The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  In her 1953 memoir/biography Willa Cather Living Lewis writes, “In 1906, Washington Square was one of the most charming places in New York,” with “an aura of gentility and dignity . . . [I]t was a very sedate Bohemia; most of the artists were poor and hard-working.” She fondly recalls the “youthful, lighthearted, and rather poetic mood of those days before the automobile, the radio, the moving picture—and before two wars.” Lewis worked at McClure’s as well. The two of them moved together to a boxy little apartment on Washington Place, then to a spacious seven-room apartment in a brick house at 5 Bank Street, near Greenwich Avenue, where they lived from 1912 to 1927. The heat was coal and the lights gas. They left only because the house was to be torn down for the large apartment building that stands on the corner to this day.

  Cather wrote that her Greenwich Village was “a gentle spot of old Georgian red brick homes with brass knockers, filled with folks who like quiet and rest and mellow living.” Even during the height of the Village’s Left Bank heyday in the 1910s and through its wilder Prohibition party years in the following decade, she and Lewis lived sedately. She walked to Jefferson Market every day for fresh salad greens and cut flowers, worked diligently on her books, not participating in the bohemian and radical goings-on, arguing that “the business of an artist’s life” is “ceaseless and unremitting labor.” For socializing, she had small groups of friends, mostly from McClure’s, over for Friday afternoon tea. On being forced to leave Bank Street she and Edith settled for a while at the old Grosvenor Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Tenth Street, across from the handsome Episcopal Church of the Ascension, and from there they moved up to Park Avenue, where Cather died in 1947.

  A NUMBER OF THE GUESTS AT DODGE’S EVENINGS ALSO JOINED THE Liberal Club when Henrietta Rodman dragged it to the Village. With such personalities coming together not just in one neighborhood but in one room, whether that was in Dodge’s parlor, over the sixty-cent dinners at Polly’s, or while downing the nickel beers at the Hell Hole, interesting events were bound to follow. In 1913 there were three: January’s appearance of a newly reorganized, collectively run version of The Masses, edited, written, and illustrated by many in Dodge’s circle; February’s opening of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, in which Dodge and her cohort were intimately involved; and the June pageant in support of the striking Paterson silk workers, which was conceived at one of Dodge’s salons.

  7

  1913

  MUCH OF THE EXPRESSION OF THOSE EXPLOSIVE DAYS WAS THE SAME, WHETHER IN ART, LITERATURE, LABOR EXPANSION, OR SEXUAL EXPERIENCE, A MOVING, A SHAKING TIME.

  —Hutchins Hapgood

  SOME SAID IN THOSE DAYS THAT YOU COULD NOT GET ANY NEARER TO ORIGINAL SIN THAN BY RENTING A STUDIO ANYWHERE BELOW FOURTEENTH STREET.

  —Djuna Barnes

  THE MASSES PLAYED OUT THE SCHISM BETWEEN YELLOWS AND Reds on a small scale. It was begun in 1911 as a Yellow periodical backed by Rufus Weeks, a vice president of the New York Life Insurance Company and as silk stockinged as they came. It politely promoted workers’ cooperatives. After a year of publishing. Weeks tired of supplying virtually all the funding for the magazine and announced he was closing it. Members of the staff, led by the illustrators John Sloan and Art Young, decided to continue the magazine as a collective. Max Eastman was vacationing in Provincetown when Sloan and Young informed him peremptorily that they’d chosen him to be their nonsalaried editor. He had never edited a magazine, but he was charming, charismatic, and intellectually flexible enough to ride herd on a collective of artists and radicals with big and usually contradictory ideas about sparking a cultural revolution.

