Perhaps, though, Howells was simply too much under the influence of the book he had just reviewed for Harper’s—a futuristic fantasy called Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts journalist and one of Howells’s protégés. It was remarkable, in fact, how closely life at the Chelsea resembled the idyllic communal society discovered by Bellamy’s protagonist, a well-off young Bostonian named Julian West who falls asleep one night in 1887 and wakes up, magically, in the year 2000. In his ordinary life in anxious, competitive, money-dominated, nineteenth-century America, West had been accustomed to seeing members of the gentry lie and steal in order to rise in society, workers threaten violence to force a raise in pay, and women essentially sell themselves into marriage for the sake of economic security. But in the Boston of 2000, West found that these social ills had vanished, thanks to the government’s taking over the nation’s industries and resources and distributing the bounty equally among all citizens.
As with the Chelsea Association’s cooperative system, the United States of the future was able to keep expenses down through the elimination of brokers, retailers, and other middlemen and by directing the money saved toward improvements for the lives of all. With everyone in the work force, no individual needed to labor more than twenty years. Strolling through this future metropolis, with its clean streets, modern technology, shared public buildings, and healthy, smiling population, West reflected in the novel, “Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.” What ease and comfort were created when all people joined together to provide for everyone’s needs.
Reading the loose proofs, Howells found himself so transported by this “allegorical romance,” he admitted in his Harper’s column that he questioned his own allegiance to the cause of realistic fiction. None of his own novels possessed the inspirational power of this fable, fantastic in content but related in plain, matter-of-fact journalistic style. Bellamy’s vision jolted Howells so effectively out of his habitual ways of thinking, in fact, that it was difficult to shake off the effects: exiting the Chelsea cooperative onto West Twenty-Third Street, he experienced the same type of culture shock West felt when he returned to the era of his birth. Strolling among the theater district’s gentlemen and beggars, opera singers and prostitutes—each person’s role determined by a toss of destiny’s dice—one understood the full truth of Bellamy’s metaphor of society as an enormous coach being pulled with great effort by the masses of humanity while atop the coach rode the fortunate wealthy few. The seats at the top were comfortable, Bellamy had written, and the competition for them was high. But comfortable as they were, “the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly.”
Bellamy’s Looking Backward became one of the best-selling books of the century, outsold only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Bible. Howells was astonished to see how easily such a “dose of undiluted socialism” could be “gulped down by some of the most vigilant opponents of that theory” when it was presented in “the sugar-coated form of a dream.” Here was the opportunity he had been seeking, he wrote to his former protégé from the seaside cottage where he and his family vacationed that summer, to open Americans’ eyes to the inequities of the times and to begin to create real social change. Throughout the following year, as the Howellses finally chose a home in New York—not at the Chelsea, as Howells had expected, but in a respectable brownstone of which Elinor approved—the two novelists conspired to turn fantasy into reality, promoting the proliferation of Bellamy clubs across the nation and the creation of a progressive new Nationalist Party to replace the corporation-toadying Republicans and Democrats, who, Twain liked to brag, sold their allegiance at “higher prices than anywhere in the world.”
Bellamy, exhilarated by his new influential power, soon abandoned writing altogether in favor of direct political action, and he urged Howells to do the same. “The responsibility upon us who have won the ear of the public, to plead the cause of the voiceless masses, is beyond limit,” he wrote in a passionate letter to his friend. “There is no discharge in that war.” But the success of Looking Backward had only increased the older writer’s desire to experiment further with ways to help Americans find their own voice. Determined not “to lie” about life, he wrote, and working “more in earnest, polemically . . . than I had ever been before,” he set to work on A Hazard of New Fortunes, his first novel set in New York, the story of a middle-class couple searching for a home who become entangled with a wide array of city types, from newly minted millionaires to Lower East Side anarchists, and who must decide where they stand politically and morally in the new industrial America.
Howells continued to drop in at the Chelsea Association Building occasionally with his younger daughter, Mildred, an aspiring artist. Dining at the Deweys’ apartment, surrounded by deep-toned paintings in gleaming gold frames, Howells could keep an eye on the Chelsea’s burgeoning creative subculture while Mildred mixed with such contemporaries as the novelist Edward Eggleston’s daughter Allegra, who had studied sculpture in Switzerland; Bruce Crane, a tonalist artist with a studio in Bronxville; and Charles Naegele, an excellent young portraitist from Tennessee. One always found nonartists at the Deweys’ table as well, such as Chelsea Association neighbors John Straiton, a bank director then in the process of creating the Colorado River Irrigation Company to expand farming in the arid West; the staunchly progressive Ritter sisters, Ida and Mary, one a writer, the other an actor; and Charles G. Wilson, president of the city’s board of health, who had provided access to the worst downtown tenements for the journalist Jacob Riis to document in How the Other Half Lives.
