by Jane Brown
Did she sail on, to everyone’s delight, because she felt that in giving of herself and all she owned she could melt into the arms of the world, her only consolation now? To a private notebook she confessed that she felt God had deserted her. She plunged into ever harsher philosophies, reading Bertrand Russell, who bolstered her pacifism with his warning of what he called ‘cosmic impiety’, meaning man’s intoxication with his apparent power over nature, it ‘is the greatest danger of our time’.115 The advent of theatrical realism made a timely bulwark for her grief. She saw Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, his first Broadway success in which ‘gloom spreads over the stage like a sea mist’, and even his father’s verdict was, ‘What are you trying to do send them home to commit suicide?’116 Dorothy was instinctively interested in O’Neill and she had most probably met him in 1916 when on a visit to Gertrude’s studio in Macdougal Alley downtown she had strayed into the impromptu theatre where the Provincetown Players were presenting his Bound East for Cardiff to a casual audience gathered on wooden benches. The fervent playwright was there attending to his own sets, and she already knew the Players’ activist John Reed through his work for trade unions; but for the presence of Reed’s lover Mabel Dodge, who bank-rolled the Players, Dorothy’s role as impresario might have started there and then. In the fall of 1917 with Willard away in Oklahoma, she had coyly noted several ‘Players’ entries in her diary which suggested she had volunteered to help – were these the ‘forward looking people’ Willard had warned her about? Now she became an O’Neill devotee, as partly a return of her youthful passion for the theatre, which had lain dormant with Willard occupying her mind, and partly because of Willard’s loss. O’Neill never let her down, he was writing for her and for others like her at sea in their own emotions when, as he said, ‘From his own life he excavated the pain and overwhelming loneliness of living in the first century of which it could be truthfully said that God is dead.’117
John Dewey was another lodestar. Her discovery of his educational philosophy and Laboratory School in Chicago long before her marriage had to some extent lain behind the educational aims of The New Republic. She had followed his career at Columbia and heard his lectures on psychology. Her turn of mind being naturally pragmatic (she even ventured into William James’s Pragmatism), it was Dewey, sixty-ish, professorial and well married, who was her natural master, launching her on her own questing and metaphysical journey that was to be essential to the rest of her life. As she struggled to regain her equilibrium, she learned to ameliorate her private needs by her recognition of the public good. She became a director of Dewey’s New School of Social Research, and also of the Columbia Teachers’ College, which trained teachers in his methods of child development, to foster communication skills, their curiosity, creativity and self-expression. She enrolled her own three children with their widely differing personalities into the offshoot Lincoln School.
In her last letter to Willard (which he could not have read) she had exploded in fury at the misrepresentation of the war’s casualty figures, grossly underestimated in the American press.118 Two years on from the Armistice people were shocked at the slaughter of their innocent ‘doughboys’ on the Western Front, in that horrific trench warfare that seemed utter madness, and they shied away from President Wilson and his League of Nations. America would look after her own, and Warren Hastings came into office in March 1921 with the promise of a return to ‘normalcy’, the small town values of the rural heartland. Dorothy, as elected president of the National Association of Junior Leagues, was an observer, with John Dewey and Ruth Morgan, at the armaments’ limitation conference in Washington at the end of the year. She found the French ‘impossible’, the Japanese ‘more conciliatory than expected’ but the power of the United States ‘the thing that frightens me – power that has come through accident’. She found herself sitting with H.G. Wells who pronounced himself ‘sick of world affairs’; she sensed his physicality and ‘need to indulge himself’ and perhaps he slipped down her chart of favourite novelists. She marched behind the Honour Guard for the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, and thought it ‘rather fine’ to hear the vast crowd repeating the Lord’s Prayer with the president.
