“Red War on the Family”:

Sex, Gender, and Americanism, 1919-1929

By Erica Jean Ryan

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 1998

A.M., Brown University, 2002

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of History at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2010

© Copyright 2010 by Erica Jean Ryan

This dissertation by Erica Jean Ryan is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Mari Jo Buhle, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Elliott Gorn, Reader

Date______Carolyn Dean, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

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Erica J. Ryan Brown University Box N Providence, RI 02912 [email protected]

EDUCATION

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Doctor of Philosophy, History, 2010 (degree requirements completed in Sept 2009)

Dissertation: “Red War on the Family”: Sex, Gender, and Americanism, 1919-1929

Dissertation Committee: Mari Jo Buhle (Director) Elliott Gorn Carolyn Dean

Master of Arts, History, May 2002

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York

Bachelor of Arts, History concentration, 1998

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

19th and 20th Century United States Cultural and Intellectual History, Women‟s History, Gender History, History of Sexuality

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ Adjunct Lecturer Introduction to U.S. History II, 1865-Present, Fall 2008, Spring 2009, Fall 2009.

Bristol Community College, Bristol, MA Course Instructor America in the 1960s, Teaching American History Project, Spring 2005. The 1920s in America: A Cultural History, Teaching American History Project, Fall 2004.

School of Summer and Continuing Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI iv

Instructor Modern American Cultural History, Summer 2004.

Brown University, Providence, RI Teaching Assistant The Mexican Revolution, Spring 2006. Modern Russian History, Spring 2004. Introduction to U.S. History to 1877, (survey) Fall 2003. American History, 1930-1980, Spring 2003. American Urban History to 1877, Fall 2002.

HONORS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Brown University, 2007, 2006. John Lax Fellowship, Department of History, Brown University, 2006. Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship, Social Welfare Archives, University of Minnesota, 2005. Sophia Smith Collection, Travel-to-Collection Grant, Smith College, 2004. McLoughlin Travel Fellowship, Department of History Department, Brown University, 2003-2004.

PRESENTATIONS

“„The Bolshevism of Sex‟: Nationalism, Sexuality and Gender in 1920s America.” Presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, New York, NY, March 2008.

“Culture and Politics in the 1920s and the Renegotiation of Gender.” Guest Lecture in Women‟s Social Activism, 1865-1920, Professor Mari Jo Buhle, Brown University, Providence, RI, Fall 2006, Fall 2005, Spring 2004.

“Red War on the Family: The Gendered Discourse of Americanism in the First Red Scare.” Presented at the 13th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Claremont, CA, June 2005.

“Sex, Gender and Americanism in the 1920s.” Presented at Gender Across Borders, Graduate Student Conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, May 2005.

“Making a Home: Gendered Discourse on Women and Family in the First Red Scare.” Presented at the Fifth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women‟s and Gender History, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, IL, March 2004.

PUBLICATIONS

“Women and Gender,” Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: 1918-1929, James Ciment ed., (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2008) v

“Sheppard Towner Act,” Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: 1918-1929, James Ciment ed., (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2008)

Book Review of “The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935,” by Laura Behling, in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 3, June 2006, p384-386.

Book Review of “Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare,” by Johanna Schoen in Women and Social Movements in the United States, March 2006.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Organizer, “Gender and Sexuality in Defining the „Nation,‟ 1860-1930,” panel of five scholars for the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, March 2008.

Participant, “Culture and Communities,” Mellon Graduate Workshop at Brown University, 2006-7.

Planning Committee, Gender Across Borders, Graduate Student Conference, Brown University, 2004-2005.

RELATED EXPERIENCE

Assistant Director of Admission, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, 1998-2001.

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

American Historical Association Organization of American Historians

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Acknowledgments

I happily turn to the overwhelming task of saying thank you to those who helped me see this project through from start to finish. I wish first to acknowledge the generous institutional support I received from Brown University and from the Department of

History. I also benefited greatly from the Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship to research extensively at the Social Welfare Archives, housed at the University of Minnesota, and from a Travel-to-Collection Grant to visit the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

I offer my thanks to the staff at numerous libraries, including: the Rockefeller Library at

Brown University, the New York Public Library, the Swarthmore College Peace

Collection, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the New York Historical

Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Schlesinger Library at the

Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

I have been blessed with good history teachers. I wish to thank John Bullard, my high school history teacher at Northern Valley Regional High School in New Jersey. He was the first person to point me down this path. Still, I went to Sarah Lawrence College thinking I would be a writer, until I met Professor Lyde Sizer. Lyde, kind and wise in equal measure, sparked my interest in history and in issues of gender and sexuality in new and meaningful ways. She encouraged me to see myself as a historian way back then, and her belief in me has carried me through many moments of self doubt in the meantime. In her I found a compassionate mentor and a cheerleader, something rare and incredibly valuable. My gratitude to her is boundless.

vii

At Brown University I found an exceptional community of scholars. I thank Mari Jo

Buhle, my dissertation advisor, for her unflagging enthusiasm throughout this project.

Mari Jo pushed me to sharpen my thinking at every turn, and her abilities as a thoughtful editor and a remarkable historian improved this work in more ways than I can count. I am lucky to find myself among the cohort of graduate students and scholars who have benefited from her kindness and considerable expertise. For her dedication to my work, I am very grateful. Elliott Gorn also played a crucial role, challenging me to ground this intellectual and cultural history in real people and real happenings. I thank him too for his humor and for shared dinners in Providence. I also owe Carolyn Dean a debt of gratitude for her ability to read my work and see it for all it could be. Her critical readings and her warmth and kindness were vital to the completion of this book. I also thank Professor Howard Chudacoff, Professor Michael Vorenberg, Cherrie Guerzon,

Mary Beth Bryson and Julissa Bautista for their kindness over the years.

My time at Brown was also indelibly marked by my wonderful colleagues in the

Department of History. For their intellectual help and emotional support, for late nights at the library and late nights of revelry, I thank Nicholas Anastasakos, Jonathan Hagel,

Sheyda Jahanbani, Thomas Jundt, Jason White and Katherine Worley. It was an honor to share this experience with such a talented, generous, and kind group of people. I also thank an extended network, loosely affiliated with history, including Hugh Amano, Neil

Perry, and Maureen White.

My gratitude extends well beyond Brown. My wonderful friends have cheered me and carried me through these years of often lonely labor. I could not have made it to the finish line without the love and shared laughter of Sarah Graizbord, Amanda Kraus,

viii

Michael Blaskewicz, Larry Alan McDowell, Mary Beth Harrison, Sara Kaliski, Jessica

Spillane, and Sara Lubitz. Thank you for keeping me present in a world removed from academia.

My family has played a big role in sustaining me through these years. For their great love and enduring kindness I thank Michael John Ryan, Denis and Carmel Ryan, Sheila

Ryan-Doherty, Catherine Gotay, Saisha Gotay, Lisa Terrero, Kevin and Christine

Schuck, Mary Jane and John Conroy, Mary Jane and Charlie Sacco, and Christine Sacco.

I also thank my in-laws, Frank and Sheila Schuck, for their tremendous love and support.

My husband Matthew Schuck encouraged me to follow this dream, making the move from New York City to Providence with me at the beginning. From those first uncertain days, to the pink house on Hope Street, to the completion of this project, with unfailing love, patience, and support, Matt has anchored and balanced my life and my work. Even though it has not been easy, with humor, tenderness, and with great generosity, he has facilitated the completion of this book by keeping me sane, and fed, and happy, and loved. There are simply no words to express my gratitude for your partnership on this long journey. I love you and know how lucky I am.

Finally, my parents, Michael Ryan and Jeannie Ryan. How do I adequately thank the first two people to believe in me? At times, I am awestruck. They worked so hard to give me and my brother a world full of opportunities that they never had. With great emotion and warmth, they nurtured me and made sure I believed that I could be anything

I wanted to be when I grew up. This early gift, their abiding faith in me, their consistent support, and above all, their overwhelming love have made me the person that I am, and have made all of this possible. This book is the product of your labors and love as much

ix

as it is mine. As some small token of my gratitude, it is to you that this book is dedicated.

Erica Jean Ryan

Lodi, New Jersey

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Constructing Postwar Nationalism: Americanism and Bolshevism as Competing Ideologies in American Culture 28

Chapter Two: “The Age of Woman in Revolt”: Talking about Bolshevism by Talking about Women in Red Scare America, 1919-1923 75

Chapter Three: “Every Homeowner is a Bulwark of Americanism and a Safeguard against Bolshevism”: Constructions of Social Order and Working Class Masculinity in the Postwar Own Your Own Home Movement 121

Chapter Four: Getting “Personal and Intimate”: The Americanization of Immigrant Family and Sexual Values 173

Chapter Five: “The Perils Ahead Are Moral Not Economic”: Modern Culture, Modern Marriage, and Antiradicalism after 1924 221

Conclusion 269

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Introduction

Historians have long recognized that the Russian Revolution created a seismic shift in world politics and had a profound impact on the political situation in the United States.

What they have not explored, or even acknowledged to any great degree, is the significance of the Revolution in relation to sexual and social mores in the United States.

Historians have, of course, targeted the years around World War I for just this purpose, highlighting the emergence of sexual modernism, which thrust sexuality into the public eye and finally dismantled separate spheres for women and men. In this dissertation I will draw lines between these two major developments, one ostensibly political, the other cultural, to shed new light on the period immediately following World War I.

Connections between political reactions to Russian Bolshevism and cultural change after the war developed within a flexible, defensive, and ideological nationalism, referred to at the time and in this study as Americanism. This ideology stemmed from widespread beliefs about American superiority, about the nation as a city on the hill where democracy and capitalism offered freedom and opportunity to all citizens. It also embodied ethnic and racial superiority. The cry for 100% Americanism during and after

World War I overtly targeted unassimilated immigrants as unfit citizens and as workers assumed to be radical. Proponents of Americanism, usually middle and upper class men and women, did not only view the working class with suspicion, however. While all workers, men and women, needed to prove their Americanism, middle and upper class

1

2 intellectuals and activists, mostly women, needed to as well. The complex interplay between class hierarchies, ethnic and racial bias, and notions of national superiority, maintained a brand of cultural nationalism. That cultural nationalism stamped public expectations and approval on specific behaviors and identities while casting others as not only socially troubling, but politically troubling. This Americanism shaped the way

Americans ordered their thinking about appropriate femininity, masculinity, sexual propriety and family life in the postwar decade.

As uncertainty over the potential implications of Russian Bolshevism pervaded

American society, boosters of Americanism cultivated specific values in response.

Nervous opponents of Bolshevism, conservative politicians, social critics, and fiction writers drew attention to dramatic Russian social policies that turned American expectations of womanhood, manhood and family life on their heads. These groups associated Americanism with values and behaviors that opposed Russian practices.

Cultural conservatism, they intimated, would help ensure political conservatism. By the same token, business and political interests working to right the economy after the war developed a movement to encourage home ownership among American workers and the middle class. These groups acted on the belief that the family as a consuming unit reinforced the capitalist system. The capitalist system, in this equation, promised order and prosperity. These advocates of home ownership strongly encouraged certain social and sexual behaviors as a way to maintain the status quo.

As the 1920s progressed, those promoting Americanism confronted the drastic cultural changes evident in American society with the arrival of sexual modernism. Reformers trying to Americanize immigrant groups focused their energies on intimate matters.

3

Liberal activists and settlement house workers considered the immigrant‟s adjustment to proper family roles and proper sexual behavior to be a vital part of assimilation.

Americanism necessitated certain attitudes on respect for one‟s elders, on sexual expression, and on marriage. Antiradicals expanded concerns about the effect of radical doctrines on young people to include American youth, particularly those middle and upper class college aged men and women society feared to be in “revolt” against old standards. Anxieties about Russian Bolshevism, both its social ideals and its political values, even framed discussions about the sexual revolution of young people against marriage and monogamy. Antiradicals, nervous elites, super patriots and social conservatives saw this disregard for traditional sexual and gender values as a sign of demoralization in American society. Weakened morals, they reasoned, would weaken

Americans‟ resolve to defend family and country from radical political doctrines.

Americanism fostered an environment of political conformity in the 1920s, and this conformity was maintained in part through the quest for cultural and social conformity, best exemplified by the celebration of private, middle class family life. In the context of reaction to the Russian Revolution, some Americans insisted on adherence to traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, along with monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive marriage as a way to ensure stability and order in a capitalist democracy. In the coming pages this manuscript charts the ways that Americanism both reinforced, and was reinforced by, sexual and gender norms in the decade after World War I.

4

The Sexual Landscape after the War

Americans‟ views on sexuality and gender in the 1910s reflected a drastic break from the past; by the postwar period, anxious traditionalists feared that these changed values and behaviors might make Americans susceptible to radical politics, especially in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the years leading up to the war Americans witnessed major challenges to Victorian culture.1 Working class youth mixed with members of the opposite sex in urban amusements, and sex education reformers gave up a formal silence on the subject of sex in favor of imposing some kind of order.2 In cities like San

Francisco, Chicago, and New York, building on the ideals of activists like Emma

Goldman, sexual radicals sought out a new philosophy appropriate for an increasingly modern world. Political radicals, artists, journalists, feminists and other bohemians rebelled against the constraints of Victorian sexuality, making their rejection of genteel

Victorian middle class culture a new kind of identity politics based on sexuality. As historian Mari Jo Buhle succinctly writes, “Sexual love in many forms, inside or outside marriage, between men and women or between individuals of the same sex, must, they insisted, be allowed to flourish without restriction.”3 Americans criticized sexual reticence, advocated for birth control, and most significantly, demanded that women‟s sexuality be acknowledged and expressed. The 1910s presented a unique period of

1 James R. McGovern. The American Woman‟s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals. The Journal of American History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Sep 1968): 315-333. 2 Kathy Peiss. Cheap Amusements. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 3 Mari Jo Buhle. Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), p260.

5 opportunity in matters sexual, as people reformulated sexual ideology to fit a fast changing world.

The new discourse on sex permeated American culture, and women who came of age during the late 1910s and early 20s encountered an entirely changed social framework.

The break from Victorianism simmering amongst the working and upper classes broke into the middle class, marking the start of the 1920s as a period of sexual liberalism.4

Popularized interpretations of Freudian psychology linked sexuality firmly to notions of identity and the self. Postwar youth who grew up with the terms of sex reformers were encouraged to integrate with members of the opposite sex at an early age, and were aware of ideas about deviance and inversion. Unmarried men and women attended petting parties, and fully engaged in sexual experimentation. Companionate marriage reformers articulated a response to these changes, stressing early marriage, birth control, easy divorce for the childless, and equality between the sexes.5 While this equality was more illusory than real, the rearticulation of sexual ideology became increasingly, and exclusively, heterosexual.6

This new sexual ideology, articulated as an aggressive stress on heterosexuality, led many to believe that a kind of sexual liberation had occurred. Women, commentators argued, needed to catch up as well as wise up by letting go of the sex-segregated

4 John D‟Emilio and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See Chapter 10. 5 Christina Simmons. Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See Chapter 3. Also, see Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. (New York: Free Press, 1988). They note that companionate marriage grew out of progressive reform tendency for order. 6Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, chap. 3.

6 women‟s culture of the nineteenth century. 7 Women who appeared to reject men no longer had the notion of true womanhood, or female moral authority, to cloak their actions. Reformers expounding upon the new sexual ideal correspondingly developed an alternative discourse as a warning. Historian Christina Simmons notes extensive attention to lesbians in popular literature in this period, and she asserts, “The critical point about this literature is that it treated homosexuality as a condition which developed in specific relation to heterosexuality, namely through the failure or deprivation or rejection of the latter.”8 In this period, then, homosexuality was understood as a potentially acquired condition; medical understandings moved away from the concept of congenital inversion, or complete reversal of gender identity, and instead determined lesbians by sexual object choice.9 Women who did not choose men fell into the opposing category.

The “mannish lesbian” of earlier days was knowable, and therefore containable, but now even passive women who appeared feminine could potentially be lesbians. The sexuality of all women was suspect.

The shift away from homosocial culture and towards a culture suspicious of women‟s solidarity and separate institutions had tangible effects in the 1920s. Women expressed a palpable sense of disillusionment about their own lives, and popular understandings of feminism changed. The breakdown in female culture has been linked to the decline of

7Christina Simmons. “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat.” Frontiers. Vol.4, No.3 (1979): p54-59. Simmons argues that marriage reformers articulated a “myth of Victorian repression,” which further dispersed the power of regulation even as it claimed to be liberating. 8 Simmons, Frontiers, p56. 9 George Chauncey Jr. “From Sexual Inverstion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female Deviance,” in Kathy Peiss, et al eds. Passion and Power. (Philadelphia: Temple University University Press, 1989). Also, see Sherrie Inness. “Who‟s Afraid of Stephen Gordon?: The Lesbian in the United States Popular Imagination of the 1920s.” NWSA Journal, Vol.4, No.3, (Fall 1992): p303-320. Inness argues that Americans in the 1920s were comfortable with the mannish lesbian symbol, but were threatened by the many “normal” women who turned out to be lesbians.

