The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  No direct records exist of the discussions, although many of Dodge’s guests would write from memory about them. It was said that an experiment with a stenographer failed when the woman hired to record an Evening was both flummoxed by the big words bandied about and embarrassed by the subject matter. Dodge laid out a fine spread of food and liquor, such that her inner circle was at periodic pains to cull freeloaders. But everyone drank, many of them copiously. Other drugs were not unknown to them. One night, not an Evening but a small party, Dodge and a few select friends even tried peyote; Hapgood accidentally took more than the others and soon found himself over the toilet vomiting flames. But alcohol was the intoxicant of choice. Newspaper reporters came, indulged, and then wrote up the experience, often luridly and antagonistically. Mrs. Dodge, the society matron who invited bomb-throwing anarchists and sex-mad suffragettes to drunken revels in her Fifth Avenue home, was soon the talk of the town.

  Among the notables crowding Dodge’s parlor were the matronly Emma Goldman and intense Alexander (Sasha) Berkman. Goldman, born in the Russian (now Lithuanian) town of Kovno in 1869, had immigrated as a teenager to the United States, slaving away with other immigrant girls in Rochester’s garment industry before moving to the Lower East Side in 1889. Anarchist meetings and rallies were practically daily occurrences on the Lower East Side at that point, and Goldman, in her early twenties, became known for her fiery speeches, delivered in both German and Yiddish. It was in this milieu that she met Berkman, another Russian immigrant whom Hapgood called “that very rare species of human being, a genuine fanatic.” In 1892, during a bitter steelworker strike near Pittsburgh, Goldman and Berkman plotted the assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Berkman pulled the trigger, failing to kill Frick, and was imprisoned until 1906. Through her writing and speaking Goldman was a huge figure not only in the anarchist movement but in trade unionism, women’s rights, and among the bohemians. Together with Berkman, she edited and published the radical journal Mother Earth. Mabel Dodge found Goldman warm and motherly, while Berkman, with his hooded eyes and thick lips, seemed dark and troubling. “Sasha tried to kiss me in a taxi once, and this scared me more than murder would have done. I don’t know why.”

  William and Margaret Sanger were also frequent guests. He was an architectural draftsman, failed painter, and lover of modern art. Despite Margaret’s soft, mild-mannered affect—“the Madonna type,” Dodge calls her—she was by nature an extremist, and in some ways one of the most radical of Dodge’s guests. She championed birth control at a time when just sending information about it through the U.S. mail was a felony and would go to jail when she opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. She firmly believed that to achieve equality with men, women must enjoy equal sexual freedom. “Never be ashamed of passion,” she would advise young married women in a 1926 book. “If you are strongly sexed, you are richly endowed.” Acting on this belief, she would leave William in 1914 and take many lovers, including, it’s said, H. G. Wells and Havelock Ellis. Dodge calls Sanger “the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.” In the 1920s Sanger’s extremism would lead her well beyond promoting voluntary use of birth control to embrace eugenics and, if necessary, forced sterilization to solve “the menace of the moron to human society,” as she wrote in 1922. She was hardly the only American of good conscience to promote eugenics and “racial hygiene” in the years before the Nazis put it into monstrous practice. A number of states practiced involuntary sterilization of the mentally ill or retarded, and the idea that certain races and ethnicities—including Asians, southern Europeans, and eastern Europeans—tended toward mental inferiority was behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas on newcomers from those regions.

  For Theodore Dreiser, unlike many in Dodge’s circle, poverty and working-class life were not noble abstractions but firsthand experience. Born the ninth child of a destitute German-immigrant mill worker in 1871 Indiana, he learned writing on the job as a poorly paid reporter in Chicago and elsewhere before coming to New York in the mid-1890s. He stayed for a while at the big new Mills House No. 1, which still dominates the south side of Bleecker between Sullivan and Thompson Streets, where Depau Row had been. By the 1890s those once fine homes had deteriorated into slum housing and sweatshops. The progressive millionaire banker Darius Ogden Mills had them torn down and replaced by the first of three model workingmen’s residencies he built in the city, with clean rooms, baths, a library, and a dining hall in the basement. A room and two squares cost fifty cents a night. Residents were locked out in the daytime to encourage them to find work.