Her friendship with John Dewey led her into the greatest liberal cause of the day, championed by The New Republic, the campaign to rescue Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from a miscarriage of justice. The two Italian immigrants were accused of attempted robbery and murder on weak – and some said contrived – evidence, and sentenced to death. Their poor English meant that they did not understand the judicial process, and their disillusion with the way they felt America had broken her promises to new arrivals had led them to be activists, labelled as anarchists. Vanzetti, who was well read and something of a mystical philosopher, asked why the judge seemed to hate him so, ‘But now I think I know – I must have looked like a strange animal to him, being a plain worker, an alien and a radical to boot,’ he had concluded. They were both in their early thirties and friends in adversity; Vanzetti, a pastry cook, had lost several jobs because head chefs were paid for every new employee so consequently dismissed existing ones – and he had taken to outdoor labouring. Nicola Sacco worked in a factory and had a wife and two children, he had never been out of work and had saved up enough for their return passage home to Italy. Their appeals against their sentences galvanised an influential defence committee, led by Dewey, supported by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Wells and Anatole France, who fought for years against fallible judges and a right-wing popular opinion who thought ‘the bastards’ deserved to die. Dorothy was not involved in the judicial process but she gave generously, as she always did, towards the defence costs.119
She had also given $1,000 to Rose Schneiderman’s campaign as the New York Labour Party’s candidate for the Senate in 1920. Rose was defeated by the Prohibitionist and the Socialist candidates, but she had established herself as a brilliant orator, passionate in the cause of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), now a well-organised scourge of sweatshop conditions.120 Dorothy gave a tea party at 1130 Fifth Avenue to raise funds to buy 247 Lexington Avenue as WTUL headquarters, and on this occasion Rose met Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt who became her great allies. Eleanor had worked side by side with Dorothy at the Camp Upton welfare centre in the war, but of late she had been the stalwart of her family since her husband had contracted polio; this tea party was one of his first outings on crutches as he struggled to return to active life, and probably Dorothy’s first meeting with him.
The New Republic was her anchorage – in the dark days to cheer Willard she had written, ‘The paper is really extraordinary – I believe it is going to do more for the education of the country than any other one force that I know of –[it] is the best thing you and I ever put over.’ It was (almost) their fourth child. Herbert Croly and Willard had their differences, but Croly was devastated by his loss; Dorothy became the lone proprietor, arranging Christmas presents for the staff and dinners for the editors, she read almost everything that was published and she was often present at the weekly editorial post-mortems. Her influence was subtle – ‘all the most important things were indirectly felt’ was her rule. She did not interfere editorially, but then she did not need to if she was there – a smile, a lift of her eyebrow, or gentle drawing aside of the offender and a suggestion of lunch, that was her way. She did increase the paper’s coverage of women’s concerns because it increased the readership, the franchise for women over thirty having been won in 1920.
In late December 1922 Croly redefined The New Republic Idea for the post-war world, in an editorial printed under the paper’s masthead of a galleon in full sail, and Walt Whitman’s words:
O To Sail to Sea in a Ship! Passage to more than India,
Passage to you, to Mastership of You, Ye Strangling Problems.121
Dorothy’s copy, bearing her and Willard’s bookplate, was referred to so often that it is torn and falling apart, and has been carefully mended with
sticky tape.122 Croly began:
The group of men who founded the New Republic in 1914 [the woman wishing invisibility or taken as read?] had a definite conception... we called it a journal of opinion. Its object was less to inform or entertain its readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions.
The Great War had thwarted their intentions, it was no longer a prodding of America’s apathy and contentment that was needed, but ‘a full-scale campaign to save the structure of western civilization’. The ‘good ship America’ was drifting into dangerous waters, he could have said iceberg-ridden, and in a prescient passage he located the sources of the ‘bergs’:
... from a science which multiplies machinery much more than it illuminates human nature, from an industry which saves so much human labor and wastes so much human life, from a technology which – while prodigiously productive – is still too sterile to cultivate craftsmanship and creative work, from a nationalism which is opposed to imperialism but which insists itself on being pettily imperialistic, from a liberty which... remains consciously negative and unedifying.