7 organized feminism itself in that decade.10 But how did the sexual discourse, so promising in the 1910s, become so narrowly focused? How did the focus on heterosocial culture became so aggressive in the 1920s? This is an important question for the historian—no map for sexuality‟s development, no trajectory, is inevitable. Christina

Simmons provides an answer, arguing that,

[the decline of organized feminism] after 1920 must certainly have been one factor allowing the dissemination of such an intensely heterosexual vision of personal life. In the absence of a powerful feminist voice, exponents of companionate marriage tempered the liberating potential of new sexual ideas and judged women‟s sexuality acceptable only insofar as its energy was channeled into marriage and the service of men.11 Marriage reformers “tempered” these ideas by co-opting sexual radicalism and enforcing companionate marriage, and, women no longer had the benefit of a feminist framework.

Yet, there is something else to consider in any attempt to fully understand the narrowing of sexual and gender norms by the late 1920s.

The discourse of Americanism, with its intense focus on the family as a bulwark against Bolshevism, with popular beliefs about the Russian Revolution so tightly linked to gender and family disorder, also worked to temper “the liberating potential of new sexual ideas.” Americanism shaped sexuality and gender behavior through public conflicts between liberals and conservatives, patriotic campaigns, Americanization efforts, and reactions to youth culture and sex modernism. But, how did this sexed and gendered construction of Americanism develop? What did the Red Scare have to do with sex and the family? To answer these questions one must understand the second major narrative underlying this study.

10 Elaine Showalter, ed. These Modern Women : Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties. (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978).; Estelle Freedman. Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930,” Feminist Studies, 5 (Fall 1979): 512-29. 11 Simmons, Frontiers, p58.

8

The Russian Revolution and the Red Scare

The Red Scare, created and sustained by Americans after World War I, cultivated an ideology of defensive nationalism in opposition to communism. The Russian Revolution rocked the world in February of 1917, sparking fears of widespread discontent in the

United States. At first, Americans welcomed the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with hopes of a democratic revolution. But after the Bolsheviks seized power from

Kerensky‟s Provisional Government in October of 1917, declaring their country a dictatorship of the proletariat, alarm bells began to ring in America.

The United States‟ participation in World War I framed immediate reactions to

Bolshevism in a number of ways. The Bolsheviks stirred American anger when they agreed to pull out of the “capitalist” war by signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with

Germany, effectively collapsing the war‟s Eastern front and prolonging the Allied struggle. But that anger was inextricably linked to wartime hatred of Germany. Dubious, but widely believed, published accounts credited the Germans with supporting the

Russian Revolution in an attempt to weaken the Allied cause. George Creel and his

Committee on Public Information carefully cultivated anti-German sentiment during the war, sweeping Americans away with an intense hatred for all things German. When the war abruptly ended in 1918, this hatred did not. The unspent anger and intolerance so successfully unleashed by Creel swiftly shifted from the Hun to a new and easily recognizable enemy: the Bolshevik.

As early as February of 1918, Ralph Easley, head of the antiradical business interest

9 group the National Civic Federation, identified concerns about communism in a creeping acquiescence to inevitable upheaval when the war came to an end.12 Easley described magazine editors and businessmen stunned by the spirit of Russian Bolshevism, throwing up their hands and shaking their heads, saying “Well, it is coming.” A self-fashioned expert on radicalism and industrial conditions, Easley heartily disagreed; “It seems a profound thing to say that at the close of the War we shall not go back to old conditions; that all our time-honored institutions have been shaken up; that we are going forward to revolutionary conditions.” He believed the “great” American middle class, with tangible stakes in capitalist society through their families, banks, and property ownership, would prevent revolution from ever reaching American shores. To him, the notion that

Bolshevism, Socialism or Communism genuinely threatened America was so minimal, he breezily dismissed potential American radicals as “sentimental pacifists, some college professors, charity workers, and freaks.”13

Yet, within a year after Easley‟s reassurances, a general strike in Seattle indeed sparked widespread and genuine fears of a revolution. Although the February 1919 strike lasted only five days, the participation of many Industrial Workers of the World, coupled with the Seattle Mayor‟s pronouncements about saving America from revolution, plunged the nation into the Red Scare. Mayor Ole Hanson called the general strike an attempted revolutionary coup, the first blow of a nationwide campaign to bring Russian

Bolshevism to the United States. As authorities called for “Americanism” and urged

12 The National Civic Federation was a federation of businesses and labor leaders who worked towards responsible capitalism. It lost considerable influence after WWI ended, in part due to the 1924 death of Samuel Gompers and to Easley‟s over the top anti-communism. 13 Ralph Easley. After-the-War Problems, Pamphlet, Feb 26, 1918. New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series XV, A, Box 490, Folder 31, on Microfilm Reel 419.

10 citizens to defend their city, radical groups circulated handbills to workers urging them to continue the fight for revolution. The New York Times reported, “Their source is not traceable, but the caption of the revolutionary appeal is „Russia Did It.‟”14 Nervous

Americans feared their fellow citizens might “do it” too.

The actions of alleged Italian anarchists further fueled fears of violence and instability.

Three short months after the Seattle strike, on May Day, the post office discovered sixteen bombs in the U.S. mail, all intended for prominent government officials. Only one bomb went off, injuring a Georgia senator‟s maid, but the fallout spread swiftly. A series of riots then swept the country as patriots clashed with radicals marching in May

Day parades. Before Americans had time to take a breath, another set of bombs went off on June 2nd, one of which destroyed the front facade of staunch antiradical Attorney

General A. Mitchell Palmer‟s Washington home.

The heady optimism of the American labor movement in postwar months fueled the

Scare further. Many workers, bound through pledges and patriotism, did not strike during the war. But, as wages failed to compete with rising costs, disgruntled workers reacted aggressively. In the fall of 1919, Americans witnessed three spectacular strikes.

On September 9th, 1117 of Boston‟s 1544 policemen walked off the job. A nationwide steel strike began on September 22nd, and by the close of the first week, some 365,000 workers walked off the job. Coal miners struck next, on November 1st, and even though the federal government enjoined the United Mine Workers from striking, at least 100,000 stayed out of mines across the country on that day.15 By the end of 1919 there were more

14 New York Times, Feb 9, 1919, p1. 15Murray, p.122-165.

11 than 3,600 strikes, including some four million workers.16

The shock of these events coalesced with more general fears of instability, enabling

Americans to carry the Scare forward. Even though no real threat of armed revolution existed, Americans reacted to changes all around them. The Great War cast a very long shadow in 1919, as many felt emotionally ill-equipped to face the postwar challenges ahead. The government demobilized quickly and without much planning, cancelling war orders abruptly and hindering economic growth. Soldiers streamed back to their hometowns in search of jobs. The price of food, clothing and housing surged, raising the cost of living for the average American family in 1919 to one hundred times higher than before the war. Congress passed the woman suffrage amendment in the summer of 1919, horrifying antifeminist agitators who spent years lobbying against the bill. Congress also ratified the Volstead Act, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transport of alcohol, in

January of 1920. A rash of race riots erupted throughout the country, highlighting both the American race problem and anxiety over increasingly disorderly urban spaces. For

Americans, the world at home was fraught with difficulties. Despite the Allied Powers‟ victory, economic and social stability eluded Americans and shook their psychological confidence.17 Some historians even identified a kind of post war hysteria as the root cause of the first Red Scare.

Seeking to explain what otherwise seems like irrational behavior, historians also point to insecurities about radicalism and immigrants, locating the cause of the Scare in a surge of wartime nativism. The intensely anti-foreign and antiradical tenor of WWI and the

16 Todd J. Pfannestiel. Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York’s Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919-1923. (New York: Routledge, 2003), p7. Pfannestiel points out that these numbers “exceeded the totals for all previous labor actions in American history combined.” 17See Pfannestiel. Rethinking the Red Scare, Introduction and Chapter One..

12 postwar Red Scare did represent the culmination of overt expressions of nativism, which has been a constant force throughout American history. As Americans made the difficult transition from an agrarian to industrial society, moving through cycles of stability and instability, nativism ebbed and flowed accordingly. And, since the time of the Great

Upheaval in the 1880s, Americans made easy associations between immigrants and anarchism. The long nativist tradition was integral to the way American political culture absorbed or rejected immigrants and dissenters; in this light, the Scare represents an overt period of active nativism rather than an irrational explosion of hysteria.18

The agitation of workers, many of whom were indeed immigrants, undoubtedly fueled larger fears of revolution. Some working class radicals viewed the Russian Revolution with great promise, and many firmly believed it was only a matter of time before

American workers joined the workers of the world. A radical movement existed in

America for decades before the Russian Revolution, buoyed by unskilled workers left out of the American Federation of Labor, middle class reformers, religious leaders, the

Socialist party, immigrant anarchists, and pacifists, to name a few. This loose coalition, with national figureheads like Eugene Debs and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, enjoyed visibility if not outright popularity from the late nineteenth century to the 1910s, and even after the start of the war, as a vocal antiwar faction. But, once the United States entered the war in 1917, American radicals found themselves cut off from power, money and mainstream influence.19 Figureheads of the movement, including Eugene Debs and Kate

18 John Higham. Strangers in the Land. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 19 Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p6-7,

13

Richards O‟Hare, were imprisoned for their opposition to what they called a capitalist war. And an array of forces swiftly clamped down on radicalism of all kinds.

Yet, despite this intense antiradicalism, many American radicals dared to voice their support for Bolshevism. Statements like this one from a Michigan Socialist, made at a public and well publicized rally in Madison Square Garden in 1919, were fairly typical;

“No one knows when the revolution will break, but it is only a question of time when the proletariat will control all Europe, and here in America, over the hills, the red sun is rising.”20 The Robitnyk, a Russian language newspaper in the United States, went further, declaring capitalism in America to be unjust, soon to be a relic of the past; “Our fate is being made here—our own and that of our children…On ruins of capitalist civilization we will build our civilization.”21 Many liberals and intellectuals also celebrated the

Russian Revolution as a harbinger for real meaningful change in the world, challenging the place of the United States as the city on the hill.

However, the vigilant antiradicalism of the United States government hyped the radical threat even more than these declarations of support by workers and radicals.

Officials sought new ways to track and repress radical immigrants for decades; the explosion of nationalism upon U.S. entry into World War I provided them with that opportunity and the Scare continued it.22 The Senate voted unanimously in February of

1919 to extend the scope of a committee convened to investigate German propaganda during the war. Senators gave the Overman Committee jurisdiction to complete a sweeping “investigation of Bolshevism and all other forms of anti-American radicalism

20 New York Times, June 23, 1919, p12. 21 New York Times, June 8, 1919, p47. 22 Preston, William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p7

14 in the United States.”23 In late March of 1919, the Lusk Committee convened in the New

York State Senate to investigate radicalism there. And, most spectacularly in December of 1919 and January of 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer raided the offices of radical organizations and newspapers. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn characterized Palmer as

“an attorney general who saw “reds” in schools, at dances, in plays, in unions, under the bed—just everywhere.”24 Under his orders, ones carried out by a young J. Edgar Hoover, the Department of Justice caught anyone present or passing by a suspect meeting hall or office, and in sum, arrested over 4,000 alleged radicals, mostly Slavs and Jews, in 33 cities. Shaken immigrant and urban communities cried out against police abuse and the disregard of civil liberties, but most Americans applauded Palmer‟s fortitude.25

Mainstream newspaper and magazine editors breathed a sigh of relief over the round up of dangerous reds. Eventually, and with great flourish, 500 foreign radicals were deported for “crimes” committed during the war and after.

Patriotic groups expanded the reach of the federal government in the years after the war, often taking the lead in antiradical efforts and propaganda. A still very small Bureau of Investigation could not effectively scour the nation for domestic enemies single- handedly, and so they relied on the vigilance of organizations like the American

Protective League, the National Security League, the American Defense Society, the

Daughters of the American Revolution, and the National Civic Federation. These, made up of prominent volunteers, usually elites and members of the business community,

23 New York Times, Feb 5, 1919, p1. 24 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of the “Rebel Girl.” (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p 255. Flynn also noted here that “In those days all Reds were called Bolsheviks.” 25 Pfannestiel, p124-5. He points out the glaring fact that of the 4000 detained, all but 500 had charges dismissed.

15 countered subversive activities during the war and, most importantly, afterwards, by publicly attacking radicals, publishing patriotic propaganda, and engaging in

Americanization efforts.26 They parlayed their wartime influence by fashioning themselves as experts on Red Scare dangers, as evidenced by this National Security

League press announcement in March of 1919. The group would continue their patriotic work, despite the war‟s end, as “the teaching of Americanism and the fighting of

Bolshevism are two of the main purposes of the league hereafter.”27

To social conservatives, government officials, and economic elites, and even to average Americans caught up in propaganda, the Russian Revolution changed the nature of capitalism and democracy. Attempts to hold the line against change, to safeguard civilization and the status quo, became irrevocably more difficult. Editors of the

Saturday Evening Post explained this logic to their readers in 1922 when they argued,

““the struggle has become far more severe, a hundred times more difficult, since those who would destroy have before them the maddening vision of the Russian proletarian dictatorship…The Russian experiment turns out to be little else than a bonfire…The brighter the fire the more their disordered minds are affected.”28

The glare of the Revolution colored even the nation‟s dearest myths. American intellectuals and journalists visited Russia and called the revolution the “real deal.” This, and the fact that it was a workers state, dealt a blow to American revolutionary notions of self-grandeur. The meaning of progress, the goal of civilization and of all Americans, was in question. Capitalism, and the American way of life it enabled, was not the only

26 Powers, p10-11. 27 New York Times, March 9, 1919, p4. 28 The Saturday Evening Post. June 24, 1922, p23.

16 feasible economic model. Furthermore, the treaty talks in Versailles and the public debate over the League of Nations forced Americans to imagine their own nation and their own nationalism in a wider context.

Yet, Americans also interpreted the larger significance of the Russian Revolution in ways personal and intimate. Seeing the Soviet experiment as they wanted to, in ways that related to their own anxieties at the time, Americans‟ fear of Bolshevism reflected their real concerns about a seemingly unstable domestic society.29 One significant issue captured by Red Scare anxieties was the struggle over woman‟s suffrage.

Anti-suffragists labeled women activists as radicals for years, but during the Red

Scare this tactic gained new currency. Through the Scare, gender became central to understandings of healthy Americanism, thanks in large part to anti-suffragist efforts to block the advances of feminism.30 After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment these antifeminist groups fostered a political culture hostile to progressive women‟s activism, including social welfare work and women‟s peace efforts, conflating feminism and radicalism in the 1920s. Ultimately, while antifeminists failed to block votes for women, they successfully used antiradicalism to weaken the power of organized women.

Why did these attacks by antifeminists work so well during the Red Scare?

Understanding the success of this strategy requires a closer look at issues of citizenship and gender in 1919. The circumstances of the war, women‟s activism, and President

29 Peter G. Filene. Americans and the Soviet Experiment. 1917-1933. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967. 30Kathleen Kennedy. Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. xix. Conservatives Red Scare efforts built upon government prosecutions under wartime emergency laws, where the United States tried women like Kate O‟Hare for gender roles corrosive to the nation when they spoke out against the war. At the end of the progressive era, these women violated the tenets of a clear patriotic womanhood model. The antiradical attack on progressive women during the long Red Scare is the subject of Kim Nielsen‟s Un-American Womanhood.

17

Wilson‟s support quickened the pace and intensity of the suffrage movement by early

1919, which quickened the pace and intensity of the opposition. As both houses of

Congress moved slowly towards passing the amendment that spring, communism existed in Russia, unknown radicals exploded bombs, and workers went on strike. Viewing changing conceptions of women‟s citizenship through the lens of antiradicalism, social conservatives feared the consequences of a loss of men‟s power and a blow to the stability of the family.

Women in Public and Private in 1919

In 1920, just before antiradical and antifeminist activist Samuel Saloman published his ant-communist and antifeminist tome The Red War on the Family, he lashed out publicly at the social inequality of sexual relations in the New York Times. The way Saloman saw it, for many years, men and women entered into a bargain with one another, a kind of deal. Men held political power, and women depended on men for this. In return, men granted women social privileges, chivalrous protection, and economic security. Now that women could vote, society disadvantaged men, he argued in an article titled “The

Downtrodden Sex.” Saloman complained that citizenship for women was “all gain and no loss,” whereas men lost power and privilege.31 In 1920, then, the root of this perceived inequality between the sexes resided in the issue of dependency, or more specifically, in women‟s diminished dependency on men.

31 The New York Times, December 12, 1920, pPBR1, 11, 19; quote on p11-19. For his views on this subject, see also his letter in The Woman Citizen, December 29, 1917, Volume 2, Issue 5, p94-95.

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What Samuel Saloman acutely perceived many Americans also realized, as the meaning of citizenship changed before their eyes. The passage and ratification of the 19th

Amendment, as Nancy Cott put it, signaled the end of the “marital model in which the individuality and citizenship of the wife disappeared into her husband‟s legal person.”32

With this development, Saloman and others knew very well that the relations between the sexes were changing. Several women responded to Saloman in the pages of the New

York Times, but not one denied that women could cast off, theoretically if not literally, dependence on men. In fact, they argued that women were not independent enough.

