"The Village," the Salons, and Other Gatherings

"THE VILLAGE," THE SALONS, AND OTHER GATHERINGS

The Birth of "The Village."

When the Greenwich Village section of New York City (the part of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street and above Houston Street) was officially designated a residential area in 1916, it was already home to some of the most influential artists and intellectuals in the city. They had moved there partly because the neighborhood was inexpensive—rent for a single room was typically eight dollars a month, or an entire floor of a brownstone house was available for about thirty dollars a month—and partly because of its bohemianism, the prevailing tolerance of a wide variety of lifestyles. The Village was also gaining a reputation as the American Left Bank, a place like the section of Paris where the brightest minds in politics, journalism, and the arts came together. Between 1913 and 1919 Greenwich Village, less than a mile square in size, included the homes of playwrights Eugene O'Neill, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, and Louise Bryant; novelistplaywright Floyd Dell; poet-playwright Alfred Kreymborg; novelists Willa Gather, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson; poets Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and Edna St. Vincent Millay; journalists Max Eastman and John Reed; and painters John Sloan, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Marsden Hartley, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Cather was the only one not to participate in the active social life of the Village. One high-spirited night during the late 1910s, a group including John Sloan climbed to the top of the Washington Square Arch and proclaimed Greenwich Village an independent republic—only half in jest. John Reed wrote in a poem, "we are free who live in Washington Square, / We dare to think as Uptown wouldn't dare."

Where Art and Politics Mingled

In New York, Chicago, and elsewhere throughout the 1910s, practitioners of the various arts enthusiastically socialized with radical political thinkers. Many of the artists and intellectuals of Greenwich Village were members of the Liberal Club, formed in 1913 by Henrietta Rodman, a New York City schoolteacher who believed in, among other things, sexual freedom for women. The Liberal Club was billed as "A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas." It also served alcohol and had dancing. Some members of the club wrote one-act plays that the others staged, and this faction of the club evolved into the Washington Square Players (later the Theatre Guild); the group also included some of the future Provincetown Players. Other meetings of minds in the Village took place at the mural-filled apartment of painters William and Marguerite Zorach and at Polly's Restaurant (which was on the ground floor of the building that housed the Liberal Club and was run by an Illinois-born anarchist named Paula Holladay), where the food was cheap and the politics were radical. In Chicago groups formed around the poet-playwright Floyd Dell and his first wife, Margery Currey (before Dell moved to New York in 1913); cultural critic and economist Thorstein Veblen; Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry; and Maurice and Ellen Volkenburg Browne, the founders of the Chicago Little Theater.

The Salons

In New York there were two influential salons—regular, planned gatherings of artists and intellectuals. One was at the West Sixty-seventh Street home of art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. Their circle included painters Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Morton Schamberg, and Man Ray; poets Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Alfred Kreymborg; and dancer Isadora Duncan. More famous than the Arensbergs' gatherings was the salon of Mabel Dodge, an intellectual socialite who served as hostess, patron, and friend to many of the most important talents of the decade. On Wednesday evenings from 1913 to 1917, her apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue, a block off Washington Square, was filled with guests, including playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Neith Boyce, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, and Floyd Dell; poet Amy Lowell; stage designer Robert Edmond Jones; painter Max Weber; and journalists Max Eastman, John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and Hutchins Hapgood. Dodge's gatherings often had themes—a poetry evening, a magazine evening, a psychoanalysis evening—and guest speakers such as birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger, radical labor leader William "Big Bill" Haywood, and anarchist Emma Goldman. The radical climate of some of these social events carried over into the political activities of the group members. For instance, Dodge, Jones, and Reed were the masterminds of the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913, a staged event in which thousands of striking silk-mill workers marched up Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Garden, where they put on a political "pageant" meant to dramatize the plight of the industrial worker. Dodge had been inspired to start her New York salon by her friend Gertrude Stein, an expatriate American poet who held her own salons in Paris. There she befriended and encouraged American artists working in Europe, including Marsden Hartley and Alfred Maurer, as well as European artists who later came to the United States, including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Dodge's New York salon—which ended in 1917 when she moved to Taos, New Mexico, to create an artists' colony—played an important role in bringing together the arts and radical politics during the middle years of the 1910s.

Sources:

Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians: A Recreation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday (New York: Dutton, 1959);

Martin Green, New York: 1913 (New York: Macmillan, 1988);

Robert E. Humphrey, Children of Fantasy: The First Rebels of Greenwich Village (New York: Wiley, 1978);

Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991).