  In 1900 Frank Doubleday’s editors had accepted Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for publication while Mr. Doubleday was on vacation. Worried about its depiction of a country girl, “bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth,” who goes to the big city and learns to survive by becoming a mistress and actress, Doubleday very reluctantly published only a thousand copies, without advertisement. It sold fewer than half of those. In 1912 Dreiser fell in with Dodge’s crowd. He embraced their various political and social causes; by his own admission, he was especially interested in exploring the freedom to have sex with more than one partner, which he gave the unlovely name “varietism.” In 1915 Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would have Dreiser’s autobiographical novel The “Genius” banned for its sexual frankness, resulting in a long court battle Dreiser eventually won in 1923.

  The restlessly peripatetic Upton Sinclair flitted in and out of the Village at this time, drawn by the scene Mabel was generating. He was one of the most famous writers in America at the time, though in recent years he’d gotten more press as an excitable and eccentric socialist than as an author. He’d been born into relative wealth in Baltimore, but when his father’s alcoholism dragged the family to ruin they fled in shame to New York City, where Upton grew up in shabby rooming houses. He struggled for years to find his literary voice before combining melodrama and muckraking in The Jungle, his gruesome 1906 novel exposing the unsanitary conditions and exploitive labor practices of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Jack London said it did for the modern wage slave what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for black slaves in the previous century. Sinclair self-published a limited edition before it was picked up by Doubleday. The Jungle met with spectacular international acclaim and rang many bells for reformers. President Theodore Roosevelt read it carefully and sent Sinclair three pages of notes both praising and critiquing it, especially its propagandizing for socialism, which he rejected as “the pathetic belief that the individual capacity which is unable to raise itself . . . will, when it becomes the banded incapacity of all the people, succeed.” Teddy the relentlessly self-improving man’s man believed in the strong individual over any collective of weaklings. Though The Jungle helped create a climate of public outrage that ensured the passage of a Pure Food and Drug bill Teddy supported, the president considered the author a “crackpot.”

  So did many others. No great literary success had followed The Jungle, and Sinclair’s notoriety since had rested more on his exploits as a founder and member of various experimental communes; a sickly health nut susceptible to every quack and fad; and a proselytizer for socialism, free love, and vegetarianism. He made the front pages again when he angrily sued for divorce after his wife left him for his erstwhile friend Harry Kemp, the so-called Vagabond Poet, even while he, Sinclair, took up with an erstwhile friend of his wife’s.

  There was Max Eastman, who was just taking over the editorship of the radical monthly The Masses. Raised in Elmira, New York, both parents Congregationalist ministers, he studied philosophy at Columbia under John Dewey and was a poet and a critic who opposed the newfangled free verse. He was so handsome an admirer nicknamed him Apollo, “well dressed, well mannered, well connected, respected in academic circles.” He had moved to the Village in 1907 and become passionate about the various women’s liberation idea
s circulating in the neighborhood, including suffrage and birth control.

  The Masses’ most fiery and popular writer, John (Jack) Reed, attended as well. Also from money, son of a prominent businessman in Portland, Oregon, Reed had graduated from Harvard and moved to the south side of Washington Square in 1911 with the goal of becoming a muckraking journalist in the Steffens mold. Boisterous, cheerful, and boyish, another writer of bad poetry, Reed was overflowing with infectious idealism. Apparently there was no one in the Village crowd, male or female, who wasn’t at least a little in love with him. Mabel Dodge fell deeply and passionately for him. “He was young, big, and full-chested. His clothes wrinkled over his deep breast. He wasn’t startling looking at all, but his olive green eyes glowed softly, and his high, round forehead was like a baby’s with light brown curls rolling away from it and two spots of light shining on his temples, making him lovable.” With Edwin out of the house she was free to engage Reed in an affair she describes as both torrid and tempestuous, though once again much of the passion seems to have been on her end; he was more interested in roaming the world and writing in support of its revolts and revolutions. He moved in with her in 1913 but his constant ramblings provoked in her terrible fits of jealousy. With typically self-deprecating humor, she records that “When he came in one night and he told me he had walked and talked with a strange, beautiful prostitute on the street, had felt her beauty and her mystery, and, through her, the beauty and mystery of the world, I threw myself on the floor and tried to faint.” They would break up and rejoin a few times before he left her for the younger Louise Bryant, a writer he met on a trip home to Portland.