In this postwar moment, one marked by antiradicalism and by a debate over women‟s role in the public sphere, Americans engaged in a reformulation of the meaning of citizenship. The right to vote marked persons as citizens endowed with civic status, including men of all classes, and then in 1870, at least theoretically, all men regardless of color. In reality Jim Crow laws in the South and discrimination in the North disenfranchised many African American men, and eventually women too. But the last vestige of exclusivity propping up civic status seemed ready to disappear during the Red

Scare. In the view of elite men, men of power and wealth, hierarchies of citizenship inscribed with patriarchal power and authority rocked with uncertainty.33 Suddenly elite male citizens had no other, no dependent group to define themselves in opposition to.

To battle the rise in women‟s independence, antiradicals and traditionalists breathed new life into the notion that the family constituted the fundamental democratic unit of

32 Nancy Cott. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) p157. 33 For a broader look at the affect of woman‟s suffrage on American conceptions of citizenship, see Liette Gidlow‟s The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s-1920s. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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American society. Since the nineteenth century, the anti-suffrage campaign operated based on the belief that women were represented in the polity by male heads of household, and on the necessity of the family unit‟s freedom from governmental interference. Even after citizenship shifted in the 1800s to embody the rights of individuals rather than those of a patriarchal household, anti-suffragists persisted in asserting the family unit as the de facto political entity in the United States.

The rise of militant suffrage tactics in the 1910s served to heighten anxieties about women as political actors in the public sphere. Since its formation in 1890, the National

American Woman‟s Suffrage Association worked to win the ballot for all women. But this organization fought its battles primarily on local and state levels, pushing for a state by state ratification of the right to vote. The movement grew, achieving great popularity by the 1910s, with impressive gains in western states. But NAWSA encountered stiff competition from a more militant suffrage group. The National Woman‟s Party, founded by Alice Paul in 1916, embarked on what they called a “political” strategy. Rather than educate voters and women on the benefits and sensibility of votes for women, NWP members focused on the political realm, pressuring politicians to extend rights to women.

This strategy centered on the call for a national amendment, a tactic left on the shelf for several decades. This group deviated from the image Americans had of the mainstream suffrage movement.

Quite simply, the NWP just seemed more radical, more frightening in their call for the ballot than the women, than other suffragettes. This stemmed in part from the apparent youth of NWP members. While many of them were similar in age to women in

NAWSA, Alice Paul, the passionate, committed, heart and soul of the organization was a

20 mere thirty one years of age in 1916: quite a contrast to NAWSA leaders, like sixty nine year old Anna Howard Shaw and fifty seven year old Carrie Chapman Catt.

Furthermore, Paul and her co-founder Lucy Burns both cut their teeth working with and for the notoriously militant English suffragettes. The NWP raised many suspicious eyebrows with the company they kept, too. While Socialists historically contributed great resources and energy to the movement for woman‟s suffrage, once the United States entered the war mainstream suffragists turned their backs on them and anyone else who might be characterized as radical. However, the NWP, already outside the pale for their refusal to support the war, continued to welcome able bodied supporters regardless of their radical inclinations. Socialists rushed into their ranks after 1917.34

Most alarming to conservatives, of both the social and the political variety, was the overt feminism of the NWP and the shocking tactics they employed. By the middle of the 1910s feminism held aloft the visage of a new world to women and men beyond New

York City‟s Greenwich Village. The NWP members traveling the country, organizing workers, middle class women and wealthy women, were avowed and proud feminists.

These women pushed further than mainstream suffragists, stressing the boundaries of polite society. They demonstrated this by campaigning against President Wilson‟s re- election, and Democrats in general, in the election of 1916, and then by picketing

Wilson‟s White House. Most scandalously, they continued to picket even after the country was at war. After a few months of benign neglect by authorities, picketers were arrested for obstructing traffic. Following the lead of their British sisters once again, they went to prison rather than pay fines, and once there, many went on hunger strike.

34 Nancy Cott. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p60-61.

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The behavior of the NWP made women‟s boisterous entry into the public and political sphere all the more unsettling to many Americans. To conservatives, this behavior undoubtedly seemed like a transgression of civilized womanhood. Some felt their passion and stubbornness only accentuated their unfitness for citizenship. Their militant suffrage tactics and their radicalism, coupled with the success of their strategy, raised a host of unanswered questions about women‟s role in the public sphere in the years leading up to the Red Scare.

These political advances were all the more unsettling because of changing attitudes about women‟s roles in the private sphere. The birth control movement began in earnest in New York City in 1912 among the Greenwich Village radicals seeking to afford women reproductive and sexual freedom. The movement spread throughout the 1910s thanks to the support and agitation of other radical groups, including the IWW and the

Socialist Party. Government clamp downs shaped birth control work as a free speech issue. But, at heart, feminists and modern thinkers about sex were motivated by other reasons. Some wished to unchain working women from an endless, life threatening, and poverty inducing cycle of childbearing. And others sought quite simply to separate sex from reproduction, to allow for sexual experimentation unbounded by the traditional claims of marriage and parenthood.

Agitation for birth control alarmed social conservatives in the years leading up to the

Red Scare, dampening radicals‟ willingness to fight for the cause. Movement leader

Margaret Sanger found herself indicted by the government, and after producing a manual of birth control instructions, she fled to Europe. Radical figurehead Emma Goldman was arrested and jailed for distributing birth control material, along with other labor leaders

22 and young feminists. When the United States entered the war, the sweep of antiradicalism led the recently returned Sanger to disassociate herself from the broad base of radical support for the movement, and soon she turned towards more conservative, established allies among doctors and the ranks of the rich.

Still, the movement created a tremendous impact on American life leading up to 1919 because it helped to publicize the notion that the intimate matters of sex and reproduction were separate. It did the work of spreading awareness of the sexual modernism that first emerged in working class communities and in the Village by the early 1910s. And it tinged sexual modernism with radicalism, an association that would prove fruitful for antiradicals in the 1920s.

Antiradicalism and the Pursuit of Normalcy in the 1920s

The complex interplay between antiradicalism and anxieties about changing sexual and gender norms sparked during the Red Scare persisted throughout the 1920s because, in many ways, the Scare continued. While some historians maintain that the Scare ended in the early 1920s, in reality the anxieties at the root of the phenomenon were manifestations of enduring uncertainties about the warp and woof of American society and culture. Overt and heavy handed tactics by federal and local governments may have ceased, but antiradicalism shaped the remainder of the decade, framing the public‟s easy

23 escapist embrace of popular amusements and consumer culture, citizenship, and the trend toward consensus and conservatism.35

Warren G. Harding famously called for a “return to normalcy” in American life in

1920, and antiradicalism buttressed that call. Americans understood the 1920 election as a rejection of Wilson‟s failed liberalism, and as test of American values. Republicans ran a campaign heavily steeped in the rhetoric of Americanism, while Columbia University

President Nicholas Murray Butler likened the significance of the vote to Lincoln‟s election before the civil war. Butler declared, “The fundamental issue in 1920 is not going to be whether the union will be preserved, but whether the American form of

Government will be maintained.”36 It was in this political environment that Harding expounded upon his view of the binary relationship between order and disorder in

America. In a campaign speech on readjustment, he said, “America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.”37 This uncomplicated vision reflected the mood of the public, who overwhelmingly voted for

Harding. 38 But the real meaning of normalcy, and its implications, beg further analysis.

35 David Burner, “1919: Prelude to Normalcy,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America: The 1920s, John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and David Brody eds. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), p30. 36 Butler Sees Crisis in 1920 Election.” New York Times, June 10, 1919, p12. In this epic struggle, Butler identified Republicans as true Americans and called all Democrats “half-socialist.” 37 Warren G. Harding, “Readjustment,” text from Library of Congress American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I and the 1920 Election website, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/nfhtml/nfhome.html. Also cited in Robert K Murray, The Harding Era, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1969), p70. The speech was given in May of 1920 to the Home Market Club in Boston, MA. 38 Robert Murray. The Politics of Normalcy: Governmental Theory and Practice in the Harding-Coolidge Era. (New York: WW Norton and Co, 1973), p145-146. Murray explained that Harding envisioned normalcy as a return to economic stability and prosperity, immigration restrictions, balanced budgets,a nd tax reform. Murray‟s purpose was to rehabilitate Harding‟s reputation, and he did not investigate the social and cultural implications of “normalcy.”

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What was normalcy exactly? Was it a real return to consensus steeped in the past, or a struggle to construct a new cohesive order in America?

While government repression ceased in 1920, the antiradical inspired pursuit of normalcy began, as Americans used nationalism to help integrate old values into new circumstances. The Scare created a culture of conformity that championed the status quo against radicalism, and equated any attempt at reform with threats of communism.39

Patriotism at this time embodied resistance to change. As one historian put it, after

World War I, patriotism was unmistakably “the property of those who believed in the existing form of government, free enterprise, and the political, social and economic status quo in general.”40 Ultimately, Americanism acted as a revitalizing movement for conservatives reacting to the chaos of the postwar order. This brand of cultural nationalism bore the markers of this particular postwar moment. A prominent Red Scare historian explains,

[Americanism‟s] objective was to end the apparent erosion of American values and the disintegration of American culture. By reaffirming those beliefs, customs, symbols, and traditions felt to be the foundation of our way of life, by enforcing conformity among the population, and by purging the nation of dangerous foreigners, the one hundred per centers expected to heal societal divisions and to tighten defenses against cultural change.41

Nervous citizens easily clung to an idealized concept of the “nation” in order to collectively reinforce a culture that was swiftly changing under the pressures of modern life through the postwar decade.42

39 Coben, p75. 40 John J. Pullen. Patriotism in America: A Study of Changing Devotions, 1770-1970 ( New York: American Heritage Press, 1971), p89. In contrast, Pullen points out that in the 1930s, after the Great Depression, it was by no means certain that “patriotism was the property of the conservatives, or those who stood for the status quo.”p92 41 Coben p69.

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This study traces the discourse on Americanism throughout the 1920s in order to demonstrate the effect that antiradicalism had on notions of family life, gender roles, and sexuality. In many cases the voices come from the right or the far right, from reactionary social and political conservatives desperately working to stem the tides of radicalism and modernity. In other cases those contributing to this discourse come from the left, or from a liberal perspective, one accepting of capitalism and democracy with an overt mission to improve the lives of Americans living within these systems. Really, Americanism worked as a cohesive ideological stance, allowing people with disparate political motivations and concerns to join together in crafting a coherent message. Varied ideological concerns fit neatly and simply under the banner of Americanism. And within

Americanism, people found safety and promise in their effort to collectively restore social and cultural values, morals, and traditions that were threatened by recent upheavals.43 These groups focused on bolstering the strength of the private family unit, orderly womanhood and manhood, and monogamous heterosexuality.

The approach I take here is rooted in intellectual history and in cultural history, as I elucidate and assess the way Americans thought about gender and sex codes in the

42 Stanley Coben. A Study in Nativism: The American Red Scare of 1919-1920. Political Science Quarterly Vol 79, No 1, (Mar 1964): 52-75. p59. See also Peter G. Filene. Americans and the Soviet Experiment. 1917-1933. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), who argues that Americans saw the Soviet experiment as they wanted to, in the way it related to their own lives. 43 Anthony F.C. Wallace, with Robert S. Grumet ed. Revitalizations and Mazeways. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Stanley Coben uses Wallace‟s theory of revitalization in his essay on the Red Scare. Wallace defines revitalization as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” One of Wallace‟s types of revitalization movements is nativism, which he defines as an “attempt to purify their members from the influences of alien persons or customs.” Another, not mentioned by Coben, but relevant here, is the revivalistic movement, defined by Wallace as an “attempt to rediscover simple or natural styles of life perceived as being threatened by modern cultures.” p233.

26 shadow of communism and the Russian Revolution. These discourses were products of competing representations and beliefs, popular and unpopular, between conservatives and liberals, but once they were out in the pubic domain, these narratives circumscribed the ability of individuals to make meaningful sense of the world around them. By appreciating the role of gender and sexuality within a multitude of conversations about nationalism and national strength, the power of gender ideology and of national values come to the fore. Sexuality, like gender, also has a history, and it is a prime site through which to uncover the workings of power in society. Particularly in the 1920s, sexuality was privileged as part of one‟s identity, and when popular discourse had the power to shape sexuality in the public and political realm, it exerted a diffuse control over individuals. Historian Judith Walkowitz explains this process, “Through the incitement, prohibition, and normalization of desire…discourses facilitated the policing of society.”44

Because discourse affected the way people made meaningful sense of their world, and their own identities, I demonstrate the ways proponents of Americanism formulated sexual and gender norms to shed light on how this process wielded political power.

This study argues several main points. First, to Americans, both Americanism and

Bolshevism were constructions, ideologies created to serve social and political needs, ones not necessarily rooted in American or in Russian realities. Second, American fears of Bolshevism, or communism more generally, stemmed from their anxieties over social changes taking place around them throughout the 1920s, particularly regarding women‟s status and sex modernism. Third, groups utilizing Americanism created tactics to better

44 Judith Walkowitz. City of Dreadful Delight. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p9. Walkowitz is explaining the way Foucault‟s History of Sexuality clarified the use of “sexuality” as a site of power in Western society.

27 order American society that operated through the imposition of traditional family values on groups like immigrants, workers, women, and young people. And, lastly, efforts to uphold Americanism in all its variations, in response to the Russian Revolution, did the work of reinforcing heterosexuality as a social system in American life, just as ordered bodies and behaviors reinforced democracy and capitalism in the face of communism.

Chapter One Constructing Postwar Nationalism: Americanism and Bolshevism as Competing Ideologies in American Culture

On January 5th, a Sunday evening in 1919, the American Defense Society held an

“All-American Concert” at the Hippodrome in New York City, just one block from the newly named Times Square. The sprawling theater, created by the designers of Coney

Island‟s famed Luna Park, seated 5,200 people around a large, round stage. Members of the ADS, a prominent patriotic group of business advocates and social conservatives founded during the war, planned the evening of entertainment as a benefit. Suffering a steady loss of income after the Armistice, when the need for patriotic work became uncertain, the group hoped ticket sales would boost their finances. Despite their well known agenda, Executive Committee Chairman of the ADS, Henry Quinby, entreated the group‟s Chairman of the Board, Charles Stewart Davison, to prohibit speeches at the event. Quinby felt the distribution of ADS literature would be appropriate, but that even a Four Minute Man‟s speech during the concert “would bore them to death,” especially when the audience paid for tickets in anticipation of musical entertainment.45 And so, the concert went on with no speeches promoting patriotism or Americanism. But, one

“message” was read aloud to the gathered crowd.

Theodore Roosevelt penned the message two days earlier, as a letter addressed to the

All-American Concert audience. Roosevelt, named Honorary President of the American

45 Letter from Henry Quinby to Charles Stewart Davison, January 2, 1919, American Defense Society Records, New-York Historical Society, Box 3, Folder 10. (hereafter referred to as ADSR, NYHS) 28

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Defense Society during the war, could not attend, and so he wrote to express greetings and some timely sentiments. Audience members no doubt heard his voice as he bellowed, “There must be no sagging back in the fight for Americanism merely because the war is over.” In what had become his typical fashion, Roosevelt declared there was only room in America for one language, one loyalty, and one flag, “the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization.”

At the very dawn of the Red Scare, Roosevelt implored citizens and foreigners alike to maintain America‟s greatness by assuming an American identity.

This missive, read on the evening of January 5th, was not a striking departure from

Roosevelt‟s own politics and beliefs, and would not have garnered much notice, read as it was to a receptive crowd of ticket holders supportive of the ADS mission. Yet, the message attracted a great deal of attention. Theodore Roosevelt died, somewhat unexpectedly, just after 4am on January 6th, 1919, the very same night the benefit concert took place. His message on Americanism to the ADS constituted the political giant‟s last words to the American public.

The fortuitous timing of Roosevelt‟s death altered the forward course of the American

Defense Society. Announcements of his passing in the press mentioned his final address on Americanism, linking the ADS firmly to Roosevelt‟s memory, and the Society fervently cultivated this connection. Days before the Hippodrome concert Robert

Appleton, the Society Treasurer, wrote to Henry Quinby about the tenuous future of the organization. Sapped financially by the war‟s end, Appleton had serious concerns about the group‟s financial solvency. He wrote, “I do not believe that the income will be able

30 to take care of the expenses, unless some big thing develops of which the Society could take hold.”46 The next “big thing” had indeed just fallen into their laps.

C.S. Thompson, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, wrote to Society Chairman

Charles Stewart Davison on January 7th encouraging him to set the Society‟s course by the compass of Roosevelt. Thompson declared confidently, “The Colonel‟s message on

Americanisms, made through the Defense Society on the day before he died, will be an historic document I believe, in American affairs. What more do we need for our own guidance as a Society?”47 Davison felt that “fate” had “timed” the event with Roosevelt‟s death. The unhappy but fortunate coincidence garnered the Society a renewed audience nationwide, and, Davis asserted, the opportunity it created to spread Americanism buffered the pain of the loss.48

In a grand effort to kick start the promotion of Americanism, the ADS busied itself with creating a nationwide memorial service in Roosevelt‟s honor. On Sunday February

9th, 1919, the Society held that service in lower Manhattan‟s historic Trinity Church, in conjunction with smaller services in more than 700 other cities and towns throughout the

United States. At each service attendees heard Roosevelt‟s last speech, and adopted a resolution put forth by Society officers; “We have listened with deep and appreciative sympathy to the reading of the last public appeal of Theodore Roosevelt to the citizens of the United States, urging the preservation and fostering throughout the land of the spirit of Americanism.”49 At Trinity Church, Reverend William T. Manning, an influential

ADS member, honored Roosevelt‟s monumental influence on American life as a

46 Robert Appleton to Henry Quinby, January 2, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 3 Folder 10. 47 CS Thompson to CSD, January 7, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 3 Folder 10. 48 CSD to Elizabeth Marbury, January 7, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 3 Folder 10. 49 New York Times, February 8, 1919, p15.