Like Eugene O’Neill he finds religious faith redundant, ‘for the first time in history the human spirit is the captain and the only possible captain of the ship on which the human race has embarked’. Croly’s faith is in American federalism, ‘the first great political symptom of an emerging humanistic culture’. His friends attested to him being too honest and self-knowing to truly believe that a weekly paper’s contribution to ‘so vast and pretentious an idea’ could only be woefully inadequate. Perhaps ‘something to keep faith alive in those members of the community who believe in the power of the truth to set men free’ would be enough? Dorothy was wholly in support of Croly’s first ‘practical watchword’, the reform of working conditions and labour relations by means of ‘full and fair’ discussions, which would ‘break up the unmanageable class conflict into minor specific manageable conflicts’.123
She now summered with the children on Cape Cod, in the tiny fishing village of Woods Hole on the southern tip of the Cape. It had the great asset that the scientists from the Oceanographic Institute had set up a children’s summer school, much enjoyed by Whitney who would be ten in November, Beatrice eight on 2nd August and Michael, whose sixth birthday on 1st September now signalled the end of their holiday.124 As company for Whitney, ‘a warlike child’ with abounding energy, she had found a Harvard student John Rothschild, organiser of the inter-collegiate liberal league and of the student disarmament campaign, to spend the summer with them. She confessed to losing her heart to him, ‘there being nothing so enchanting as a youth of that age’.
The attractive young widow with the campaigning heart had become something of a magnet for idealistic young people who flocked to purposeful gatherings at 1130 Fifth Avenue. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, whose reports on the living conditions of the poor in his native York in England had shocked social workers and governments alike, was one visitor who became her friend.125 Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), took home her funding for Toynbee Hall and also her friendship.126 The Reverend Phillip ‘Tubby’ Clayton, the army chaplain who had set up Talbot House at Poperinge near Ypres as an ‘oasis of sanity’ for soldiers, was also her visitor.
Talbot House, shortened by the soldiers to Toc H, its symbol a lamp, was just as necessary now for thousands of ex-soldiers struggling to find peacetime work. The Toc H aims – friendship, service to one’s fellows, fair-mindedness and Christian witness – had steered the Reverend Clayton to Dorothy, and he did not leave empty handed.127 Her wavering religious faith did not deprive her of the so-called Christian virtues. But she seems to have been more comfortable with another of her young visitors, Kenneth Lindsay. Lindsay, invalided home after the 3rd Battle of Ypres and now at Worcester College, Oxford, was ‘good-looking, clever, amusing and as much interested in workers’ education as she was’ – he was leading an Oxford Union debating team on an American tour. He found No. 1130 ‘the centre of discussion on educational and international matters’, with often several meetings going on at once, and with an enlightened atmosphere that was to influence him all his life. He was invited to Old Westbury, probably with his debating colleagues because of Dorothy’s perennial need for tennis partners and young male company for Whitney and Michael. Lindsay might have been fazed by her artlessness, however: ‘I spent many hours in his room reading and talking to him,’ she wrote. ‘He is a bit of a genius, that lad – and his future is gleaming with possibilities... I love him dearly.’ Lindsay, whom family tradition maintains was in love with her, perhaps recognised her widow’s cry, but also that Willard was ever present, with his belongings in her house and in her life.128
Croly’s biography was growing, using much of Willard’s own writing on his experiences (it eventually made 596 pages) and publication was planned by Macmillan for 1924. Dorothy had already arranged for an exhibition of his watercolours and drawings, which had opened at the Arden Gallery at 599 Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1921. Two and a half thousand cards were sent out for the preview, which brought another deluge of thanks and appreciations, while the watercolours travelled on to other galleries. Less publicity, at least for Dorothy, attended the unveiling of James Earle Fraser’s statue of Alexander Hamilton on the south façade of the Treasury Building in Washington. Hamilton, the ‘Founding Father’ who had championed Eli Whitney’s industrial inventions but died from duelling injuries in 1804, was also her mother Flora’s ancestor. She paid for the statue in Willard’s memory but only a few people knew of this.
