Goldman promised they would discuss her work further after she returned from her meeting in Mexico. Her next remarks suggest that Ridge was working directly for the anarchist cause. “What is being done about the Unions?” “Have you succeeded last Sunday?” and “Are the boys working on the Union Square meeting?” Because Goldman was traveling as Miss Ida Crossman, one of her many assumed names—Ridge must have been sympathetic with the problems of an alias—Goldman ends the letter by saying she wanted David Lawson to forward a note that she’d enclosed. Lawson was Ridge’s new sweetheart.
Chapter 9
David Lawson and the Ferrer Center
Ridge met the Glasgow-born David Lawson in 1910 at the Ferrer Center, an anarchist organization on St. Mark’s Place where Goldman was a prime mover. Five years earlier, Ridge left her husband in New Zealand without divorcing him, and two years earlier had declared herself “single” on the S.S. Finance manifest. Close in height to Ridge—around five-four—gentle and soft-spoken and “always shabbily dressed, [with] an air of dryness and fatigue about him,” Lawson dropped in on the Ferrer Center almost every night. “The Ferrer Center has certainly done one thing, it has attracted quite a few young Americans very willing and eager to work like…Lawson,” writes Emma Goldman in 1911. According to the anarchist Gussie Denenberg,
Visitors [to the Ferrer Center] included Jack London…and Lola Ridge, the poet, came every Sunday evening…There was a nice young man who always accompanied her. Without him, she couldn’t do much. He was right by her side all the time.
David—or Davy as he was best known—Lawson was a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Captain William Whipple, whose signature is the second after Hancock’s, but his immediate forebears had returned to Scotland. Throughout his early life, Lawson suffered a confusion of names. His parents were already separated when he was born and his mother named him Charles M. Howie (her last name), but his father registered him as John Whipple. When he was four, he and his mother immigrated to New York in 1890, a journey that parallels Ridge’s from Ireland across the Pacific at the same age, and a few years later he was christened with a compromise—Charles Whipple. His mother remarried, becoming Helen Lawson. He took the name Charles W. Lawson. Some time later, after having been both Charles and John, he settled on David. Only 24 when they met (to Ridge’s secret age of 36), Lawson had just moved to New York. Short, red-headed, and tight-lipped, and with a gold tooth in the front of his smile until 1931, he wrote endless letters to Ridge whenever they were separated that were always sensible and supportive. “[His] rather prosaic personality, his steadiness and durability, were an effective foil for Ridge’s mercurial, driving, excitable force,” writes William Drake. In a 1925 census, Lawson identifies himself as a 39-year-old artist (and Ridge says she’s 28! and both say they’re head of the household) but for decades he found work in New York and New Jersey as a low-paid engineer. In 1918 he was a toolmaker, a machine designer in 1924, and in 1929, a consulting engineer in the employ of the New Jersey State Highway Commission.
By the late 1920s he had become interested in building bridges and took exams for assistant engineer in structural steel design but never found a job in that field. Instead he worked for the Board of Water Supply until the middle of the Depression. In 1940, he was making $2,400 a year working as a civil engineer for New York City ($69,914.70 in today’s money). When the two of them met, industry was pouring its energies into building and rebuilding cities, making engineering one of the most exciting occupations of the time. However, like many other contemporary writers, Ridge’s critique of all this industrial activity was not always positive.