It had been only a few years since Howells’s first encounter with this cooperative on Twenty-Third Street, but the atmosphere had evolved noticeably since his stay there. A new sense of confidence and ambition ran through the corridors and public rooms, as residents who once limited themselves to quoting English philosophers now hurried to lectures by Americans at the Nineteenth Century Club and classes at the Cooper Union. Much of this new assertiveness grew from the fertile soil of great wealth amassed in the city, but it also seemed a product of the sheer number of creative residents who had been drawn to a residence of this size in this location. Finally, the critical mass that Hubert had wished for had been achieved.
One saw the perfect expression of this new American self-confidence in the canvases of the charming, cherub-faced artist Childe Hassam, an acquaintance of Howells’s from Boston who had moved with his wife into one of the Chelsea’s apartment-studios in 1892. A merchant’s son who had begun his career as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and other magazines, Hassam had moved to Paris to pursue an academic course of study similar to Dewey’s. Like the tonalists, Hassam was drawn to the modern painters, but being a decade younger, he found inspiration not in the misty landscapes of the Barbizon school but in the shimmering work of the impressionists. After he returned to the United States, Hassam, like Dewey, gravitated to New York, where he celebrated in paint the lively, commercial atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Madison Square. His depictions of fashionably dressed young women promenading around the park in springtime presented a portrait of “the exuberant spirit of America . . . a new world capital.” And although gallery owners continued to ghettoize American paintings in side rooms (if they showed them at all), Hassam felt confident that he could use his pretty paintings as a battering ram to smash American resistance to indigenous art.
The fire of artistic nationalism was not limited to painters. Laura Sedgwick Collins, having graduated from the Lyceum School and made a small name for herself through recitations and one-woman plays, now moved on to music composition as a student at the new National Conservatory of Music. Founded by Jeannette Meyers Thurber, a millionaire’s wife and trained musician, the conservatory was modeled on the Paris Conservat
oire; it was a place for American musicians to get professional training without having to travel overseas. After soliciting funds from her circle of wealthy New York friends, Thurber had assembled a staff of distinguished musician-instructors led by the famous Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák, whom she had paid a small fortune to leave the Prague Conservatory and serve as the school’s director.
Like Philip Hubert’s Lyceum School, Thurber’s conservatory offered courses to all Americans who demonstrated proficiency, regardless of financial status or level of training. More astonishing, Thurber announced that her school would admit African-American and disabled students as well as white men and women. Only the most talented and committed applicants would be allowed to study with Dvořák. Collins, still living at the Chelsea at age thirty-two, was among those chosen.
But the conservatory students were mistaken if they thought the fifty-one-year-old Dvořák intended to provide them with a solely European education. Like the Americans, he had grown up in a country outside the German-dominated music community, and he had worked hard to create his own style as a composer by drawing on the traditional music of his native land. Now, in the United States, he would see to it that his students developed a close acquaintance with the great masters, but beyond that, he wanted to teach them to reach into their own backgrounds for inspiration for their compositions. Dazzled by the city, he urged these young Americans to integrate into their music its “voice of the people”—the whistling boys, the blind organ grinders, the rattling trains and moaning ships—no matter how “low” or “insignificant” the source.
Like the other students, Laura Collins was flattered to hear the gruff, bearded Eastern European proclaim, after a night in the saloons with the genial piano instructor James Huneker, that “the American voice is unlike anything else, quite unlike the English voice. I do not speak of method or style, but of the natural quality . . . it pleases me very much.” More problematic was his pronouncement, after meeting the impoverished young African-American baritone Harry Thacker Burleigh, that the mother lode of material from which to create an American canon lay in the plantation songs of America’s former slaves.
This was hardly the message New Yorkers expected to receive from the famous composer they had paid good money to import. The newspapers, always on the lookout for a scandal, delighted in describing Dvořák’s enthusiasm for Burleigh’s renditions of such spirituals and plantation songs as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Let My People Go.” They rushed to print such quotes as “The negro in America utters a new note, full of sweetness, and as characteristic as any music of any country” and to describe Dvořák exclaiming, after listening to Burleigh sing “Go Down, Moses,” “That is as great as a Beethoven theme!”
If Dvořák perplexed his American students with his odd fascination with these simple tunes, he acquitted himself brilliantly with one of his own expressions of the American experience, Symphony no. 9, or the New World Symphony. Although he claimed that during the composition process he “literally saturated himself with Negro song,” to the ears of his audience the results sounded more Bohemian than American. But that was beside the point. His haunting melodies, punctuated with the sad, strange sound of the English horn, evoked the mystery and elusiveness of this developing nation so effectively that Burleigh and the lyricist William Arms Fisher later used one of the symphony’s themes as the basis for the song “Goin’ Home.”