31

President, a citizen, and a man. Placing Roosevelt firmly at the head of the fight against radicalism, right alongside the ADS, Manning declared, “If our country is now in condition to resist the poison of Bolshevism, we owe this, in large measure, to Theodore

Roosevelt, for it was he who made the fight, at the critical time, and gave us the new spirit that we needed.”50

Americanism, the embodiment of this “new spirit,” swelled in popularity and importance in direct response to the rising fear of Bolshevism in the months and years after World War I. In one day alone in early January 1919 three prominent ADS members wrote three different letters to Charles Stewart Davison on the Bolshevik threat.

Active patriot and anti-radical Francis Ralston Welsh wrote, “America‟s greatest peril today is bolshevism.” Famous inventor and captain of industry Lee de Forest argued that

“the society must take a pronounced stand against the nationwide and worldwide menace of Bolshevism.” And Executive Committee Chairman Henry Quinby warned, “This

Bolshevik situation is a very threatening one, and would seem to need the full efforts of the Society in aid of the attempt to overcome it.”51 The urgency of their work to spread

Americanism increased proportionally with the fear of Bolshevism.

Renowned radical Max Eastman also noted the significance of Roosevelt‟s passing in the leftist organ The Liberator in February 1919. He lamented the loss of a vibrant public figure, yet, he remarked, “that last frantic reiteration of Americanism and nothing but

Americanism fresh from his pen—was like a symbol of the progress of life. The boyish magnetism is all gone out of those words. They die in the dawn of revolutionary

50 New York Times, February 23, 1919. 51 FR Welsh to CSD, January 11, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 4 Folder 1; Lee de Forest to CSD, January 11, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 4 Folder 1; Henry Quinby to CSD, January 11, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 4 Folder 1.

32 internationalism.”52 The establishment of the Third International marked the latest development of an international radicalism that stretched well into the previous century.

Radicals welcomed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, and optimistically heralded a revolution on the horizon in America. In fact, the Seattle general strike, the first in a series of spectacular strikes in 1919 and 1920, took place just days before Roosevelt‟s memorial, convincing nervous Americans that maybe overzealous radicals were on to something. On the very day of the memorial, the New York Times published a telegram sent from Charles Stewart Davison to Seattle mayor Ole Hanson, congratulating him for squashing the uprising. Davison expressed thanks, and welcomed the publicity the strike generated as press coverage spread awareness of the rising radical threat. He told

Hanson, “We are glad that the issue is definitely raised. We have awaited it impatiently.”53

Davison must have been pleased as popular awareness of Bolshevism surged in the spring of 1919, but as it did, familiarity with the Russian system only served to further invest Americanism with meaning and significance. Groups like the ADS clung to the visage of the nation for emotional support in an uncertain time, fashioning Americanism as a bulwark against the radicalism and unrest Bolshevism appeared to represent. The two systems became inextricably linked, locked in a binary relationship where fleshing out the details of one helped define the other in relief. Bolshevism and Americanism were opposites, each hazy and all encompassing, one a symbol of good and the other a symbol of evil. Intellectual and social critic Horace Kallen argued that it was only the

52 The Liberator, Vol 1, No 12, February 1919, p6. 53 New York Times, February 9, 1919, p3. The Times reprinted Davison‟s telegram to Hanson in full.

33 culture of fear generated by the Red Scare, and the threat of Bolshevism, that imbued

Americanism with clarity and focus. It was only the general mood of the public, fueled by antiradicalism, which could amalgamate the shifting and diffuse “cluster of attitude and ideals that goes by the name „Americanism.‟”54

The start of the Red Scare, coming so close on the heels of Theodore Roosevelt‟s death, defined this version of Americanism, which acted as an ideological framework linking American politics and culture in the postwar decade. The ADS almost ran out of funds and closed up shop once the overt impetus of wartime patriotism dissipated, but with Roosevelt‟s passing and the panic set off by the Seattle strike, the values and goals of the organization instead became embedded in mainstream American politics.

Reactions to the Russian Revolution, amplified by the Scare, reinvigorated and redefined claims to national identity just as these redefined the mission and influence of the ADS.

The existence of these two competing systems in 1919 set the stage for a new ideological struggle. In the United States, people emotionally invested either in the remodeled Americanism or in the seemingly opposite system called Bolshevism. Just two days before the official recognition of the Armistice, James Morgan, reporter at the

Boston Daily Globe, wrote an article for the Sunday paper titled “Americanism or

Bolshevism and the Battle Yet to Come.” He covered this topic persistently over the next two years, as this “battle” unfolded. Morgan positioned the conflict between

Americanism and Bolshevism as “the war after the war, a clash of principles rather than a fight for markets,” as a fight over a future of “world reconstruction or world revolution”

54 Horace Kallen. Culture and Democracy in the United States. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), p45.

34 following the destruction of autocracy and imperialism.55 Americanism and Bolshevism presented Americans with two vastly different worldviews, each with its own values and priorities for public and private life.

The radical American labor press publicized the clash between capitalism and

Bolshevism, framing it as an ideological contest of vital importance to working men and women. Dire postwar economic conditions and the establishment of the Russian soviets catalyzed laborers in 1919, a year with many high profile nationwide strikes. An article published in labor journal The Class Struggle in early 1919, succinctly titled “Lenin

Versus Wilson,” established for readers the new adversaries of the world stage. Writer

Karl Island exposed the moral bankruptcy of Wilson‟s claims about democracy as he named the stakes in the emerging ideological struggle; “at the present hour the battle- cries resound between Wilson and Lenin; between the dollar and freedom; between capital and labor…Never before has the fight been so hot, the front so clearly drawn.”

Island encouraged workers to recognize the oppression inherent in capitalism, and to realize the potential inherent in the very existence of Soviet Russia. Now was the time to take a stand, he wrote, as “there are only two possible roads; slavery or freedom.”56

Redrawing this pitched battle for the general public, Morgan wrote in the Globe that the postwar race was between “Wilson and Lenine, or rather, between the conflicting principles for which these men stand.”57

Even at colleges and high schools across the country, commencement speeches in

June of 1919 reflected awareness of the competing systems currently filtering through

55 Boston Daily Globe, Nov 10, 1918, p42; Nov 17, 1918, p44; March 30, 1919, p46. 56 The Class Struggle. Feb, 1919, Vol III, no1. p25, 26. Italics in original. 57 Boston Daily Globe, Nov 17, 1918, p44.

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Americans‟ thoughts. At the Dummer Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, a

Lieutenant Colonel spoke about the need to prove the utility of Americanism and democracy to the world. At Syracuse University, the school Chancellor warned that

Bolshevism posed as much a danger in America as it did in Russia.58 And at the Potsdam

Normal School in New York, Dr. W.M. March surveyed the worlds‟ cultural and intellectual extremes; “you graduate into a world shaken to its foundations, where mighty forces contend for mastery. The old, selfish, individualistic, capitalistic regime is passing. Over against it is the other extreme, the „dictatorship of the proletariat,‟ culminating in cowardly, dangerous Bolshevism.” March urged his listeners to take a middle path, to take their stand “by the idealists, the dreamers, the lovers,” but most

Americans were neither as romantic nor as sanguine.59

Much more than merely the economic systems of “capitalism and socialism,” as reporter James Morgan put it, understandings of Americanism and Bolshevism became the ideological markers of this era. Morgan declared, this “struggle upon which we are entering is primarily a conflict in thought, a conflict between two ideas.”60 New York

State Governor Al Smith seconded these sentiments in a January 1920 address, “We seem to have emerged from a war of arms to a war of ideas. I have a profound faith in the truth of the American ideal triumphantly to resist Bolshevism and unreasoning radicalism.”61

Despite fuzzy definitions and the shifting meanings assigned to Americanism and

Bolshevism, in 1919 each represented different ways of thinking, different ideas about how the world should be.

58 Boston Daily Globe, June 9, 1919, p5. 59 The Potsdam Herald-Recorder, June 27, 1919, p1-2. 60 Boston Daily Globe, Nov 10, 1918, p42; Nov 17, 1918, p44; March 30, 1919, p46. 61 The Adirondack Record, January 9,1920, n. pag.

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In fact, Bolshevism and Americanism both were phantasms created to serve cultural and political needs at the time. The artificial construction of Bolshevism was propped up by propaganda and fear mongering in 1919 and after, and this creation served to solidify

Americanism. Neither ideology was rooted entirely in realities, but rather in assumptions and anxieties about American life. In this vein, Americanism prescribed family ideals and sex and gender norms considered healthy for the nation. The expanding interest in psychology fostered an understanding of Bolshevism as a cultural entity, a belief or behavior, one that threatened the cherished America family and the sanctity of womanhood and manhood. Popular discussion about the struggle between Bolshevism and Americanism, between capitalism and communism, moved beyond economic and political issues to envelope the most intimate matters: family, sex and gender relations.

“Delusions and misconceptions:” Forming Popular Understanding of Capitalist Americanism and Bolshevism, its Opposite

Along with the American Defense Society, a host of groups and individuals vested in the established economic, political and social order reconstructed the reactionary ideology of Americanism in order to maintain its relevance. When the guns fell silent in

November of 1918, popular notions of American nationalism and patriotism slipped from the trappings of wartime emotion. With the arrival of the Red Scare, proponents of

Americanism now had to grapple with the emotional and cultural needs of postwar life, where distinctly different challenges to the American social order existed. A genuine

Communist state prevailed in revolutionary Russia. Europe appeared racked with economic and social unrest. And, the stunning power of capitalism revealed both during

37 and after the war, sparked a wave of doubt among many liberals and radicals who questioned the justness and rationality of capitalist ideology. These challenges to the established order garnered a swift, repressive response by capitalists, patriots, conservatives and governing elites.

Acting mostly in their own self-interest, these groups weaved together a defense of capitalism with a staunch postwar patriotism, shifting the core values of nationalism and patriotism away from the outdated anti-Hun mantra to a new, 1920s Americanism, directly responsive to liberal challenges and to the emerging threat of Bolshevism. They constructed nationalistic cultural ideals, ones that celebrated capitalist development, abhorred radicalism and Bolshevism, spurned internationalism, and espoused conservative social values. It was this reaction to the break in the hegemonic hold of capitalism, and to the Russian Revolution, that formed the heart of Americanism.

In 1921, political progressive and social reformer Frederic C. Howe published

Revolution and Democracy in which he denounced the entrenched power of acquisitive, money driven, capitalist ideology over a wider notion of democratic rights, social justice, and liberty in American life. Howe exposed what he saw as the unchecked power of wealthy men over the average citizen, which hung like a black cloud over American society, politics, and culture in the two years after the war. His disillusionment had deeply personal roots, although his frustrations echoed the sentiments of innumerable

American intellectuals, liberals, and reformers. After a long history of settlement work and progressive political action, Howe became a prominent public figure in New York

City in the 1910s, first as the director of the People‟s Institute and then, in 1914, as the

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Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island.62 While he set out to “humanize” Ellis

Island, instead, he played warden at a prison filled with “immoral aliens” in violation of the dubious Mann White Slave Act, “alien enemies” detained during America‟s participation in World War I, and finally, “Red revolutionists, anarchists, and enemies of the Republic” arrested and held by the Government in the Red Scare.63 Despite his position inside government channels, Howe felt powerless against the growing might of capitalist interests.

In Revolution and Democracy, Howe denounced the pervasive influence of capitalist ideology, and his outrage is representative of a widespread postwar preoccupation with critically examining the dominant role of capitalism in American society. In the years leading up to the war, capitalism served as the vehicle for tremendous industrial and material progress in the United States, and it was the strength of American capitalism, many believed, that led the Allies to victory. In this period, capitalism as an ideology was established; it was a market system, and a social and cultural system. Men like Frederic

Howe worked tirelessly in the early part of the century to ameliorate the harsh effects of capitalism in American life. But it was the experience of the war and its aftermath that pushed him to condemn outright capitalism‟s overpowering role.

According to Frederic Howe, the “ruling class” enforced capitalist ideology by shaping public opinion; he wrote, “our psychology, our opinions, even our morals are molded by the class which owns, and particularly by the class which uses the

62 The People‟s Institute organized large public forums on political and social issues, where prominent lecturers spoke and the audience asked questions, debated contentious points, and voted on actions to be suggested to politicians. Howe directed the Institute from 1911-1914, and was appointed Commissioner of Immigration in 1914, a post he held until his resignation in 1919. 63 Frederic C. Howe. The Confessions of a Reformer. (New York: Charles Scribner‟s Sons, 1925). See chapter 27, Hysteria.

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Government for its own economic advantage.”64 Industry, politics, diplomacy, culture, education, and the press were irrevocably corrupted, defining the parameters of popular thought and infiltrating Americans‟ beliefs on everything from patriotism to their family arrangements. With America‟s victory in the war, capitalism overtook and directed all aspects of American life.

During the Paris Peace talks, other commentators presaged some of Howe‟s sentiments by exposing the unchecked political power of capitalist ideology in the process of reestablishing order after the war. Many peace activists claimed the war itself was economically motivated. But the peace talks baldly demonstrated Allied priorities, and their ultimate allegiance to what economist and critic Thorstein Veblen called

“commercialized democracy.”65 President Wilson‟s much lauded Fourteen Points were, according to Veblen, evidence of the President‟s outdated notions of liberalism. The

Allied leaders appreciated the true nature of Bolshevism only after the war, and suddenly, in this postwar environment, Wilson‟s promises were untenable. Once the world digested events in Russia, and interpreted the Revolution as a threat to the old capitalist order,

Bolshevism presented nearly insurmountable problems in Paris. Veblen explained this dilemma; “Bolshevism is a menace to absentee ownership. At the same time the present economic and political order rests on absentee ownership.” Given this simple reality, the peace conference focused on saving the capitalist system by squashing Bolshevism at all costs, making calls for a peace without victory or vengeance impossible. To maintain law and order in the world, an old order based on capitalistic supremacy and the rights of

64 Frederic C. Howe. Revolution and Democracy. (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1921), p79. 65 The Dial. July 12, 1919, p26.

40 the rich, Veblen felt that Wilson had no choice but to accede to the unsavory fact that

“democracy has…outgrown the mid-Victorian scheme of personal liberty and has grown into a democracy of property rights.”66

The belief that the war was fought to protect rich men‟s interests, and the transparency of the peace process, alienated skeptical Americans and led some to question the feasibility of genuine progress under capitalist ideology. The war to save democracy undermined it, thanks to the selfish and power hungry motives of moneyed interests.

Americans had dared to imagine a world without capitalism for decades prior to the war, but the 1920s stand as a break of sorts, where some vigorously discussed and examined capitalist ideology for all of its effects beyond the economy. Economists and social scientists understood that there was a difference between the economic order and the social and cultural order, and it seemed possible that capitalism did not have to be a given in American life.67 Liberal editor and critic Norman Hapgood labeled this shift, borne of the war, “the change that has taken place in the center of gravity, in political, social, and ethical thought.”68

In this postwar environment, many American eagerly sought some kind of new order as they imagined a world reconstructed. Hapgood admitted that capitalism facilitated

American victory in the war, yet he earnestly believed that Socialism as a “direction,” rather than a “dogma,” gained ground. The war “affected the moral sense of the world”

66 Thorstein Veblen. “Review of John Maynard Keynes‟ The Economic Consequences of the Peace.” Political Science Quarterly, Vol 35, no 3, Sep 1920, p467-472. 67 Nelson Lichtenstein, ed. American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p3-4. See also Howard Brick. Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern America, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p55. 68 Norman Hapgood, “The Sabotage of Capitalism.” The Independent, May 22, 1920. p249-251. Italics in original.

41 by exposing the way money drove international policy, and by highlighting the struggle of laborers all over the globe.69 Jaded intellectuals considered whether capitalism could, and should, be managed to achieve some modicum of social justice. Men like Walter

Lippmann wondered if a “silent revolution” was taking place, whether quietly but steadily, the economic and social system in the U.S. was moving towards state management and collectivism. In an expansive study titled America and the New Era: A

Symposium on Social Reconstruction, editor Elisha M. Friedman heralded a postwar shift in emphasis from the liberty of the individual to the rights of society as a whole. The

“shibboleths” of this shift were “industrial democracy in Great Britain, communism in

Russia, self-determination in Ireland, Central Europe and Shantung, and the League of

Nations everywhere, except in the United States Senate.”70 Thorstein Veblen, as an editor of the liberal magazine The Dial, ran a monthly editorial “The Old Order and the

New,” where he denounced the influence of privilege and wealth at the expense of society, and of ordinary people. Impatient for change, he and his fellow editors listed their names on the masthead as “In Charge of the Reconstruction Program.”