Brooklyn Bridge
Pythoness body—arching
Over the night like an ecstasy—
I feel your coils tightening…
And the world’s lessening breath. (Ghetto 70)
Ridge worked as the first manager of the Ferrer Center. Francisco Ferrer was a Spaniard much hated by the Catholics for founding “Modern Schools” at the turn of the century, institutions that educated children without the coercion of state or religion. When someone connected to one of his schools threw a bomb at King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria of Spain in 1906, Ferrer was charged with complicity. Released, he was imprisoned again for instigating a general strike against the war in Morocco and shot in 1909. Ferrer’s last words were “Long live the Modern School!” Internationally prominent figures Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Anatole France, and George Bernard Shaw mourned Ferrer’s death. The response of the Catholic Church was to send a gold-handled sword engraved with the pope’s good wishes to the prosecutor who sentenced Ferrer. Instead of discouraging the movement, his martyrdom very quickly inspired the founding of Modern Schools in 15 countries, with 200 more in Spain, and 20 in the U.S. Forty of his Modern Schools operated in Barcelona alone. The Ferrer Center in New York did not have a Modern School when it first opened in June of 1910, less than a year after his execution, but acted instead as a community center for anarchists and freedom-loving writers and artists. The Rand School for Social Science had opened two years earlier a few blocks away, with the aim of educating socialists for the trade union movements. They shared a founder with the Ferrer Center, Leonard Abbott (1878-1953), but not much in the way of dogma. At the Ferrer Center, “Tolstoyans and pacifists who spurned revolutionary activity rubbed shoulders with tough labor activists, Nietzschean supermen, and apostles of terrorism and dynamite…to learn the English language, to study French or Spanish or Esperanto, to dance, drink tea, and talk for hours on end,” according to Avrich. The Center was a “seething ocean of thought and activity.” Ridge “organized educational (paying) classes for every night of the week” and “carried almost the entire work of an association of three hundred members for eight months—the longest period for which any person hung on to that terrific job.” Leonard remembered “her vivid personality and her tireless energy.” In a letter she wrote a decade later, Ridge describes her trials as manager: “every new measure had to be put to the vote, and I had to fight hostile forces inside that mob…mostly foreigners and all wild unkempt spirits, haling from one another by its hair that new, wonderful doll, Liberty.” Anarchism had a special appeal to the previously oppressed and now disillusioned immigrant, and the Center welcomed Eastern European Jews, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Spanish, English, Irish, Russians, Rumanians and others. Together with a near-aristocratic group of Harvard and Columbia anarchists, they argued their political beliefs and learned about new ones. Ridge’s poetry shows that she observed the immigrants closely at such meetings:
Little squat tailors with unkempt faces,
Pale as lard,
Fur-makers, factory-hands, shop-workers,
News-boys with battling eyes
And bodies yet vibrant with the momentum of long runs,
Here and there a woman…
Words, words, words,
Pattering like hail,
Like hail falling without aim…
Egos rampant,
Screaming each other down.
One motions perpetually,
Waving arms like overgrowths.
He has burning eyes and a cough
And a thin voice piping
Like a flute among trombones.
One, red-bearded, rearing
A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound,
Garbles Max Stirner.
His words knock each other like little wooden blocks.
No one heeds him,
And a lank boy with hair over his eyes
Pounds upon the table.
—He is chairman. (Ghetto 23-24)
The Center held a fundraiser one night and David Lawson went out on the Bowery, a major skid row at the time, to find hungry men to finish up the leftover food. In a photo taken on the street the same year, men are lined into the far perspective for bread. Another photo from that year shows eight homeless men sleeping sitting up on a crowded park bench,
straw boaters tipped low over their faces. Vagrancy had increased by 50 percent from 1907 to 1911.
Deadly uniformity
Of eyes and windows
Alike devoid of light…
Holes wherein life scratches—
Mangy life
Nosing to the gutter’s end…(Ghetto 38)
Robert Henri, founder of the Ashcan School of painting, gave free art lessons at the Center three times a week alongside his student, the urban realist painter George Bellows. Henri emphasized the gritty realism of the streets and insisted both his male and female students develop their “personalities” in the slums of New York, paralleling Ridge’s evolving interest in the ghetto. Among those who attended Henri’s classes were John Sloan, Rockwell Kent, Man Ray, Max Weber—most of the leading artists in America for the next decade. Arthur B. Davies trained with Henri and organized the Armory Show a few years later. Even Leon Trotsky attended his classes in 1917 before he returned to Russia. Henri believed that art would “keep government straight, end wars and strife, [and] do away with material greed.” He too began life with a different name: Robert Earl Cozad. His father had to flee Cozad, the little Nebraska town he had founded, after he shot another rancher. Henri was 17 at the time. Not only did his father change his last name to Henri but he insisted that Robert and his brother pretend to be adopted. Such extreme measures to hide their identities from the state must have increased Henri’s interest in anarchism.