  They paid Floyd Dell twenty-five dollars a week to handle the daily editorial details, freeing Eastman to set the tone and raise funds. Dell had only just arrived from Chicago, where he’d edited the Chicago Evening Post books supplement and been a major figure in Chicago’s own bohemian scene. It had developed in the South Side’s Jackson Park, where artists and writers commandeered flimsy shacks originally built as souvenir and snack stands outside the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. These spare, unheated spaces formed the center of a literary scene that included Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Maxwell Bodenheim, George (“Jig”) Cram Cook, and the partners Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (The Little Review). Feeling isolated in the Midwest from the larger bohemian scene, Dell, Cook, and Bodenheim fled to Greenwich Village and made themselves right at home. Dell would be the Village’s most unabashed cheerleader and, later, its most nostalgic eulogist; Bodenheim became one of its most visible, and eventually caricature, bohemian poets; Cook would help pioneer its “little theater” movement.

  Dell’s assistant was a fledgling young journalist named Dorothy Day. Raised in a stolidly middle-class Episcopal household in Brooklyn Heights, she’d dropped out of college and thrown herself headfirst into the Village’s bohemian milieu. She professed anarchist, pacifist, and suffragist politics, drank and caroused with the best of them at the Hell Hole, and was sexually free. Exhausted and disillusioned with the high life by the mid-1920s she would undergo a spiritual conversion, embrace Roman Catholicism, and cofound the Catholic Worker movement in the early 1930s, dedicating herself to pacifism and to assisting the poor until her death in 1980. She has been proposed for canonization, something her pals in the Village of the 1910s could not have foreseen.

  The new version of The Masses included a mission statement in its January 1913 issue that clearly said which side of the Yellow-Red divide Eastman believed the periodical was now on—“A REVOLUTIONARY AND NOT A REFORM MAGAZINE”—but hedged a bit by defining its revolution more in cultural than in political terms.

  A MAGAZINE WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR AND NO RESPECT FOR THE RESPECTABLE: FRANK, ARROGANT, IMPERTINENT, SEARCHING FOR THE TRUE CAUSES: A MAGAZINE DIRECTED AGAINST RIGIDITY AND DOGMA WHEREVER IT IS FOUND: PRINTING WHAT IS TOO NAKED OR TRUE FOR A MONEY-MAKING PRESS: A MAGAZINE WHOSE FINAL POLICY IS TO DO AS IT PLEASES AND CONCILIATE NOBODY, NOT EVEN ITS READERS.

  The Masses was published monthly, priced at ten cents an issue, one dollar for a year’s subscription, so the working masses could afford to buy it. Apparently not many did—the circulation averaged around twelve thousand copies an issue—but the audience for its utopian socialist message was other artists and intellectual anyway, collectively known as the “lyrical left.” Distribution was never easy. The Masses was banned from subway newsstands in New York, refused by distributors in Philadelphia and Boston, kicked out of the Columbia University library and bookstore, and not allowed into Canada. The Masses also started fights with other publications right away. It accused the Associated Press of slanting its reporting of labor disputes against the workers. The AP sued for libel but later dropped the suit.

  In June 1913 the magazine moved the operation uptown to a combined office and bookshop at 91 Greenwich Avenue near Bank Street, just around the corner from Cather and Lewis’s apartment. Being a Village publication now, The Masses took a clear stand against censorship, sexual repression, and prudery. In one issue the illustrator Robert Minor depicted the recently deceased Anthony Comstock, prude of all prudes and bane of the Village during his lifetime, as a round-bellied, bald little man attacking an artistically reclining female nude with a broadknife. Comstock’s successor John Summer responded by raiding the magazine’s Greenwich Avenue bookstore and seizing a book on homosexuality that he said promoted sodomy. (In fact the book’s author, like many of the men at The Masses, looked on homosexuality with tolerance but not favor.)

  In addition to Reed, Eastman, and Dell, Dodge and Bryant contributed writing to The Masses, as did Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Walter Lippmann (who helped found the Yellow New Republic in 1914), the cigar-smoking lesbian poet Amy Lowell, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Day, the poet and Marxist Louis Untermeyer, race reformer Mary White Ovington, and James Oppenheim, poet and founder of the Village literary magazine Seven Arts. Women’s rights, workers’ rights,
the plight of the Negro, the hypocrisy of established religions, and the war in Europe were frequent topics. Much of the writing has aged poorly. But the political cartoons and illustrations—by Minor, Sloan, Young, Hugo Gellert, George Bellows, Cornelia Barns, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Maurice Becker—remain beautiful, trenchant, and humorous, surviving not only as great political art but as some of the best works of the so-called Ashcan School of social realism.