The veil over capitalist intentions and motives slipped during and after the war, and some American critics saw more clearly than ever the way self interest and self preservation guided the actions of men in power. These liberal and radical intellectuals publicized the ways in which capitalist individualism negatively shaped all aspects of national cultural and social life, though that publicity had little real effect. In these intense and emotional months after the war, a time of “social gestation” and strengthened

69 Ibid. 70 Elisha M. Friedman, ed. America and the New Era: A Symposium on Social Revolution. (New York: EP Dutton, 1920), p4.

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“group consciousness,” according to Friedman, as thousands of strikes took place across the country, terrified elites had their own reconstruction efforts in mind.

In contrast to the liberal critics of capitalism, an increasingly beleaguered minority, economic elites and conservatives purposefully expanded the boundaries of capitalist identity and tied it to patriotism in their efforts to rescue capitalist ideology. While

Bolsheviks declared capitalists non-citizens in Russia, and some American critics denounced them, pro-business groups pushed fellow Americans to ask, who exactly made up the group called capitalists? Employers and super patriots expanded the definition of a capitalist to include average Joes, associating the term with all hard working Americans rather than just with industrial and corporate bigwigs. They did this by informing their fellow Americans that radicals actually conceived of capitalists in a broad, all inclusive manner. ADS member William T. Hornaday explained in a Society pamphlet, “In the jargon of Bolshevism, the „capitalist class‟ is made up of all persons who own property, all who have bank accounts, who can read and write, and who bathe, shave and have their hair cut.”71 Hornaday reasoned that radicals considered any American who took pride in his or her appearance, even without a penny in the bank, a capitalist. By exposing the supposed radical definition, he effectively expanded the category for his readers, inviting ordinary Americans to envision themselves as capitalists and inviting them to fear the threat of radicalism.

Conversely, expressing discontent with capitalism made one a Bolshevik, according to employers in 1919. One‟s relation to capitalist ideology became a litmus test for

71William T Hornaday. The Lying Lure of Bolshevism. American Defense Society, NY, November 1919. p23. The Papers of the American Defense Society (hereafter referred to as PADS), The New York Historical Society (hereafter referred to as NYHS), Box 12, Folder 10.

43 patriotism. The editors of Speed Up, a weekly newspaper written by ship yard employers, informed ship builders that there were two kinds of Bolsheviks in America.

The first declared his intentions, “with all his nefarious, diabolical doctrines of free love, redistribution of wealth, atheism, and the abolition of all human restraint.” Americans could identify and fight this enemy with ease. The other type, insidious and undetectable, was the man with selfish motives and communistic principles. This man would perhaps never admit to himself or anyone else that he was a “Bolshevist.” If you consider your pay to be too low, or unfair, Speed Up editors warned workers, if you feel the wage system is unjust, or that your boss or corporation is “evil,” then “you are an unconscious, but none the less real, Bolshevist in heart, soul and action.”72 A man‟s dissatisfaction with capitalist hegemony, or even with his own wages, made him a Bolshevik while acceptance of capitalist ideology marked him as a good American.

Economic elites worked hard to link good Americanism with support for capitalism, which in some way balanced the attacks on capitalism streaming from the pens of intellectuals and working men‟s willingness to strike. In the binary, discontent with capitalism equaled Bolshevism, and therefore, Americanism signified support for capitalism. Horace Kallen explained how easily this equation worked. He argued that to the man on the street, “the distinction between „American‟ and „un-American‟ is the distinction between good and evil; but he cannot tell when pressed what is American and what is un-American—he can only feel, dumbly, ineffably, that some actions and ideals are approvable by that term and others are not.”73 Americanism acted as a reactionary

72 Speed Up, January 17, 1920, p5. 73 Kallen, p44-45.

44 watchword, representative of all that was approvable in American life. Anything remotely dissonant equaled Bolshevism.

The reactionary reconstruction of Americanism, defined in opposition to liberal and

Bolshevik challenges to the capitalist order, ultimately sunk the government career of

Frederic Howe. Always unpopular with conservatives due to his willingness to stand up for civil liberties and due process, by 1919, Howe was attacked for his apparent radicalism when he denounced the overwhelming power of capitalism. In May of that year he presided over a controversial, though hardly revolutionary, “Justice to Russia” meeting at Madison Square Garden. No one at the meeting overtly endorsed the

Bolshevik system, either in Russia or in the United States. Resolutions passed merely insisted on the Allies‟ duty to uphold Wilson‟s own Fourteen Points with regard to

Russia‟s right to self-determination. As Howe would soon do in Revolution and

Democracy, rabbis, reverends and political leaders like Amos Pinchot disparaged the economic motives of diplomacy in the war‟s aftermath.

The outcry over his participation in the meeting at the Garden demonstrated the ferocity of the antiradical backlash, and it overwhelmed Howe. A week after the meeting, a New York Times editor called Howe‟s actions “especially intolerable,” as prominent Senators publicly called for his removal from office for presiding over a “Pro-

Bolshevist” event. 74 A prominent Brooklyn preacher condemned the meeting and urged

Howe and his friends, “men who hate this country,” to “go to the land of Bolshevism.”75

His critics collapsed his condemnation of the power of capitalism into support for

74 New York Times, May 26, 1919, p17; New York Times, June 3, 1919, p1; New York Times, June 4, 1919, p14. 75 Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1919, p8.

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Bolshevism. Howe defended himself, arguing that he believed simply in justice for

Russia, and he pointed out that adherence to Wilson‟s points could hardly be conceived as un-American. But by the end of the hot and tumultuous summer of 1919, there was no room in the discourse on capitalism and Americanism for such reasonable logic.

Howe‟s long held and much acted on belief in the desire and will of the upper class to affect economic change, in the name of democracy and equality was shattered.

Democracy needed rescuing, in this moment, from the Government itself. Howe resigned his post at Ellis Island in disgust. He lost faith in the possibility of a just capitalist system, which prompted his writing of Revolution and Democracy. Several years later, looking back on his life, he remembered this time painfully; “I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” And of himself and his friends, “shreds were left of our courage, our reverence.”76

The willingness of liberal Americans to imagine different organizing principles for the postwar world sparked a violent and thorough reaction by those Americans with everything to lose. This threat to the entrenched power of capitalist ideology motivated conservatives and elites to fortify the capitalist system. To do this, they enthroned capitalist ideology in the new Americanism, encouraging Americans to embrace nationalist ideals even though the nation was no longer at war. And, equally important was the way they presented Bolshevism to the American public. Few of these pundits understood the reality of Bolshevism, while even fewer average Americans did. Like

Americanism, Bolshevism was a phantasm, something to be feared, and a repository for anything and everything that seemed to threaten order in the United States.

76 Howe, Confessions, quotes from p276 and 279.

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In March of 1919 Frederic Howe chaired a luncheon meeting of the League of Free

Nations Association, at the Hotel Commodore in New York City. In front of a rapt audience of over two thousand, Raymond Robins, esteemed progressive reformer and head of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia, made one of his very first public addresses on Bolshevism. Recounting his first hand experience of the Revolution,

Robins willingly broke ten long months of United States government imposed silence.

He covered Russian conditions leading up the Revolution, depicting a society ground down by an overripe aristocracy. He characterized the leaders of the Bolshevik party as noble, sincere men. And, Robins criticized the Allies outright for their intervention in

Russia, declaring, “the Russian people have the right to have the kind of Government the

Russian people want.”77 Raymond Robins used this meeting to talk about why

Bolshevism prevailed in Russia, but on this day, and in the months ahead, he carefully conceded that he was not in sympathy with the Bolshevist system and did not wish to see it practiced in America.

Raymond Robins‟ experience as an arbiter of Bolshevism reveals the complex process undergone by Americans as they grasped Bolshevism‟s significance and categorized it as a threat to their way of life. Robins desperately tried to promote rational understanding of Bolshevism and he encouraged Americans to make reforms in answer to the reality of a world where Bolshevism existed. In the heightened emotion of the Red Scare, though

Robins was an established social progressive, one who sympathized with the Russian people, he publicly maintained his own personal belief in the fundamental need for private property and free capital. He walked a very difficult line, hoping to ameliorate

77 New York Times, March 23, 1919, p6.

47 suffering in Russia, prevent himself from being castigated as a radical, and support capitalism while insisting on the need to reform it. Conservatives and reactionaries misunderstood or purposefully misinterpreted Robins‟ attempts to encourage democracy in Russia and industrial democracy in America. In the throes of the Red Scare, Robins‟ analysis of the Russian situation frightened American elites. In turn, they crafted a popular vision of Bolshevism as a program of social and political chaos and disorder.

In his capacity as Colonel of the Red Cross Mission, Robins developed a very real sense of what Russian Bolshevism entailed, and he appreciated the economic and political system for what it genuinely was. The significance of the Revolution as a strike against the old aristocratic order impressed Robins. He counted himself lucky to witness such events unfold. “The Russian Revolution is much the greatest happening in our generation,” he wrote his sister Elizabeth Robins in August of 1918, “and my privilege was much the greatest enjoyed by any single person in the heart of that struggle for eleven months.” He networked closely with revolutionary leaders while in Russia; Lenin and Trotsky respected Robins as much for his former experience as a manual laborer as for his open-mindedness. Bolshevik leaders, in his view, moved with “honesty of purpose,” and he was convinced, “they will hold the ideals whether they lead to success or destruction.”78 While Robins understood the reasons for the Revolution, appreciating the full sweep of human misery and desperation, he wished for a more representative democratic and capitalist friendly regime.

78 First quote from letter August 27, 1918, Raymond Robins to Elizabeth Robins, from Elizabeth Robins Papers, Fales Library, New York University. Box 3, Folder 20. Second quote from letter, January 21, 1918, RR to ER, ER Papers, Fales Library, NYU, Box 3, Folder 20.

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Upon his return home in June 1918, Robins realized that already, powerful people were classifying Bolshevism as America‟s next enemy. Political events beyond his grasp tested his firm belief in American benevolence and rationality. Robins staunchly opposed military intervention in Russia, so the entrenched position of government officials against recognition or cooperation between the two countries bewildered him.

Chasing down politicians who proved to be disinterested or powerless, Robins tried in vain to alter American policy. That very summer, President Wilson set in motion the

Allied military intervention in Siberia. Any chance for Robins to foster cooperation and understanding between the two countries was lost. On the diplomatic stage, American officials decided to fight the threat presented by Bolshevism with force.

The subject of Russia became a dangerous topic after the Bolsheviks seized power, and Robins‟ willingness to approach Bolshevism with an open mind put him out of step with American officials and elites. When he first departed from Vladivostok to return home in June of 1918, and again when he docked in Seattle, government officials ordered him not to speak publicly or write about his mission.79 His fruitless efforts to prevent military intervention took place behind closed doors, and he honored the imposed silence right up until the government called upon him to speak out. The Department of Justice officially requested Robins‟ testimony before the Senate Committee on Bolshevik

Propaganda, as part of Senator Overman‟s inquiry into the effect of Bolshevism on

American life. Beginning on March 6 1919, Robins spoke for three days, and his testimony received tremendous publicity in the press. To the Senators on the Committee,

79 Neil V. Salzman. Reform and Revolution: The Life and Times of Raymond Robins. (Kent: The Kent State University Press, ) p280. See also William Hard. Raymond Robins’ Own Story. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920), p215.

49 and to the American public in his many addresses afterward, Robins bravely fought to advance a clear understanding of Bolshevism as he saw it.

The Russian Revolution dealt capitalism an indisputable blow on the world stage, and

Robins fervently hoped American business leaders and government officials could learn from this setback. With some courage, he articulated his sense of the fundamental difference between capitalist Americanism and Bolshevism. In the American system, capitalists worked for private profit, keeping labor outside of management, while in the

Soviet system, industry was operated for public purposes, with a partnership between all workers on all levels. A Bolshevist system relied on idealism realized, on goodwill and brotherhood between industrious men and women for the benefit of all society, and this undeniably appealed to many Americans.80 Robins called for reform, for an overhaul of

American industrial practices. He celebrated the productivity and ingenuity of American capitalism, yet he hoped to mediate it, to ensure economic justice and equal opportunity.

This would be, to him, “the answer of Americanism to the challenge of Bolshevism.”81

Hopeful, and always careful to elucidate his patriotism, Robins wanted capitalist

Americanism to endure, but he warned that only a better capitalist America could endure.

The fundamental challenge Bolshevism presented to capitalism also challenged long cherished claims of equality and liberty. Capitalist ideology both depended on and perpetuated grand American notions of unlimited opportunity and equal access to success and wealth. William Thurston Brown, an educator and socialist from California, illuminated this often hidden connection in a pamphlet he wrote to draw attention to the

80 Hard, p190‟ see also Rosa Luxemburg, “What is Bolshevism?” The Class Struggle, Vol III, No. 3, August 1919. 81 Hard, p215.

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“real menace” of Bolshevism, or at least as he understood it. Like Robins, he felt the menace lay in the genuine challenge Bolshevism presented to capitalist Americanism.

He pondered the impact of the Revolution on the world‟s consciousness, suggesting,

“suppose now that Russia becomes for the whole world what America has been or seemed for over a hundred years.” Historically, immigrants rushed to the shores of the

United States, lured by the American dream, so heavily steeped in capitalism‟s tenuous promises of monetary gain and the good life. But suppose that changed? Brown challenged his readers to question the promise of Americanism; “Suppose that time should prove that the strongest magnet of immigration is not the prospect of a prosperity which has proved a mirage to the millions, but the prospect of a chance to live and work and enjoy on the basis of exact economic and political equality.” Real human rights, which he and other liberals believed prevailed in Russia at the time, could prove to be a bigger draw than illusory wealth. Perhaps, he argued, Soviet Russia was poised to “play an even greater role in the life of the race than America has played in the past 100 years.”82 However misinformed he was on the reality of Russian Bolshevism at the time, his understanding of Bolshevism led to Brown to expose the hollow nature of capitalist

Americanism, presenting a possibility that horrified American elites in 1919. If average men and women prized equality and justice above capitalism‟s possibilities, how would capitalist America survive?

The successful establishment of Bolshevism in Russia and the wave of unrest rolling across the globe forced elites, politicians and patriots in the United States to go on the

82 Brown, William Thurston. “The Real Menace of Bolshevism: A Plea for 100% Americanism.” International Printing Co, 1919, p28.

51 defensive. In the glare of revolution and international instability, uncertainty rocked the most vital of American self-perceptions. The reactionary American nationalism consciously and unconsciously crafted in response to communism dictated popular understanding of Bolshevism by the middle of 1919. Americanism and Bolshevism were inextricably linked, in contest. Those Americans who feared Bolshevism as an alternative social, cultural, political and economic system defined it as anything

Americanism was not. Americanism was good, Americans were told, and Bolshevism was bad. A prominent New York Rabbi demonstrated this tightly bound oppositional relationship when he told his congregants at Temple Emanu-El, “Americanism and

Bolshevism are directly opposed in principle to one another.” He cast supporters of

Bolshevism as irrational and foolish, positioning Americanism “as liberty and order, and

Bolshevism as its opposite.”83

In popular discourse, fear and self-interest led Americans to fill in the murky details on just what Bolshevism was, allowing nervous citizens to make easy connections between disruptions in their culture and the Bolshevik program. The Senate Committee investigating Bolshevism stated outright that “the word Bolshevism has been so promiscuously applied to various political and social programs,” they thought it vital to remove “the delusions and misconceptions as to what it really is.” 84 However, this was an impossible task. Bolshevism, like Americanism, functioned as a catch all with a hazy and inconsistent meaning, a name for any and all ideas that threatened the status quo.

Conservatives called it a “shibboleth,” accusing radicals of using the very power of the

83 New York Times, April 14, 1919, p5. 84 New York Times. June 15, 1919, p40.

52 word, the fear it inspired, to bolster their revolutionary propaganda.85 On the other hand, as liberals and radicals endured the crushing weight of antiradicalism, they charged the privileged elite with seizing upon confused understandings of Bolshevism in order to suppress radical ideas. Any difference of opinion incurred charges of Bolshevism, which effectively shut down debate and free expression. “The word has become an epithet,” wrote a Colorado journalist, “a popular invective, a slur, an insult, an outlet for contempt, contumely and hate.”86

By 1919, then, popular understandings of Bolshevism operated devoid of any real information on the political, economic and social system as it is existed in Russia. While the brutal truth about violence and deprivation under Lenin was not available to outside observers at the time, the American media easily relied on assumptions and fears to package Bolshevism to the public in ways that suited the needs of American elites.

Average readers digested propaganda intended to scare them away from Bolshevism, produced to obscure the system‟s potential draw for reformers and the working class, and in turn, they conjured a convenient, well drawn description of the Bolshevik as bogeyman. In countless cartoons and articles, the dark, frightening, ambiguous stereotype of a Bolshevik in the flesh and blood constituted a bearded, wild eyed, disheveled lunatic carrying a stick of dynamite. This is the Bolshevik most Americans recognized. One particularly sensitive Russian immigrant bemoaned this fact in the

Russian language newspaper Russky Golos. Passing a theater with a sign that read “The

Russian National Bolsheviki,” he went in. The film portrayed the Bolshevik as large,

85 Address by Ralph Easley, “Bolshevism,” written March 3, 1919, delivered March 5th. New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series XV, A, Box 490, Folder 35, on Microfilm Reel 419. 86 “Problems Facing the Stricken World.” Akron Weekly Pioneer Press, April 9, 1920, n. pag.