“Sees Artists Hope in Anarchist Ideas” reads the New York Times headline regarding the exhibit Robert Henri organized at the Ferrer Center. It quotes from a review by Bayard Boyesen, an academic who had recently lost his job at Columbia as a result of his anarchist beliefs: “Because all genuinely inspired artists have stood for absolute freedom of consciousness they have recently stood exactly where the philosophic anarchists stand.” Whether Ridge took Robert Henri’s class is unknown—she was probably too busy with managing the Center—but, given her training with the Australian bohemians Julian Ashton and A.G. Stephens, his mixing of radical politics with creativity was not unfamiliar.
Besides Robert Henri, Ridge would have heard lectures or helped organize talks with a host of other activists, artists, and writers. These included Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Ben Reitman, Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. They spoke on topics ranging from “The Limitation of Offspring” to “The Syndicalism and Woman.” The attorney Theodore Schroeder who founded the Free Speech League had advanced ideas on anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and lectured on sex. He talked so often about the obscenity of religion that Lincoln Steffens commented: “I believe in Free Speech for everybody except Schroeder.” Emma Goldman lectured about new literature and drama. According to Will Durant, the most eclectic of lecturers, audiences were “delighted to hear that almost every symbol in religious history, from the serpent of paradise to the steeples of churches in nearby Fifth Avenue, had a phallic origin.”
Among the famous poets who visited was Edwin Markham (1852-1940). He most probably gave the Center a recitation and a lecture about his wildly popular poem, “The Man with the Hoe,” inspired by Millet’s painting, L’homme à la houe.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
According to critic Edward B. Payne:
Clergy made the poem their text; platform orators dilated upon it; college professors lectured upon it; debating societies discussed it; schools took it up for study in their literary courses; and it was the subject of conversation in social circles and on the streets.
“The Man with the Hoe” was reprinted literally thousands of times in dozens of languages. “I am myself in a limited sense one of the ‘Hoemanry,’” wrote Markham, once “a workingman under hard and incorrigible conditions.” Anxious to undermine the socialist taint of this popular poem, railroad magnate Collis Huntington offered $5,000 for a poem countering Markham’s claims. No one came forward.
Leonard Abbott, president of the Ferrer Center, wrote a piece for The Comrade entitled “Edwin Markham: Laureate of Labor,” but the closest Markham came to any real political activism was working with Robert Frost and William Rose Benét for the Poets Guild in 1919, an organization that read poems to poor children on the Lower East Side. Pulitzer Prize winner Margaret Widdemer’s parody A Tree with a Bird on it depicts Markham as much the professional poet: “Edwin Markham (who, though he had to lay a cornerstone, unveil a bust of somebody, give two lectures and write encouraging introductions to the works of five young poets before catching the three-ten for Staten Island, offered his reaction in a benevolent and unhurried manner.)” The parody is of course entitled: “The Bird with the Woe.”
The “hobo poet” from Ohio, Harry Kemp (1883-1960) lectured and read his poems at the Center and published them in Mother Earth, Hippolyte Havel’s Revolt, and elsewhere. Like Hart Crane, he was the son of a candy maker, but without the good fortune to invent Lifesavers. As a student, Kemp invited Emma Goldman to speak at the University of Kansas. A very traditional poet, he was known for his less than traditional ways with women: he absconded with Upton Sinclair’s wife when he was still in his twenties. Eventually he became known as “the poet of the dunes” in Provincetown where a road is now named after him. “When an abscessed tooth nagged him, he removed it himself with a screwdriver. He scratched out his verses with a seagull feather, wore beach rose garlands in his light colored hair, and fancied wearing capes,” according to the Eugene O’Neill Newsletter that remembered his part as a seaman in one of O’Neill’s plays, opposite the revolutionist John Reed and Eugene O’Neill himself.
