold words he spoke, and the brave things he did.
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