53 imposing, greedy black monkey, and this dark characterization meshed with the audience‟s perception of Bolsheviks. The immigrant described his experience there:

The audience seemed well pleased, and some applauded. I felt hurt and walked out. Many women came out at the same time and I listened to their conversations. One said: “How horrible these Bolsheviki are. I am afraid to go home.” Another woman carried a child which cried and she threatened the child with the Bolsheviki. The Bolsheviki are a threat for the American children. Let them picture us as they will. We will bear it. In time they will see that we are not such, then they will be ashamed to look into our eyes.”87 Popular culture and popular discourse effectively removed the menacing image of the radical from any pseudo sophisticated political or theoretical realm and characterized him as a monster, exploited by parents to scare children from misbehavior.

The ambiguity that plagued perceptions of Bolshevism ultimately allowed conservatives to ably castigate Raymond Robins as a Bolshevik by the middle of 1919.

His willingness to understand the allure of communism, and in turn, the weaknesses of

American capitalism, his opposition to military intervention in Russia, his very complexity, made him a frightening figure in the culture of the Red Scare. Somberly, he wrote to a friend that many people attended his talks on Bolshevism, and most received him well, but the powerful influence of dissenters won out; “the newspapers report my addresses from a biased viewpoint adversely to me and to the truth. I am made the advocate and apologist for Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik program as the result of nearly every write-up in the public press.”88 One angry anti-Bolshevik denounced

Robins for promoting a system that would nationalize, and thus denigrate, women,

87 Bolsheviki Frighten American Children. Russky Golos, April 7, 1920, Publishers Translation, Department of Justice Information. Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Record Group 65, General Investigative Records, 1908-1922, Microfilm 71079, National Archives and Records Administration. 88Salzman, p297.

54 demonstrating that anti-radical discourse could rely less on conventional political models and more on the cultural power of cherished values and institutions.89

Most heartbreaking to Robins, his own government suspected his intentions. He bitterly complained to his sister Elizabeth in October of 1919, “I thought I had a sharp rough time in Russia but it was a joy ride compared with what I‟ve been through for the past fifteen months…I‟ve been dogged by Secret Service, Naval Intelligence, War

Intelligence, special Bolsheviki Squads and other minions of my government.” A month later, he told her, “We are in the throes of a nation-wide witch hunt and every voice of dissent…is denounced as „dangerous Bolshevik sentiments.‟”90

Robins‟ attempts to interpret Bolshevism to Americans imperiled his position in mainstream American politics, a position cultivated over a lifetime of work. He maintained ties with old friends, many of whom were Republicans, and despite his activism on the Russian situation, in December of 1919 they appointed him to the

Advisory Committee of the Platform of the Republican Party. Horrified, the secretary of the American Defense Society notified his organization‟s chairman, writing, “I cannot imagine how those in control of the Republican party could put such a man in such a position.”91 Four different letters were published in The New York Times criticizing the appointment, arguing that Robins, while once a respectable Progressive, had clearly evolved into a dangerous radical who supported Bolshevism. Robins‟ respectability garnered his opinions a degree of legitimacy, which, according to conservatives, made

89 Ibid, p429, footnote 13. An audience member at a speech given by Robins in a Brooklyn church wrote a letter to his Reverend denouncing Robins for his supposed support of Bolshevism, March 26, 1919. 90 First quote from letter to ER, October 1, 1919; second quote from letter to ER, November 21, 1919, both from ER Papers, Fales Library, NYU, Box 3, Folder 21. 91 Letter from R. Hurd to CS Davison, December 29, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Folder 8, Box 4.

55 him more of a menace to the capitalist order. One letter writer claimed to have witnessed several cases in which “men and women have been seriously unsettled by the influence of

Raymond Robins in their ability to realize the fundamental evils of Bolshevism.”92 A self declared capitalist, American, and anti-Bolshevik appeared as a subversive radical in the eyes of the public. His wife, feminist and labor activist Margaret Dreier Robins, wrote in bewilderment, “there are times when I rub my eyes and wonder if it is

America.”93

The motivating spirit of communism in Russia clashed with capitalist ideals, and for this reason American elites developed a healthy fear of Bolshevism. Men like Raymond

Robins tried to meet that fear with a push to reform the capitalist system, to address the inequalities in American democracy before a wave of unrest might reach American shores, yet these efforts only served to highlight the differences between the two systems.

In the heightened crisis culture of the Red Scare, politicians, employers and the press understood that in some fundamental way, the ideology of Bolshevism as they imagined it posed a dire threat to capitalist Americanism and the American way of life. In response, they packaged it for the American public as dangerous, and significantly here, as inherently opposed to American values.

92 New York Times, Jan 11, 1920. (the letter was dated Dec 30, 1919) Other letters published on Dec 29, 1919, Dec 25, 1919, and Dec 29, 1919. 93 Margaret Dreier Robins to Elizabeth Robins, Nov 30, 1919, ERP, Fales Library, NYU, Box 3, Folder 21.

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Beyond Politics and the “Creed”: Americanism and Bolshevism in Society and Culture

Reformed Socialist John Spargo examined the origins and implications of Bolshevism in his 1920 book The Psychology of Bolshevism. Unlike many other writers on the subject, Spargo purposefully overlooked the official writings and pronouncements of

Lenin and his followers in Russia, as well as those of radical Bolshevik sympathizers in the United States. One had to look beyond the “formal statements and authentic expositions,” he argued, in order to

study the psychology of the men and women whose ideals and yearnings these statements and expositions aim to represent. It is not enough to know and comprehend the creed: it is essential that we also know and comprehend the spiritual factors, the discontent, the hopes, the fears, the inarticulate visionings of the human units in the movement.94 The increasing popularity of psychology in the United States engendered Spargo‟s analysis, and awareness of psychology framed the way Americans comprehended the menace of Bolshevism. It was not enough to understand the apparent theoretical or economic dictates of Bolshevism. Spargo sought to understand the motivating factors, the emotional and psychic elements behind radical inclinations. Working with the implicit understanding that people‟s allegiance to radical ideas ran deep, stemming from sources both personal and emotional, Spargo identified the social and cultural component of radicalism.

American constructions of Bolshevism, then, reflected more than an awareness of any abstract theory or notions of disorderly street violence. It embodied cultural values and ideals, ways of thinking about family life, sexuality, and gender roles. Therefore,

94 John Spargo. The Psychology of Bolshevism. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), p2.

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Americans understood the Russian system as more than Communism. This difference is crucial. Rather than merely an economic and political program in Russia, critics expanded the concept of Bolshevism to include mental and behavioral attributes. One did not have to be an active political supporter of Communism or Socialism in order to be identified as a Bolshevik. Removed from the context of political conviction, Bolshevism was positioned as something internal in the mind and heart of the individual.

The distinct cultural and social values Americans associated with Bolshevism represented a viable competing ideology, a way of life in the very sense that

Americanism was a way of life. The capitalist American social system organized society on the principle of individual rights, constructing relationships around those rights. Men possessed the unlimited right to acquire wealth for their own benefit. This allowed them to exercise the right to own private property, and to rule over a family of dependents.

This social structure engendered a specific set values and morals necessary to uphold it.

The Bolshevist social system organized society around a wider notion of rights,

Americans intimated. Men and women worked for the common good, liberal supporters claimed, for all to have an equal share. Individuals maintained their primary relationship with the state, which diminished varying degrees of power in all other relationships.

With vastly different incentives in work and life, and with an alternative structure of power between individuals, each system would naturally produce different sets of social and cultural values. How these different values would affect the lives of Americans worried many.

Nervous Americans imbued Bolshevism with the power to infect people‟s consciousness, to change the way they ordered their world and lived their lives. Being a

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Bolshevik meant possessing a certain state of mind, or acting in a certain way. Henry

Campbell Black, a staunch patriot, reinforced this understanding of Bolshevism in his aptly titled pamphlet “What is Bolshevism?” He wrote, “A Russian woman lately said that it was not a theory but a behavior.”95 For those opposed to social and cultural change

Bolshevism signified a set of behavioral characteristics exhibited by radical individuals.

If one was a Bolshevik it meant the he or she subscribed to a host of alternative social and cultural ideals which ran counter to the lifestyle of a good American.

Social conservatives, patriots and economic elites drew on the prominent discourse on psychology, focused on the shaping of identity, beliefs, and behavior, in order to demonstrate the psychological nature of Bolshevism. A steel company vice president explained the spread of Bolshevism among disaffected working men, asking fellow business men outright, “Who at the present moment is using better psychology and salesmanship than you or I?”96 Fred Marvin, a “super patriot” and prolific antiradical writer, declared that the radical “method of operation is based wholly upon the psychological fact that they must create certain undesirable mental attitudes.”97 Those fighting the war on Bolshevism believed, then, that radicalism resided in the mind.

For anyone assessing the mental state of Americans in this moment, the population‟s experience of the war figured heavily in their analysis. Many Americans believed the world to be too enlightened, too steeped in the international connections of commerce, and simply too modern to engage in total war. Yet it came, unleashing terrible and

95 Henry Campbell Black. The Enemy Within Our Gates; Bolshevism’s Assault Upon the American Government. 1919, p1. From “Pamphlets on socialism, communism, bolshevism, etc” Microflim, Library of Conress. Reel 3, Volume 7, No 4. 96 Boston Daily Globe, Feb 27, 1920, p7 97Fred R. Marvin. “Bootlegging Mind Poison.” N.d. p5-6. SCPC, WILPF, Box 3.

59 unbelievable carnage and destruction, scarring people and shaking their faith in reason and progress. As John Spargo probed the depths of this emotional upheaval, he argued that many were psychically unmoored from familiar surroundings. Spargo asserted,

countless thousands of people throughout the civilized world, outwardly normal, are really victims of what might be termed spiritual traumatic shock. There are subtle inhibitions of moral judgment and motor energies and something very closely analogous to amnesia…Old moral and spiritual habits are abandoned, obliterated as by some violent injury. The spiritual anchorages have been lost and the souls of men are drifting.98 Radicalism in America seemed rooted in a vast spiritual malaise, all the more insidious because it lurked under the visible surface. The old web of social, spiritual and moral values deteriorated with the war, and conservatives feared for the nation‟s established codes of social conduct in the face of Bolshevism.

Any exposure to radical ideas at this moment in time could erode vital national characteristics like ambition, restraint, chivalry, morality and virtue, and thus imperil the nation‟s future. George B. Lockwood, Secretary of the National Committee of the

Republican Party and editor of the rabidly conservative National Republican, was a seasoned writer on issues of radicalism and patriotism. He confidently argued that the ideas behind pacifism, anti-nationalism, liberalism, communism and socialism chipped away at American society, creating a “destructive national psychology.” Beyond the visible and public activities of Socialists and Communists in America, radicalism slowly eroded core American values and ideals

More specifically, social conservatives identified in this “dangerous popular psychology” an assault on established moral and sexual norms. In the decade after the war, discourse on sex infiltrated the mainstream of American culture. Anxious over

98 Spargo, p121-122.

60 changes taking place around them, American observers endlessly discussed women‟s chastity and virtue, the sanctity of marriage, and the sexual behavior of the nation‟s young people. Many conservatives attributed these changes to the effect of radicalism in

American life. Lockwood considered the dominant place of sex in the nation‟s culture to be

one phase of the perversive movement tending to prepare the minds of the people for bolshevism. Libertinism in any form is the fore-runner of a national psychology favorable to social or political revolution, or, as it might better be called, devolution. It strikes at one of the objects of communist and socialist assault—the home. So do sex plays, sex movies, sex books—and when one probes beneath the surface it is found that in this fetid mass are working the maggots of the libertinism which, for lack of a name more descriptive, we call bolshevism.”99 This Republican Party operative and prolific writer on radicalism and Americanism confidently equated libertinism, prurient literature, promiscuity, and immorality with

Bolshevism.

Undermining sex and gender norms undermined the strength of American society to resist radical challenges on a larger level. To illustrate this argument, Lockwood stressed the need for legislation to block the sale of “libidinous” literature and the need to halt the

“birth control movements engineered by radicals,” which clearly eroded the stability of the American family, and hence, the nation. Salacious literature and birth control efforts were not synonymous with Bolshevist agitation, according to Lockwood, but they contributed to the demoralization of American society, thus paving the way for radical revolution. This trend towards demoralization created a “popular psychology which, if permitted…to attain its final phase,” Lockwood argued, “would make easily possible the overthrow of our civilization.”

99 G.B. Lockwood. Red Radicalism—menace or myth? [192-], p2-3 From Pamphlets on socialism, communism, bolshevism, etc, Microfilm, Library of Congress. Reel 3, Vol 7, No 30.

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Bolshevism embodied a way of being, a code of moral and sexual vales, that ate away at the institutional structure of American society. The loss of sexual restraint, the monogamous family, and the private family home could untie the relationships at the center of the American social system. In 1922, an editorial in the Chicago Daily Tribune condemned immorality as a “crime against the order of society.” The editors argued that immoral behavior destroyed the bonds of society, which meant immorality destroyed established relationships of power between capitalists and workers, parents and children, and husbands and wives. Editors stated plainly, “Economic bolshevism is destructive but it is nothing as compared with sexual bolshevism.”100

Bolshevism presented the world with the image of an alternative social system, and thus it contained the potential for a strikingly different notion of social, sexual and gender order. Conservatives interpreted Bolshevism as a psychology of demoralization because of the threat it presented to the bonds of power in the capitalist American order. To prevent individuals from internalizing new social and moral values, ones already evident in American culture, conservatives attempted to regulate Americans‟ thoughts and behaviors. George Lockwood baldly asserted, “Every citizen is either a constructive or destructive unit in the national organism. If indifferent or inactive he automatically becomes an ally of destructive elements. In this fight, which has been wholly lost to civilization in Russia and partly lost in other European nations under our very eyes, you are either on one side or the other.”101 Every Americans‟ part in this ideological struggle was individualized. To raise the personal stakes in this pitched battle between

100 Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug 25, 1922, p6. 101 Lockwood, Red Radicalism, p6.

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Americanism and Bolshevism, American conservatives fashioned a bulwark against the destructive psychological and behavioral influence of Bolshevism: the American family.

In January of 1920, the American Defense Society utilized the image of the family in its commemoration of the first anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt‟s death just as it had throughout most of 1919. The memorial service capped a busy year, in which the organization moved steadily and purposefully into their campaign against radicalism. In the span of that busy year, anti-Bolshevik sentiment spread rapidly, becoming firmly entrenched in American culture. Bombs sent through the mail, public riots, and thousands of strikes throughout 1919 only raised the stakes in the fight for Americanism.

The business men and political conservatives who filled the organization‟s membership roster cared deeply about maintaining social and economic order. One member, concerned about an overall lack of support for Americanism, wrote “it remains for the

American Defense Society and other patriotic bodies to determine what course the country shall take.”102 Through “America Day” meetings, local citizen‟s committees, published literature, and the memorializing of Theodore Roosevelt, the ADS worked to bring the American public into the fold of Americanism. In the process, the ADS placed the cherished American family in the very center of the discourse on nationalism and radicalism.

The need for a public spectacle highlighting Americanism seemed greater than ever in

January of 1920. In late December the Committee on Arrangements sent out one thousand letters to prominent businessmen, asking for the privilege of adding their names to a public list of supporters. Calling their fight against radicalism a “solemn obligation”

102 Letter from Charles E Manierre to CS Davison, December 8, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 4, Folder 8.

63 to Roosevelt, the ADS vowed to “fight on bravely and indefatigably against the enemies of American ideals and American institutions.” The celebration of the anniversary of

Roosevelt‟s death would, by their estimation, “remind all good citizens of the principles for which Theodore Roosevelt fought; and that those who are inclined to stray from the paths of law and order toward Bolshevism and anarchy, will be inspired with new loyalty to their country.”103

ADS member Reverend William T. Manning once again addressed a packed crowd at

Trinity Church, but the thrust of his message on January 4, 1920 focused squarely on the

Bolshevik menace. The overwhelming effect of the Russian Revolution on American public thought through 1919 is clear. The New York Times headline for coverage of

Manning‟s 1920 address read “Manning Assails American „Reds,‟” and “Trinity Rector, at Roosevelt Memorial, Demands Exposure of Disloyal Citizens.” Manning once again held Roosevelt up as a model for citizenship, but this time, the stakes were higher. He warned Roosevelt‟s friends, family and admirers that “sovietism” loomed on the horizon, threatening civilization as they knew it.

Manning drew on a familiar and powerful symbol to illuminate the core values of

Americanism, one readily available in the legacy of Roosevelt‟s life. Blasting high minded and sentimental internationalism, Manning declared that true men loved their own country first and foremost, above all others. He stretched this relationship between citizen and nation to compare it to the duties and affections of a husband; “a man who does not love his own country more than he loves any other country is no more to be

103 Form letter from Henry Quinby, Chairman, Committee on Arrangements, December 27, 1919, ADSR, NYHS, Box 4, Folder 8..

64 trusted and followed than a man has no special love for his own wife and his own home.”