Signing his letters: “Yours for the Revolution,” Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) spent time at the Ferrer Center as a result of rooming with the painter George Bellows (1888-1953). Emma Goldman published 23-year-old O’Neill’s first poem in 1911, a dreadful workers’ parody of the Rubaiyat, in the issue before Ridge’s second poem appeared. O’Neill helped produce the first issue of Havel’s weekly, Revolt, until a police raid forced them to move out, and they were raided again three months later. A character based on Havel, famous for calling the patrons of Polly’s “bourgeois pigs,” opens O’Neill’s play The Ice Man Cometh with those words. Havel also worked on the scenery for O’Neill at the Ferrer Center’s Free Theater, out of which emerged the Provincetown Theater. Just a few years after his association with Havel and the Ferrer Center, O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize.
John Reed (1887-1920) shared his wife, Louise Bryant, with O’Neill one summer in Provincetown, and wrote mostly poetry during his involvement with the Center. Ferrer Center regulars helped him put on the “Paterson Strike Pageant” at Madison Square Garden with a cast of thousands when he was only 24. Using Margaret Sanger’s apartment as headquarters and his lover Mabel Dodge’s money, he persuaded John Sloan to paint a 90-foot backdrop that dramatized the plight of many strikers who were also the actors, and Hutchins Hapgood, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair to play the parts of cops and scabs. After Wobbly leader Bill Haywood gave the last speech, the entire audience of 15,000 and its huge cast sang “The Internationale.” Reed became most famous for publishing a firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, in 1919. Ridge must have been envious of his achievement. She repeatedly tried to scrounge up enough money to travel to Russia to see the revolution herself.
Reed wrote the introduction to Crimes of Charity, the first book by Ferrer Center habitué Konrad Bercovici (1882-1961). It concerned the controversial pr
actices of New York’s private charitable organizations. Penniless and knowing very little English when he arrived from Rumania, Bercovici supported his family of five as a streetcar conductor, a house wrecker, a painter, a stone cutter, an organist for nickelodeons, a sweatshop worker, a piano teacher, and a tour guide for the Lower East Side. His children—Free Love, Gorky, and Liberty—attended the Ferrer school. The first story Bercovici wrote in English was published a week after he submitted it, and he won a prize for his first story in Yiddish, a language he picked up in the neighborhood. In 1921, he wrote a study that accused doctors of using orphans as guinea pigs for the medical study of rickets, but he was most famous for his gypsy novels, and eventually published 42 books. In Paris, he made friends with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and when he worked in Hollywood he associated with Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin. He sued Chaplin for plagiarizing The Great Dictator—and settled. Later a lawyer proved that Chaplin had used Bercovici’s story.
Ridge met Jack London (1876-1916) in the winter of 1911-12. He was visiting New York and the Ferrer Center, reciprocating Emma Goldman’s recent visit to him in California. He wrote the introduction to Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist that year, but was critical of Berkman’s methods—and may have been put off by his sympathetic treatment of homosexuality. Berkman did not use the introduction. A short man, London weighed nearly 200 pounds by 1913, and was too burnt out to find the Mexican Revolution when he went down as a reporter a year later.
Another writer frequenting the Center was Manuel Komroff (1890-1974) who, like Ridge, drew illustrations that Goldman published. He wrote plays while involved at the Ferrer Center, began a class in music appreciation, became an art critic, and traveled to Russia to cover the revolution like John Reed. On his return, he edited The Modern Library and wrote fifty novels. His most successful book was an edition of the travels of Marco Polo.
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