The New World Symphony touched on the longing in the hearts of a people who had left behind a past they no longer remembered and who sought a future they could not yet perceive. Howells was perhaps more in touch with that mix of emotions than most New Yorkers during those years. Sitting at the Deweys’ dining table, he found it easy to recall the pronouncement made at the Lotos Club that year: “We have not begun our greatest century yet, but are laying the foundations in the arts. Expect great things and we will build the greatest monuments to these disciplines that the world has known.”
The voice of a bold new America was preparing to make itself heard for the first time at the opening of the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For years, everyone who counted in the intersecting worlds of American industry, arts, and politics had been tracking the construction of this enormous world’s fair, staged to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America but more directly intended to trumpet both America’s expanding power and Chicago’s role in processing its enormous natural wealth. Central to that vision was the construction of the White City—the collection of gleaming white buildings at the center of the exposition, so white in contrast to Chicago’s dark tenements that it seemed to glow. The grand classical style of the buildings and the elaborate use of electric lighting to add drama to their appearance sent a message that here was the beginning of not just a new phase in the life of a developing young country but a new era, one that would leave its stamp on the world.
In the weeks before the exhibition’s opening day, the Chelsea Association Building’s public rooms fell silent as nearly all the association’s artists traveled to Chicago to take a look at the preparations. There they encountered an expression of America that they themselves had helped create. Laura Collins, touring the Palace of Fine Arts as the guest of that exhibit’s chief assistant, found four of Charles Melville Dewey’s defiantly American landscapes on display, along with two of John Francis Murphy’s—sources of national pride now after so many years of derision. In the Women’s Building, Allegra Eggleston’s portrait of a woman playing the lute was exhibited; Childe Hassam, whose illustrations decorated the exposition’s architectural drawings, commemorated the event with a set of chromolithographs titled Gems of the White City. The irrepressible Steele MacKaye, first director of the Lyceum theater, could be found hard at work on a million-dollar “Spectatorium”—the largest theater in the world—where he planned to stage a grand reenactment of Columbus’s arrival in America that would feature an actual ship on water, sailing to the accompaniment of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
The White City shone with the promise of Edward Bellamy’s vision. Here was a demonstration of how the electrifying power of the arts supported by the vast wealth of the great corporations could enhance and elevate the lives of all citizens. Howells himself, who arrived two months before the opening to tour the exposition grounds, wanted to believe in its potential. After all, according to the scenario presented in Looking Backward, the consolidation of corporate power in private hands was a necessary first step before the state stepped in to transfer those assets to the people. But something nagged at him, as he later wrote to Bellamy—a small doubt about whether, in the end, these great corporate entities would allow themselves to be harnessed in the public interest.
Howells returned home—“home” now being a luxurious twelve-room apartment on West Fifty-Ninth Street, paid for partly with the proceeds of A Hazard of New Fortunes, his most popular novel to date. Five years after moving to New York, Howells was not only the nation’s leading literary arbiter but also one of its best-paid writers. Middle-class Americans were thrilled to see themselves reflected in his kindly gaze—to consider in the comfort of their parlors the ethical questions he put before them and to congratulate themselves on the depth of their insight and empathy. But despite his having reached many more ordinary Americans than he had ever dreamed possible, Howells could not shake the feeling that he had failed in his greater mission to change America through literature, to help guide the nation into the future with its democratic, humanistic ideals intact.
As the city’s commercial character permeated its coalescing culture, New Yorkers’ love of power and wealth overwhelmed the efforts of progressive writers like himself. The shocking images of starving tenement children in Riis’s How the Other Half Lives—an other half that had by now expanded to three-fourths of the city’s population—showed how much worse life had gotten in the city in recent years. In this teeming metropolis, where each man’s value was assessed by the size of his bank ac
count, the dream of “settling somewhere very humbly and simply” appeared not only futile but foolish. Howells’s relationship with his Harper’s Monthly publisher had cooled to the point of chilly politeness in the years since the Haymarket affair; he had ended the series of novels required by his contract with The World of Chance—a cruel self-parody in which a callow young novelist from Ohio finds great success with a silly romance called A Modern Romeo while a New York acquaintance of his, an elderly socialist, dies with his treatise unpublished and ignored. After delivering the novel, Howells resigned. Now, returning from the Chicago exposition, he confronted the manuscript of his current novel in progress, The Coast of Bohemia—a fond look back at that spring of 1888 when he had first encountered the coalescing society of young artists in New York—that was lying half finished on the desk in his thick-carpeted, book-lined study overlooking Central Park.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 7