Nations, Manning implied, resembled families. And perhaps even more than nations, families were sacred. Manning played on the cherished ideal of the American family as he leveled a popular denunciation of Bolshevism. “It is a significant fact,” he suggestively remarked, “that those who are trying to destroy loyalty to the country are trying also to destroy the home and the marriage tie.”104

Social conservatives, employers, super patriots, and antiradicals effectively attached the image of the American family to the trope of Americanism in order to promote stability and adherence to capitalist ideology. The war and its aftermath exposed capitalism‟s flaws, and its frightening connections to national and international policy. In the midst of a recession, with extremely high prices and low wages, patriots and economic elites struggled to sell capitalism on economic merits alone. At the same time, the war seemed a breaking point in American social life. Sexual modernism arrived in popular culture, coloring Americans‟ thoughts on morality and family life. Linking concerns about social problems to the assault against capitalism, conservatives salvaged capitalism by identifying it with the cherished notion of the American family. Groups with similar interests certainly used the family to combat radicalism and support capitalism in the past, but the way the family became fundamental to Americanism in

1919 was new. Economic elites, patriots and conservatives succeeded in constructing a vital cultural nationalism that both secured capitalism and regulated the personal lives of

American men and women by promoting an idealized image of the family.

104 New York Times, January 5, 1920, p10.

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Boosters of nationalism solved a difficult problem by presenting Americanism as the embodiment of American family life. Conservatives struggled to concretely define and encapsulate the essence of Americanism, aside from persistently positioning it as the opposite of Bolshevism. Radical propaganda was dialectic, urgent, promising a change or improvement in tangible material conditions. Whereas, according to Chicago Daily

Tribune editors, “conservatism is passive and Americanism is emotional rather than argumentative.”105 Conservatism, and Americanism, as ideologies were often reactive rather than active. Lamenting this fact, economic elites, patriots and conservatives sought out ways to muster support for Americanism from the majority of the population.

Capitalist Americanism, to some, required cultivation. Secretary of the Interior Franklin

K. Lane explained, “Americanism is entirely an attitude of mind.”106 So, like

Bolshevism, Americanism functioned internally, in the minds and hearts of individuals.

What better way to draw on Americans‟ emotions than to place the family in the cross hairs of the ideological battle?

Employers purposefully used the family, fortifying men‟s emotional attachment to their wives and children, in order to dampen radical tendencies. Understanding that men‟s inclination towards radicalism was informed by a world beyond the workplace, corporate leaders extended their reach right into employees‟ homes. At the Morse Dry

Dock and Repair Company in Brooklyn, NY, employers used a weekly newspaper, or a

“house organ,” to encourage their working men to “carry on” with patriotic service after the war. Using the “up-to-date house organ „technique‟ of refuting Bolshevism,” the

105 Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct 9, 1919, p8. 106 Franklin K. Lane. “The Living Flame of Americanism,” Current History Magazine, July 1921, Vol 14, p608.

66 company established the Morse Dry Dock Dial explicitly to bolster patriotism and to counteract radical propaganda.107 Editors garnered interest in the paper by including local events, gossip around the shipyard, and a detailed woman‟s page with an advice column, recipes, letters, and glimpses of shipyard life. Believing that heartfelt patriotism could spring from the home, employers purposefully and carefully appealed to women and to workers‟ families. A reporter for the New York Times, covering the rising phenomenon of house organs in 1919, found the women‟s page to be “one of the most carefully thought out departments on the theory that the influence of the family is counted on to sway the man from radicalism. Fully half of this group of publications is sent to the man‟s home by mail to give the wife first innings.”108

In the pages of the Dial, “Morse Men” epitomized a masculine individualism central to capitalism and Americanism. Dial editors cultivated a family identity for their working men, calling them “Americans with a love for home and country.” This patriotic identity grounded in the love of family allowed workers to claim a masculine individualism that might otherwise remain elusive. The Dial transparently celebrated those who would maintain their own “homes and families when other workmen are seeking aid and employment from…social welfare organizations.”109 Masculine men who stepped up to their responsibilities by working within the capitalist system and

107 New York Times, Oct 26, 1919, pSM2. The writer noted that 375 employers around the country were currently publishing company organs for this reason. The Dry Dock Dial is cited as the most skillful of these magazines, based on the lackluster success at Morse Co. of a ship builders strike in September of 1919. The reporter noted “you hardly notice the propaganda even when you are looking for it with a microscope, but it is there.” 108 New York Times, Oct 26, 1919, pSM2. 109 The Morse Dry Dock Dial, Volume 3, No 1, January 1920, p8

67 placing their families first warded off potentially feminizing interference in their private family affairs.

The model Morse Man, then, imagined himself primarily as a breadwinner and a family man, and not part of a collective of his fellow workers. Employers portrayed unions as bullying mobs which forcibly subsumed the interests of masculine individualism. A man out on strike “may have thought of his wife and children,” as all good men should, “but was bullied or cajoled.”110 The Dial, considered the most effective house organ, overtly created prescriptive propaganda for manliness by asserting in no uncertain terms that “the man who can‟t progress except in the push and stampede of a [union] mob is hopelessly dependent.”111 Men who embraced their roles as individuals, as breadwinners, best represented postwar masculinity and patriotism.

Cultural message makers exploited “the family” not only as an institutional defense against labor radicalism, but as justification for defending the capitalist system. In a circular logic, capitalism enabled proper masculinity, yet the love of family inherent in that masculinity required men to maintain capitalism. A Boston lawyer best articulated this logic some years later, as he spoke before the New Jersey State Bar Association in

1925; “If you believe in the institution of the human family and want to live secure with your own wife who shall „cleave to you alone,‟ and desire the right to watch over, care for, educate and bring up your children, you are a „capitalist,‟ as [radicals] think of the word.”112 Belief in established gender roles and heterosexual, monogamous relations

110 The Morse Dry Dock Dial, Volume 3, No 4, April 1920, p11. 111 The Morse Dry Dock Dial, Volume 3, No 1, January 1920, p8. 112 “Red, White and Blue,” or “Red, Pink and White.” Address of Melvin M Johnson, Esq, before the NJ State Bar Association, June 6, 1925, p5. Reprinted by the Daughters of the American Revolution, March 15, 1928. Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter referred to as SCPC), Records of Women‟s

68 made one a capitalist. Under this definition, many Americans could consider themselves capitalists with an imperative to uphold the status quo. What family man could deny his yearning to live “secure” with his wife and children?

As capitalist Americanism became identified with the family, cultural commentators positioned Bolshevism in opposition to family life. The seeming destabilization of sexual and gender norms after the war made Americans anxious about cultural change, and this anxiety spilled into the void of conflicting and varied interpretations of Bolshevism.

Appeals for national strength and unity incorporated concerns over the erosion of traditional sexual and gender values, which helped manufacture a broad political coalition opposed to change. The use of gender and sexuality in configuring anti-Bolshevik political and social arguments helped make disparate and confused issues seem cohesive.113 Social disorder, immorality, sexual depravity, and fluid gender roles were all associated with Bolshevism, which effectively grounded the ideology in a stable and commonly understood meaning. Americans identified their large scale social anxieties with the threat of Bolshevism, and in a kind of emotional transfer, associated one with the other. Seattle mayor and famous anti-Bolshevik Ole Hanson encapsulated this relationship perfectly when he wrote, “Americanism is founded on family love and family life; Bolshevism is against family life.”114

International League for Peace and Freedom (hereafter referred to as WILPF), Series I, 1, Box 2. See also in Box 2, The Threat of Communism and the Answer. Pamphlet by National Americanism Commission, The American Legion. Nd. Dates in text denote that pamphlet was written after 1925. The Legion understood the relationship between capitalism and family the same way as Johnson did. 113 Kristin Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p.8. She argues that economic, imperialistic, strategic and defensive issues were all cited as reasons for the US declaration of war against Spain in the late 19th century. Her evidence shows that these issues were gathered together and acted upon en masse under the banner of manhood. 114 Ole Hanson. Americanism vs. Bolshevism. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920), p283.

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The specter of the family in peril symbolized the Bolshevik menace as conservatives juxtaposed the secure American capitalist household with the alleged radical assault on family life. In the Literary Digest, writer and moderate labor activist Peter W. Collins denounced Bolshevism in sweeping terms, urging Americans caught up in the Scare to save “the American family, which [radicals] call a „relic of barbarism”; the American home, which they call an „antiquated relic”; the American State, which they call a

„capitalistic institution.‟”115 The family and the home needed saving right along with the state. The American Defense Society played on news of violence in Russia to create a terrifying contrast between Bolshevik practices and American ones. In a 1919 mission statement, the ADS exhorted their members to choose the family life over chaos; “You are against the robbery, throat cutting, shooting, bombing and burning which the

Bolshevist element practices. You believe in marriage, the rights of property, the observance of law and the sanctity of the American home.” One could oppose murder and destruction by being for the home and the family.116

In more material terms, communism imperiled the status of the classic American dream, realized only through citizens‟ engagement in family life. Economic elites celebrated the Americanism of the capitalist breadwinner who achieved the good life through individual competition in the economy. The advantages of capitalism were most compelling when viewed through the lens of the family. An ADS member claimed the average citizen could very well trust that “his educated son or daughter may be rich tomorrow! This is THE land of Opportunity, and the ambitious working man is not going

115 How the Bolshevik Mind Works. Literary Digest, January 24, 1920, p51. 116 The ADS‟s Work for 1921, ADSR, NYHS, Box 12, Folder 12. Bulletin quotes a New York Evening Telegram article, in which the 1919 mission statement is quoted.

70 to drag his own wife and children down to the level of cave men, while under the present system his son may become president of the United States.”117 All Americans lived comfortably, or so ADS members assumed, and by birthright, every American had the chance to achieve more than his or her parents. Placing it in conflict with the American dream, lure of immigrants for more than a century, elites further depicted Bolshevism as undesirable, as a system which prevented fathers from doing the most natural thing imaginable: providing opportunities for their children.

The potential impact of Bolshevism on men‟s ability, and desire, to provide for their families gravely concerned conservative politicians. In their final report, Senators on the

Overman Committee described the purpose of Bolshevism as an attempt to make women and children in Russia dependent on the government. Under socialist and communist systems, all citizens, regardless of gender, would depend on the government to some degree. Yet Committee members took issue particularly with Bolshevik policies that jeopardized women and children‟s dependency on men, policies that abolished private property and laws of inheritance. The Committee declared, “[Bolshevism] has destroyed the moral obligation of the father to provide, care for and adequately protect the child of his blood and the mother of that child against the misfortunes of orphanhood and widowhood.” Bolshevik programs relieved men of responsibility for their families. With battles over social welfare legislation looming on the horizon, Senators condemned these policies as the very same ones “revolutionary elements and the so-called „Parlor

117 Hornaday, p25.

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Bolshevik‟ would have this country accept as a substitute for the Government of the

United States.”118

These concerns over the Bolshevik challenge to dependency and private property reveal a more pervasive fear: the Bolshevik challenge to patriarchy. Conservatives and economic elites tirelessly entreated Americans to cherish and defend the family ideal as part of their Americanism, in direct response to Bolshevism. In this instance, the family ideal represented the patriarchal model, whereby men‟s power over women and children was institutionalized within the family and in society beyond. As we have seen, the masculine individualistic breadwinner was hailed as a patriot, resistant to the lure of

Bolshevism. Clearly, the significance and symbolic power of the breadwinner role reached beyond the confines of the immediate family. Embodiment of that role assigned broader political and social power to the male head of household. Patriarchal power enacted social control in American life and it constituted the core of traditional American democracy.119

Conservative writers equated dependency and private property, the foundation for patriarchal power, with family love in their efforts to enforce Americanism. These conservatives most commonly cited the family ideal as the primary reason for condemning the confiscation of private property, a purported goal of American radicals and an actual practice in Soviet Russia. Americans with a stake in property ownership made much of the Bolshevik practice for obvious reasons, buy why would the millions of

118 New York Times. June 15, 1919, p40. The perceived threat of social welfare will be discussed in chapter five. 119 For definitions of patriarchy, see Carole Patemen. The Sexual Contract. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); see also Nancy Cott. Public Vows. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p12, 141; Gerda Lerner. The Creation of Patriarchy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) p239.

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Americans with no property be concerned? Antiradicals positioned the home, or more specifically, private property, as the foundation of family life. In his pamphlet, Coffin quoted William Graham Sumner, noted scholar and laissez faire supporter, to explicate the link between property and family love; “Property is dear to men, not only for the sensual pleasure it can afford, but also because it is the bulwark of all which they hold dearest upon earth…the safeguard of those they love most…The reason why I defend the millions of the millionaire is not that I love the millionaire, but that I love my own wife and children.”120 American men, even those economically disadvantaged, were compelled to support capitalism in order to demonstrate love for their families, and to retain their patriarchal power.

An American society steeped in that patriarchal power, demonstrated through home ownership, could thwart radicalism. Henry W. Taft, lawyer and brother to the former

President, gave an address on the “fundamental principles of Bolshevism, and “how it is at war with very principle of true Americanism.” Taft believed that if the Bolsheviks invaded America, they would be “confronted with a land where eighteen millions of houses are occupied by twenty-one millions of families, where nine million families own their own homes.”121 Home ownership, the capitalistic desire to acquire reflected in the sentimental notion of the family ideal, could repel Bolshevism. Even Herbert Hoover,

120 Charles P Coffin. Socialist Delusions! Circulated by the American Defense Society, August 1919, p5. Box 12, Folder 9, ADS, NYHS. 121 Henry W. Taft. Aspects of Bolshevism and Americanism. Address before the League for Political Education at Carnegie Hall, NY, Dec 6, 1919. p1.

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Secretary of Commerce and future president, agreed, arguing later in 1926 that home ownership by families was “the best antidote for radicalism and unrest.”122

Bolshevism and Americanism were each assigned a distinct set of values and ideals, each with the power to sink or save the American family in unstable times. Economic elites, politicians, conservatives and patriots realized that by endangering private property and dependency, Bolshevism endangered the nation‟s established social hierarchy. All those invested in maintaining the old capitalist, patriarchal order celebrated the masculine breadwinner who put family before all else, and the need for family love as a defense against the Bolshevik challenge to American life. The cultural and social tenets of

Americanism strengthened the nation.

Groups like the American Defense Society forged a new nationalism to meet the challenges of postwar life. Americanism embodied a defense of the established, capitalist order. Americans understood Bolshevism as its opposite, representative of chaos and disorder. These two systems became ideological markers in the postwar period, each one invested with social and cultural significance. Through proper engagement with family life, as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, Americans could easily to save the nation from disorder and destruction. Discussion of nationalism and patriotism was palpable in American life, both reflecting American reactions to the postwar world and directing people‟s thoughts and behaviors.123 Understandings of Americanism and

122 New York Times. Dec 26, 1926. Hoover went on to support the Own Your Own Home Campaign by the federal government, which will be covered in detail in the fifth chapter. 123 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg‟s work is useful in connecting words to actions and social sensibilities; she focuses on “the dialectic between language as social mirror and language as social agent.” Disorderly Conduct. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p45.

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Bolshevism influenced the way citizens made meaningful sense of their public and private lives.

Chapter Two “The Age of Woman in Revolt”: Talking about Bolshevism by Talking about Women in Red Scare America, 1919-1923

In 1922, amidst national anxieties about radicalism at home and abroad, Samuel

Saloman published The Red War on the Family, an indictment of radicalism and the threat it posed to sex and gender norms in America. Saloman‟s choice of title demonstrates that more was at stake in the struggle against radicalism than the fate of economic or political systems. Interlaced with warnings about the crumbling of marriage and morals under Socialism, Saloman pointed to other elements in the United States threatening the established order. He argued, unsurprisingly, “The family—the monogamous family—as at present constituted, generally is recognized as the keystone of the social arch. Therefore any weakening of the marriage tie must have an injurious effect on the whole social structure.” Who were these Americans who threatened the social structure, those who, according to Saloman, aimed for “revolution in social and moral conditions”?124

Responding to the instability in gender norms during the Red Scare, Saloman included disorderly women, feminists, in his construction of a revolutionary group of radicals out to out to upset the social and moral order. A rigid antiradical and antifeminist, Saloman published missives railing against giving women the right to vote in the years leading up to the Red Scare. Once the antiradical threat presented itself he often couched his

124 Samuel Saloman. The Red War on the Family. (New York: The Beckwith Company, 1922), p133. 75

76 antifeminism in calls for Americanism. Conservatives like Saloman, as they endured the triumphant suffrage victory and the concurrent rise of a broader feminist vision, found it plausible that very much like Bolshevism, feminism promoted disorder. If American women heeded the “siren‟s song” of feminism “heard in the land,” he stated with certainty, it “will have the result of luring them from sacred home duties to destruction and chaos.”125

At the crux of Saloman‟s argument against Bolshevism, and against the “Red War” on the family, lay his anger and anxiety over the potential unfettering of women‟s selfhood and sexuality. While he took aim at socialists, feminists, and Bolshevists, Saloman spent many pages of The Red War keening over the fact that women there could act as sexual beings and as individuals apart from marriage and children. Saloman expressed the intimate concerns of many Americans when he warned “our socialist and feminist friends” that the “degradation of present-day bolshevist Russia” might spread to

American shores.126

Reviews of Saloman‟s book demonstrate a broader concern for women‟s behavior in light of the threat of radicalism. R.M. Whitney, director of the American Defense

Society and a rabid patrioteer during and after the war, said the book “ought to be placed in the hands of every woman in the US—or better, in the world…If every woman would read, digest and appreciate the significance of the facts…we could all of us go to work on something else and realize that the nations of the world were safe.”127 In advertisements for the book, placed in the right wing conservative newspaper The Woman Patriot,

125 Saloman, p120. 126 Saloman, p128. 127 Advertisement and reviews of The Red War on the Family, published by the Beckwith Company, New York, nd. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 4.