  ON FEBRUARY 17, 1913, JUST AS DODGE’S EVENINGS AND THE NEW Masses were getting up and running, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, casually known as the Armory Show, opened with great fanfare and ran for a tumultuous month. Although it happened outside the Village, Dodge and several from her circle played key roles in planning and promoting it. And by bringing an explosion of new art to the city (and America) for the first time, it provided a major early stimulus to a Village scene that would, a few decades later, come to dominate modern art.

  American art in 1913 was stuck somewhere back in the nineteenth century, if not the Renaissance. It had never been encouraged to develop. Americans devoured writing, music, and theater but they had not warmed to painting and sculpture. Every small town had its piano teacher but very few had an art teacher. To make change and growth more difficult, after the Civil War art was increasingly segmented into highbrow and lowbrow, an aesthetic divide along class lines. Lowbrow meant the popular culture that entertained the lower and lower-middle classes—minstrel shows, vaudeville, Currier & Ives. Fine art was reserved for those with the education, aesthetic refinement, and taste to appreciate it correctly, which restricted its appeal to small circles of wealthy patrons and cognoscenti in New York and a few other cities.

  Even in those refined circles art, like all other endeavors in the land of the Protestant work ethic, was supposed to serve some pragmatic purpose. “For Americans an artist had always been valued for his functional role,” the art historian Dore Ashton writes. Artists were thought to be not terribly different from artisans and craftsmen; a well-painted landscape was the functional equivalent of a well-constructed chair. Ideas about artists needing to express their personal vision or genius did not wash in America, and the story of the occasional idiosyncratic American artist who chose to follow his own muse “is a record of repeated cries of loneliness and despair, a story of flinty, determinedly reclusive eccentricity.”

  Beyond that, American painters and sculptors were still struggling to find an authentically American style, long after American literature and music (at least popular music) had established themselves. Educators, curators, and critics saw their role as preserving old forms and hallowed traditions from the debasing influences of modern Europe. Even many artists distrusted and spurned what they felt were decadent, effeminate, and immoral European tendencies. Winslow Homer grumbled that he wouldn’t cross the street to see a French painting. All of these deeply conservative attitudes had obvious retarding effects on the development of a truly modern art in America. In 1913 sculpture was still largely neoclassical; paintings were mostly traditionally rendered portraits, landscapes, or historical scenes (preferably American subjects, scenes, and history).

  By then, Samuel F. B. Morse’s once renegade National Academy of Design was a staunchly conservative defender of these old forms and a bitter enemy of the new. As early as 1875 disaffected artists had broken with it to form the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street. Pointedly opposed to the academy’s closed and elitist system of conferring favor on a handful of approved artists, it was an open atelier where anyone could study with any teacher they chose. In 1910 some artists associated with the league organized the large Exhibition of Independent Artists, presenting hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures. A few of them were European-influenced Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. But the core of the organization called themselves New York Realists. Many of them came from backgrounds in newspaper and magazine illustration. They used traditional techniques of figurative and landscape art but applied them to a new, street-level realism, depicting bar rooms, diners, prizefighters, street urchins, wash hanging over tenement streets, the El. They were nicknamed the Ashcan School and it has stuck. In 1912 they formed the new Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS).

  It was members of the AAPS, determined to drag the American art world into the new century, who organized the Armory Show. They rented the 69th Regiment Armory, a barrel-vaulted hall on Lexington Avenue at Twenty-fifth Street, and began gathering what would be a giant exhibition of their own works alongside new works from Europe. Mabel Dodge and Alfred Stieglitz—whose small 291 art gallery on Fifth Avenue had previously been the only place in New York where one might see an occasional work of new art from Europe—were appointed honorary vice presidents of the association and helped strategize and publicize the show. So did Carl Van Vechten and, from Paris, the Steins. Even those who despised the work in the show agreed that the organizers pulled it off spectacularly. The exhibition was enormous, filling the cavernous hall with more than twelve hundred works by roughly three hundred artists, all offered for sale. The Americans included Edward Hopper, destined to be the most famous of them, along with several Ashcan artists who did illustrations for The Masses. There were a couple of American expatriates who were for all intents and purposes European artists, Mary Cassatt and (posthumously) Whistler. The Europeans, most of them shown in America for the first time, included Picasso, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Seurat, Roualt, Matisse, Braque, Munch, Leger, Redon, Duchamp, Brancusi, Cézanne, Daumier, Picabia, Kandinsky . . . an astounding explosion of the new.

