For anyone wondering how Greenwich Village — one of the trendiest and most desirable neighborhoods in the city — got its start as more than just a destination for immigrants, Christine Stansell has the answer with her new book, “American Moderns” (Princeton University Press).
She tells the story of a group of artists, radicals and intellectuals, collectively known as “Bohemians,” who gathered at the turn of the 20th Century and reshaped New York City life forever.
Here, Stansell describes five of the most important NYC Bohemians who altered American culture…
The Birth Control Champion
With her pragmatic campaign to legalize birth control, Margaret Sanger captured the bohemian enthusiasm for sexual freedom. Federal law prohibited the distribution of “obscene” birth control devices. Sanger, a public health nurse, knew how hard it was for poor women to obtain contraception and how burdened they were by unwanted pregnancies. So in March 1914, she wrote “Woman Rebel,” a manifesto on birth control in America — and working-class organizers passed it round the country. Sanger wrote that modern women had a duty to defy prudish convention and “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes.” When she was arrested for running her own clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which handed out diaphragms, her trial became a cause célèbre — even women from the tenements, loaded down with babies, bottles and diapers, came to testify.
The Ghetto Historian
Hutchins Hapgood was a Midwesterner who made it to Harvard, and moved to New York because he felt it was the best place to become a writer. His forte was human interest reportage — he saw himself as uniquely endowed to understand the aspirations and longings of immigrants, workers and radicals and, in 1902, he published his first major book, “The Spirit of the Ghetto.” Hapgood befriended poor Jewish intellectuals and artists and brought the most talented of them back to the coolest parties and cafés in the Village. Hapgood was married to Neith Boyce, another talented writer, but one whose career sank under the burdens of their large family and a move to the suburbs. While Hapgood made a virtue out of free love, using his affairs with working-class women to get closer to his subjects, he responded badly to Boyce’s own flings.
The Male Feminist
Max Eastman was a political star of downtown New York. Handsome, brilliant, charismatic and politically acute, he was editor of “The Masses,” the trend-setting monthly magazine which celebrated Bohemia’s special brand of labor radicalism and sexual freedom, socialism and modern art. A feminist by virtue of his upbringing — his mother was a minister and his sister was a leader in the battle for women’s suffrage — Eastman founded the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1910. He believed in modern marriage, too. His partnership to the beautiful and accomplished lawyer, Ida Rauh, provoked a newspaper scandal after it was discovered that Ida had kept her own name on their mailbox. “I do not want to absorb my wife’s identity in mine,” Eastman told the paper proudly.
The Intrepid Journalist
John Reed was part of the migration of left-wing Harvard graduates who arrived in Greenwich Village in 1912-13 to make their mark on New York culture. Brimming with talent and energy, Reed was always in the thick of bohemian productions, beginning with a huge theatrical pageant in Madison Square Garden in 1913, which dramatized a silkworker’s strike in Paterson, New Jersey. That same year, a major magazine sent him to Mexico to cover the revolution. His dispatches on Pancho Villa’s army elevated him to the rank of the finest journalist of his generation. In 1917 Reed — along with his wife Louise Bryant — were among the few American reporters to cover the Russian Revolution first hand.
The Free-Love Bride
Louise Bryant, Reed’s lover and eventually his wife, was married to a dentist in Portland, Oregon, when Reed passed through town in 1914 to visit his mother. She left her husband to follow him back to New York.
In Greenwich Village, they threw themselves into a love affair which was also a career partnership. They made a virtue out of their emancipated, free-love relationship, so much so that once Bryant divorced and they married, they kept it hidden from their friends.
Bryant wanted to be a journalist, too. She always tried to square her career ambitions with her attraction to powerful men. Once Reed went to Europe to cover World War I, she began an affair with Eugene O’Neill. But when Reed wangled an invitation to Saint Petersburg to cover the brewing Russian Revolution, she left O’Neill to join him.