  Reed didn’t have to go far for his education in radicalism, as not only Goldman and Berkman but Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn turned up at the Dodge Evenings. Also from the West, though not by way of Harvard, Haywood was the one-eyed rabble-rouser for the IWW, aka the Wobblies. (According to the legend at the time, this nickname for the big union came from a striking Chinese worker who pronounced it “I Wobba Wobba.”) Born in Utah, son of a Pony Express rider, Haywood had blinded his right eye “whittling a slingshot out of a scruboak,” as John Dos Passos later wrote. As a young man he wandered the West of cowboys and miners, working various jobs, and once he tried to organize a bronco busters and range riders union. That he came to live in the Village is a good indication of what a magnet it had become for all kinds of radicals and rebels. Then, too, he may also have been attracted by the decadent bohemian lifestyle, which would have been wholly new to him. He lived with at least two Village women, a schoolteacher and then a well-off lawyer, and when the IWW began to founder in 1913, some would say it was because he’d lost his edge luxuriating in the warm bosom of the Village’s free-loving atmosphere. Flynn grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She gave her first public speech on the benefits of socialism at the age of sixteen. As a Wobbly she was an extremely effective speaker and strike organizer, known as labor’s Joan of Arc. She was more successful than Haywood at resisting the Village’s bohemian lure.

  Haywood had helped to found the IWW at a “Continental Congress of the Working Class” in 1905; Flynn joined a couple of years later. The IWW was the most radical and confrontational of the era’s labor unions, and the only one committed to out-and-out class warfare with “the capitalists.” While the big labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor restricted their membership to skilled and overwhelmingly white laborers—steelworkers, machinists, and such—the IWW, under the banner of One Big Union, was open to any laborer skilled or unskilled, male or female, any race or ethnicity. On the East Coast, the Wobblies sought to organize the mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants in the big-city sweatshops and textile mills; out West they organized miners, loggers, sailors, and migrant workers.

  The schism between the Reds of the IWW and the so-called American labor unions like the AF of L (The AF of Hell, the Wobblies joked) was also pulling apart the American Socialist movement just as it was reaching its peak strength. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) had been formed only in 1901, yet its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs polled almost a million votes in 1912, and more than fifty cities and towns around the nation elected Socialist mayors that year. The key issue now was how radical the radicals wanted to be. “Socialists could not agree whether they wanted to reject . . . the whole of the dominant civilization or only its political forms,” Henry F. May writes in The End of American Innocence. On one side of this rift were the reformist Yellows, also known as silk-stockinged Socialists, mostly middle- and upper-class WASPs who believed in all the traditional American values and merely sought to ease the working masses into that culture. On the other side, the Reds and Wobblies wanted full-on revolution, a stand that appealed to those Italian and Jewish workers. “The only question worth debating on the hot tenement roofs on summer nights was what kind of socialism should prevail in the whole world.” Wobblies were noted for their rousing propaganda and sense of humor. Their Little Red Songbook, first published in 1909 and sold for a nickel, contained stirring anthems, such as “The Internationale” and “Solidarity Forever,” but it was also filled with irreverent lyrics like “I pray, dear Lord, for Jesus’ sake / Give us this day a T-bone steak.”