If she was trying to fill her every unforgiving minute then she was not finished yet. Her most daunting task was in fulfilling Willard’s wish to make his university, Cornell, ‘a more human place’. Where to start? In his letter dated 23rd January 1919, her thirty-second birthday, Willard’s former tutor and drawing master, Olaf M. Brauner, was simply sorrowful. ‘For what Willard Straight was to me, I thank you,’ he wrote, and so, later that year when she had needed to find out about Cornell, she turned to Professor Brauner. They met quietly in the city, and he responded with ideas for Willard’s memorial – an architectural travelling fellowship, a chair in international law, or history, or art, or maybe an art gallery or a college of fine arts? She wanted a scholarship for Willard’s old school, Oswego High, to send a pupil to Cornell, and approaching Cornell’s President Schurman about this, she added that she ‘had it in her mind’ to carry out her late husband’s wishes. Despite her discretion the Cornell community was soon speculating as to what Mrs Straight might do, and humming with assured gossip as to her wealth. In October 1920 she spent a day on the Ithaca campus with a cohort of professors, ending in an agreement that Willard’s memorial should be a new student union building, and that his friend and hers, Bill Delano, should be her architect. She quickly learned that she had to tread as on eggshells through the Cornell politics for in early 1921 she had been warned of a ‘sex war’ – the talk had been blithely of male undergraduates when a quarter of the students were women, as Ezra Cornell had intended ‘an institution where any person can find instruction in any study’. She of all people had hardly overlooked this, but the faculty of Home Economics headed by Martha Van Renssaeler and Flora Rose had to be reassured. Bill Delano sent her his first design for a beautiful stone building of restrained gothic, with a big gable end for a hall and memorial window, and separate rooms for various student activities.
Outsiders, particularly the parsimonious professors at Cornell, did not understand her attitude to the cost of the union building, that – as with Henry Street, Sacco and Vanzetti’s defence and The New Republic – her word, once given, meant that she would find what was genuinely necessary. They were so accustomed to jostling for funding that they continued to quibble and question over the siting and details of the design, and her architect had to put up a stout defence. Matters were made easier with the appointment of Livingston Farrand as Cornell’s new president, the brother of Prof
essor Max Farrand and therefore Beatrix’s brother-in-law. Dorothy saw ‘something rather fine and idealistic in his make-up’. She saw Beatrix fairly regularly as she continued to oversee the maintenance of Old Westbury’s Chinese garden, and as she was now the doyenne of campus designers (working at Princeton, Yale and Chicago) the massed Farrands’ expertise on academic life was at Dorothy’s disposal. They suggested that Hart House at Toronto and the union building at Ann Arbor in Michigan were the best models for Cornell. Dorothy visited them both and polished her expertise. Delano and Aldrich’s design had grown in gothic majesty, providing for a lounge, writing room, women’s lounge, co-op, library and theatre, with upper rooms for music, games and committees. Dorothy was adamant about the theatre, and she sent a typed list of additional requests – that the union should be managed by the students, there were to be no heavy-handed controls, and a standing committee of trustees were to take a light stance, and in all ‘a maximum of decency, order and cleanliness should be the ideal’.
In June 1922 her gift to Cornell was formally announced, and her architect promised to keep her informed of any changes to the design. In the following October Professor Lincoln Burr wrote, hoping that the evident progress would bring her and the children to Ithaca – the professors had become paternal and sent love ‘to the kiddies’. Finally she was sent the formal resolution dated 7th March 1923, ‘That Mrs Dorothy Straight is hereby granted permission to erect upon the site designated, and in accordance with the Delano & Aldrich plans, a building which will be presented when completed to Cornell University for social and recreation purposes and maintained as a Union.’129
In June a cable arrived from Louise Croly in Venice to say that Herbert was ill. Dorothy had crossed the Atlantic only once since the war; now she sailed on the Homeric on 16th June, arrived in Paris eight days later and made a dash via the Simplon express to reach them. She found Herbert improving, but that the crisis was over the proofs of Willard’s biography, which he could not finish correcting, so she shouldered the task, put them in her bag and headed for home. She went to Suresnes; Daisy had told her that the cemetery was being reorganised and the bodies all reburied in steel coffins, ‘and dear Willard’s body will be placed where it won’t ever have to be moved again’. The work was finished and the cemetery had been rededicated on Memorial Day at the end of May, so that the posies laid by French schoolchildren were still on the graves.130 Once again she seemed to find the reality comforting; she wrote of her acceptance, of ‘having given up the man I love at least there is no further struggle’. She tripped gaily into London in early July, meeting Almeric Paget and his new wife Edith Starr, whose wedding she had attended in New York. She lunched with John Maynard Keynes, dined with Kenneth Lindsay and Albert Mansbridge, and treated herself to Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play. After seeing her beloved stepsister Addie Lambart in Dorset she sailed on the Elizabethan on 17th July.