  The organizers promoted the show with an advance publicity juggernaut the likes of which had not been seen in New York since Barnum ballyhooed Jumbo the elephant thirty years earlier. This was no mere art exhibition for an elite of connoisseurs; it was a grand public spectacle, with admission set at a quarter in the day and a dollar in the evening to keep the show accessible to a wide audience. In its one-month run, some seventy thousand New Yorkers saw it, an astonishing turnout for its time. “It was the first, and possibly the last, exhibition of paintings held in New York which everybody attended,” Van Vechten later wrote. He heard elevator operators, streetcar conductors, and other everyday New Yorkers going on about it. Overnight, looking at fine art was entertainment for the masses.

  But if “everyone” in New York flocked to the show, not very many of them liked what they encountered there. “The thing is pathological! It’s hideous!” the National Academy’s Kenyon Cox huffed in the New York Times. “These men have seized upon the modern engine of publicity and are making insanity pay.” Another disapproving voice in the Times issued the dire warning that “Cubists and Futurists are cousins to anarchists,” all part of a general movement “to disrupt, degrade, if not destroy, not only art but literature and society too.” The press and public singled out Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 for particular notoriety. They seem not so much outraged or angered as moved to hilarity by it. They mocked it (the often repeated “explosion in a shingle factory”), parodied it, but generally admired what they took to be its brazen wackiness.

  With the Armory Show, new art gained a foothold in New York. Duchamp followed his work to the city in 1915; for much of his life he would live and work in the Village. In 1916 he helped found the Society of Independent Artists, hosting large annual group shows where any artist who paid the six-dollar fee could exhibit, and the Société Anonyme in 1920, both dedicated to propagating the European avant-garde in America.

  Gertrude Whitney was also a very important supporter of New York artists in the years after the Armory Show, showing both Ashcan School artists and European-inspired modernists (though preferring the former). In 1931 she and her husband would buy the two town houses next to 8 West Eighth Street and turn the three buildings into the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.

  It would take until the 1940s, but when the seeds the Armory Show planted fully flowered, the Village would play a major role
in making New York the modern art capital of the world.

  IN JUNE 1913, VILLAGERS ORGANIZED AND STAGED THE PATERSON Strike Pageant. Just fifteen miles west of New York City, the mills of Paterson, New Jersey, produced more than half the silk used by the garment industry. In a city of 125,000, some 50,000 nonunionized men and women worked in the mills. As mills elsewhere challenged Paterson’s dominance, owners effectively doubled the workload without, of course, doubling the pay. The workers walked out in January 1913, shutting the mills. The IWW’s Haywood and Flynn, flush from their victory in Lowell, swept into Paterson a month later to help run the strike. Newspapers in New York and New Jersey, solidly on the owners’ side, barely covered the strike, even when two workers were shot and killed. That left it to The Masses to do the reporting, with Reed filing unabashedly pro-worker dispatches, for example, “War in Paterson,” which began, “There’s a war in Paterson. But it’s a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side—the Mill Owners.” Reed was arrested while reporting on the strike. Several other Villagers went to Paterson to support the strikers and join in their demonstrations. They didn’t all come back feeling quite the unalloyed sympathy Reed did. Harry Kemp was dismayed by the sight of thousands of workers “milling about like a great herd of restless cattle.” In his 1926 autobiography More Miles, the sometime hobo hero wrote, “For the first time in my life, I had sensed directly that enormous, ruthless, unthinking and idiot power latent in masses of people . . . and it had appalled me.”