  By 1912 the Wobblies were organizing huge and successful strikes in mill towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s “city of spindles.” Wobbly leaders didn’t openly advocate violence but sabotage was an approved negotiating tactic, and Wobbly-run strikes tended to be volatile. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, the workers destroyed equipment, threatened managers’ lives, and went toe to toe with the police and state militia, who bayoneted one fifteen-year-old worker to death and shot and killed a woman worker. In a brilliant propaganda coup, the Wobblies gathered up the workers’ children and sent them away “for their safety.” Margaret Sanger paraded 120 of them off a train in Manhattan and through the streets to Webster Hall in today’s East Village to meet the New York press. The ensuing articles helped convince the Lowell mill owners to give in to the Wobblies’ demands.

  ALTHOUGH RELATIVELY SMALL IN NUMBER, THE VILLAGE’S BOHEMIANS made themselves highly visible to their neighbors when they weren’t holed up in Dodge’s parlor or attending the Liberal Club. When they were feeling flush, or could put the bite on a publisher or art patron, they loved to party at two of the pricier cafés in the neighborhood, at the Brevoort and at the smaller Lafayette Hotel, behind the Brevoort at the corner of East Ninth Street and University Place. In fine weather the Brevoort put small tables out on the sidewalk, excellent for seeing and being seen. Originally the Café Martin, and later immortalized as the Café Julien in the novels of Villager Dawn Powell (who lived across the street), the Lafayette’s café and restaurant were faux-French, complete with humorously snooty waiters, racks of French newspapers, French wines, and the latest French dishes. In the afternoons, artists and writers lounged at the marble-topped tables over checkers, dominos, and coffee; in the evenings the waiters spread tablecloths for dinner service. After dinner until midnight, the café bar with its aperitifs and cocktails was a destination watering hole where the smart set and slumming uptown swells came to meet up with their arty downtown pals. In her novel The Wicked Pavilion Powell would characterize it as a “procrastinator’s paradise,” a “union station” and “stationary cruise ship” where bohemians and the café set hid from the world and its demands. It would remain so until the building was demolished in the 1950s.

  More daringly—and more affordably—the bohemians infiltrated and colonized some of the old dive bars in the neighborhood. Bars were still almost exclusively male preserves, some refusing to serve women at all, others relegating females to a back room with a separate “ladies’ entrance,” as exemplified in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, where the first act is played out in the separate ladies’ room of Johnny the Priest’s saloon. Village bohemians, however, shocked the neighborhood with their coed partying. They took over the Golden Swan at the southeast
corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street. The Golden Swan was known as the Hell Hole from its use as a hangout by the Hudson Dusters. O’Neill, who felt more at home in tough dive bars than probably anyone else in his crowd, began frequenting the Swan and his presence drew other bohemians. The site is now a tiny city parklet, the Golden Swan Garden.

  In her landmark study Greenwich Village 1920–1930 the sociologist Caroline F. Ware writes of the “wide and virtually unbridged” cultural gulf between the Italian and Irish “local people” and the bohemian “Villagers.” Her analogy is that the Villagers were like summer vacationers at a resort who maintain “a social existence wholly distinct from that of the natives.” Irish and Italian Ninth Warders grumbled and stared at the bohemian men’s loose, long hair trailing down to their open collars, which in an era of strangling high collars and pasted-down hair signaled their artistic and rebellious temperament. But it was the so-called new woman who most fascinated and scandalized the neighbors and the press. With her short hair and peasanty outfits, openly drinking and smoking in the company of men, she was the very embodiment of craven immorality.

  Not every writer or artist drawn to the Village by the cheap rents and unhurried pace identified with the new crowd. Willa Cather and her longtime companion Edith Lewis, for instance, who’d been living in the Village for several years when Dodge arrived, kept pretty much to themselves. Born in Virginia in 1873, raised in Nebraska, Cather served a long apprenticeship writing journalism, poetry, and short stories before moving to New York in 1906 to work at McClure’s with Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, another older muckraker and author of the titanically controversial exposé The History of the Standard Oil Company. Cather took a studio in the cheap boardinghouse at 60 Washington Square South where Lewis also had a room, in the heart of the student and bohemian zone.