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Saloman‟s publisher proclaimed, “If every woman in America read and studied this book, there would be no radical movement.”128 Reviewers, like Saloman himself, portrayed women as vulnerable to radicalism, but also as a powerful bulwark against it.

Writers and cultural commentators talked about women during the Red Scare as a way to make the radical threat intelligible to Americans. In newspapers and magazines and in stories and plays, Americans negotiated the reality of Bolshevism with their own society and culture.129 While Samuel Saloman entertained particularly right wing views, his concerns about radicalism and women were widely held.130 In light of the potential impact of the Russian Revolution, a host of writers tackled the social and sexual implications at stake. Russian family policies, both real and imagined, became a prime site for Americans engagement with the ideology of Bolshevism. And antiradicals expressed their conviction that like Bolshevism, feminism would bring disorder and unrest to the United States.

“The Revolution Caught My Imagination”: The Radical Implications of Feminism in the Red Scare

On February 20, 1919, just a few days before Raymond Robins appeared before

Senator Overman‟s sub-committee investigating Bolshevism, the senators called Louise

Bryant. Bryant, a radical, a writer, and the wife of famous reporter and communist John

Reed, testified for two days in hearings marked as contentious at best by observers, the

128 The Woman Patriot, May 1,1923, p7. Vol 7. No 9. 129 In addition to the three fictional pieces covered in this chapter, in the fall of 1919 two other Bolshevist themed plays ran on Broadway: The Red Dawn and The Challenge. New York Times, July 6, 1919, p38. 130 While the Red War appeared under three different publishers between 1922 and 1924, Saloman‟s first publisher, The Beckwith Company, enjoyed notoriety as a right wing, probably anti-Semitic, outfit.

78 press, and by Louise herself. In fact, an editorial in The Dial compared the experience of testifying before Overman‟s committee to “the Indian custom of running the gauntlet.”

The Senators, Dial editors noted ruefully, struck their hardest blows against

“sympathizers with the Soviets,” and against “Miss Bryant in particular.”131 Committee members asked about her belief in God, to gauge her ability to be trusted under oath, prompting Bryant to cry out, “It seems to me as if I were being tried for witchcraft.”132

The committee proceedings were in many ways similar to a witch hunt once they got around to the handful of witnesses known to be sympathetic to Russia. And, for social conservatives opposed to Bolshevism and to changes in American family life, Bryant appeared to be a perfect target. A week before the hearing, at a public meeting Samuel

Saloman called her a “bolshevist propagandist” whose speeches bordered on treason.133

In his book he referred to her as a “radical socialist, picketing suffragist, feminist, and advanced woman.”134 In short, Louise Bryant was not the kind of woman Saloman hoped would save the family, the nation, and civilization.

The Senate hearings were a public forum on patriotism at the start of the Red Scare, and Bryant represented the worst of two evils as a woman and a radical. When she bucked against the Senators‟ rude treatment, the crowd of spectators broke out into cheers and hisses. The New York Times reported that the noticeably gender neutral “pro-

Americans” in the crowd hissed their disapproval. Meanwhile, the “Bolshevik

131 The Dial, March 22, 1919, p310. 132 Quoted from the report on Bolshevik Propaganda in The Liberator, April 1919, Vol 2, No 4, p28. 133 The Washington Post, Feb 10, 1919, p2. 134 Saloman, p77.

79 adherents” in the crowd applauded Bryant for her efforts to retain her composure, and the

“the majority of them” were women.135

The press jumped on the story, taken as they were with the visage of a beautiful, radical woman facing down a line of hostile Senators. On February 21st, the papers exploded with reports of her first day of testimony, from New York to Chicago to

California. Bryant was big news, in part because that winter she was enjoying something of a celebrity‟s status. In 1917 she and John Reed hurried to Russia eager to experience the revolution they felt certain was about to unfold. Ardent supporters of self- determination and social justice, with sympathies borne of their radicalism at home, both

Reed and Bryant cheered the Bolsheviks‟ actions. In the weeks leading up to the October revolution they lurked the hallways of Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, sharing cabbage soup and black bread with Russian soldiers and making fast friends with radical leaders. Along with a coterie of other brave and fortuitous American reporters in

Russia, like Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams, Bryant and Reed worked tirelessly covering political events and interacting with leaders like Lenin and Trotsky. With ease, they inserted themselves into the daily politics of the emerging Bolshevik government, reporting back to the United States, and in Reed‟s case, even writing for the Bolshevik

Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda.

Upon their return to the United States, Bryant wrote numerous newspaper articles and then quickly published Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. She wrote the book, she informed her readers, simply to pass along all that she witnessed at “the dawn of a new era.” But she was undoubtedly sympathetic to the revolution, for which she felt “a good

135 New York Times, Feb 21, 1919, p5.

80 deal of awe.”136 Presenting a sweeping portrait of the revolution, through profiles of leaders and anecdotal reporting of events and experiences, Bryant offered her readers a first person account of what she see saw. She garnered positive reviews from both her liberal friends and more mainstream press outlets, and enjoyed her newfound status as a legitimate reporter, as an accomplished writer, one removed from the shadow of her husband. In connection with revolutionary Russia, then, Louise Bryant became a household name.

As government repression and public hysteria began to stifle American society,

Bryant fearlessly and publicly supported the revolution, and in the process, defended her own right to be an intelligent, political animal. Overman Committee members slighted her womanly ambition, implying that she only traveled to Russia to follow her husband.

When Senator Hume asked if she went there “for love,” Bryant steadfastly replied, “No, I was not there for love. I was there because I wanted to see the revolution, and because I am a reporter, and because the revolution caught my imagination.”137 Her position as an independent woman, albeit a married one, confounded the Senate committee. Or, at times, it frustrated them. Bryant spoke her mind, and acted unafraid. She testified in favor of the right of Russians to self-determination, and stated that she believed in the viability of Bolshevism in Russia. For all its faults, she found the effort to create a genuine alternative to capitalist society a cause worth championing.138

136 Bryant, Louise. Six Red Months in Russia. (New York: George H. Doran Co, 1918), pxi. 137 Bolshevik Propaganda. Hearings Before a Sub-Committee of the Committee on the Judiciary US Senate, Feb 11, 1919 to March 10, 1919, p495. 138 Peter Filene. Americans and the Soviet Experiment. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p35.

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Bryant identified the public outcry against Bolshevism for what it was—in part, a reaction motivated by the fear of change. In the introduction to her book, she reasonably explained to her readers, “In Russia something strange and foreboding has occurred, it threatens to undo our present civilization and instinctively we fear change for better or for worse. We hug our comforts, our old habits of life, our old values.”139 When Senator

Wolcott asked her the most important question, if she encouraged those changed values and habits, if she spoke out in favor of bringing Bolshevism to the United States, she cautiously saved herself from prosecution, yet refused to betray her beliefs. She replied,

“Why, I have always spoken against the hysteria, against the scare word we have made of

Bolshevism. I have spoken in favor of understanding.”140 With the Red Scare heating up, as many denied their support for Russia‟s revolution, Bryant faced the panel of

Senators with aplomb and bravery. In passage to Russia some months later, John Reed bragged to his acquaintances about how his “honey broke the Overman blockade.” In a letter to Louise he promised he would “tell at headquarters [the Kremlin]” when he arrived at his destination.141

However, Bryant drew the ire of the Senators and the attention of the public for more than just her obvious sympathy with Bolshevism in Russia. She became a locus for reaction because, in addition to her ties to Bolshevism, she was a woman. As the first day of Bryant‟s testimony drew to a close, the Senators‟ sexist condescension glared through. Wishing to be “honest,” Senator Nelson told her he thought she was “deluded.”

139 Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia, pix. 140 Bolshevik Propaganda, p501. 141 Mary V. Dearborn. The Queen of Bohemia. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p148.

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“You are young, too,” he said, “and I feel sorry for you.”142 His patronizing tone infantilized her, diminishing her considerable experience and intellect. When, at the start of the next day‟s proceedings, she boldly protested her treatment, Senator Overman lashed out; “You are a woman,” he scolded, and you “do not know anything about the conduct of an examination such as we have in hand here.” She had been treated fairly, he insisted, “as a lady.” “I do not want to be treated like a lady,” Bryant snapped back, but

“as a human being.”143

Louise Bryant‟s simple desire to be treated as a human being, and not like a woman, reflected a thriving feminism in American culture in 1919. The new women of the late nineteenth century, and those who followed, continued to make inroads in areas previously reserved for men. A robust movement for women‟s political and cultural emancipation marked the years leading up to the war. And the last big push for the suffrage amendment steamed ahead in the early months of 1919 as activists worked to secure its passage in the Senate. The National Woman‟s Party, a radical offshoot of the mainstream suffrage movement founded by Alice Paul in 1916, ramped up its increasingly militant tactics, picketing both the Capitol Building and the White House with some regularity.

Just two weeks before she testified about Russia, police arrested Louise Bryant for protesting with the NWP on the White House lawn. The NWP embodied Bryant‟s own brand of feminism, rooted in a belief in gender equality above any considerations of

142 New York Times, February 21, 1919, p5; Dearborn, p125; Christian Science Monitor, February 21, 1919, p2. Nelson and the other members of the Committee did not ask Bryant to appear before them to share her sympathy with Russian Bolshevism unprompted. She, her husband John Reed and a few other Americans with knowledge of Russia repeatedly telegrammed Senator Overman asking to be called because they felt the reality in Russia was being distorted by the many anti-Bolshevik witnesses that went before them. 143 Bolshevik Propaganda, p531.

83 difference. In Baltimore for a speaking engagement, Bryant received a telegraph from

Clara Wold, an old friend and NWP member. Wold told Bryant she was needed to help the suffrage cause in Washington, D.C., and Louise happily complied. The NWP paid her train fare to the city, housed her, and at least partly funded her stay there. Bryant‟s status as a household name in these days likely made her an attractive participant for the

NWP, for the purposes of publicity. They planned a public demonstration for February

10th, in anticipation of an upcoming Senate vote on the amendment. That morning, a group of women marched to the front of the White House carrying banners, signs criticizing President Wilson‟s betrayal of American women, and an urn of fire. After a few speeches, someone threw a two foot effigy of President Wilson into the flames.

Thirty nine women were arrested, among them, Louise Bryant, and along with her, twenty four were sentenced to five days in the workhouse.144 Like many of the other jailed women, Bryant went on a hunger strike, both to win sympathy and to garner the early release that usually followed. Bryant languished without food for at least three days before her release. Only seven days later, she appeared before the Overman Committee.

But Bryant‟s feminism extended beyond the struggle for the vote, embodying a movement to redefine women‟s roles entirely in these years. This expansive feminism, a fight for women to be full “human selves,” developed among the coterie of American intellectuals and bohemians living in New York City‟s Greenwich Village in the 1910s.

In fact, they were preoccupied with it.145 Figures like Bryant and Margaret Sanger

144 New York Times, February 11, 1919, p5; The Washington Post, February 11, 1919, p16; Dearborn, p120-123. 145 Christine Stansell. American Moderns. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), see Chapter 7 Sexual Modernism, pgs 228-234.

84 represented an emergent cultural ideal among the Village moderns, one that celebrated and even demanded women‟s assertiveness, independence, and sexual expression.

Louise Bryant lived and worked with this group, and indeed her history reflected her lifestyle feminism. She left behind a husband in Portland, Oregon and arrived in New

York City in January of 1916 to live with John Reed. There they immersed themselves in love and in work in an environment bristling with new ideas about relationships and the social order. While they did eventually marry, possibly for the ease and convenience it afforded them while traveling the world, Bryant and Reed at first made what Max

Eastman called a “gypsy compact,” a commitment to love and respect one another while not imposing formal strictures of monogamy on their relationship. Experimentation with relationships was common in this crowd; like several other prominent couples, Reed and

Bryant practiced free love within their marriage, publicly pairing off with lovers throughout.146 These writers and artists and actors melded a radical political sensibility with feminism and a decidedly confrontational attitude towards traditional marriage arrangements. In American popular culture by the time of the Red Scare, Louise Bryant represented this group and the values they espoused.

Bryant‟s feminism branded her, and the Senators censured her for it. Senator Nelson honed in on her suffrage activism, recent as it was, asking outright, “Did you belong to the picket squad?” She replied, “I do not know what that has to do about Russia, but I did. I believe in equality for women as well as for men, even in my own country.”

Furthermore, she told another Senator defiantly, she burned the President in effigy, and burned his speeches, “and I went on hunger strike for it, too.” The Senator, according to

146 Dearborn, p45-46.

85 the Christian Science Monitor, looked “dazed.”147 Clearly Bryant felt proud of her work for the feminist cause.

In fact, Bryant‟s sympathy for and intellectual curiosity about Bolshevism fueled her feminism. During the revolution, magazine editors in the United States often asked her to cover the women‟s “angle.” For Bryant, a woman‟s angle enveloped a wide swath of

Russian culture and politics. And this vantage point helped frame the issue of equality between the sexes as a central component of her work on Bolshevism in Russia. She witnessed some remarkable women, ones she admired, wielding power. Bryant frequently interviewed leaders like Alexandra Kollontai, Minister of Welfare, and high ranking party member Marie Spirodonova. Bryant watched, day by day, as they contributed to the creation of a new order. This reality, even if it would be somewhat short lived, deeply impressed her with an appreciation for the meaning of the revolution.148 Russia, she claimed, was “the only place in the world where there was absolute sex equality.” 149

Others began to realize that Bolshevism and feminism might indeed have something in common. This is exemplified by a review which expounded upon the sheer number of books on the Russian Revolution produced by women, women who risked their lives in order to get the story. The Bookman, a journal of book reviews, ran “Russia Through

Women‟s Eyes” in February of 1919 to pay homage to four daring women who “dashed

147 New York Times, February 21, 1919, p5; Christian Science Monitor, February 21, 1919, p2. 148 Dearborn, p91-94. 149 Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia, p169. It is notable that Bessie Beatty, a Heterodoxy member and fellow reporter in Russia during the Revolution, wrote The Red Heart of Russia, (New York: Century Company, 1918), covering some of the same “great” women Bryant covers. But, overall, Beatty was less impressed by the status of the masses of women after the Revolution. She acknowledged that freedom for all human beings automatically meant freedom for women, after the fall of the czar, but she pointed out the minimal involvement of women in Russia‟s revolutionary government, finding the whole scene to be quite reminiscent of “women of the Western world.” p358.

86 into the midst of the Russian confusion.” Writer Margaret Ashmun highlighted these women, including Bryant, noting the “modern woman does not shrink from physical hardships, and her imagination overleaps hunger and cold and danger, when she sees an issue at stake.” “Moreover,” Ashmun explained, “this is preeminently the age of woman in revolt; and whoever has the courage to rebel against oppression…is an object of intense interest to women.” Women in America would naturally be interested in

Bolshevism, her argument went, because they too were in a state of revolt against oppression.150

In many ways, as a woman and a Russian sympathizer, Bryant represented the conversion of two disorderly ideologies in the postwar era: Bolshevism and feminism.

By early 1919, her melding of feminist independence, sexual experimentation, and activism for Russia crystallized the threat she presented to American values and beliefs about politics, gender roles and sexual relations.

After her appearance before the Overman Committee, Bryant embarked on a speaking tour to spread the “truth” about Russia. While standing at the podium, she unfurled a long black cloak, showing the audience its bright red lining. The press covered her events, and she attracted attention. While she reported back to her husband about the warm reception she received in many places, in other cities and towns, she was prevented from speaking at all.151 In Berkeley, California, Mayor Samuel C. Irving banned her speech, labeling her an “enemy” as he pointed out that “the times are still serious, and I

150Margaret Ashmun. “Russia Through Women‟s Eyes.” The Bookman, February 1919, 48, 6, p755. Ashmun reviewed The Red Heart of Russia, by Bessie Beatty, Six Red Months in Russia, by Louise Bryant, Behind the Battle Line, by Madeleine Z. Doty, and The City of Trouble, by Meriel Buchanan. Freda Kirchwey reviewed Beatty‟s and Doty‟s books together, nothing the woman‟s point of view, in the April 1919 issue of The Liberator. 151 Filene, p52.

87 do not think propaganda of this kind should be permitted.” The Christian Science

Monitor, insisting on calling her “Mrs. Reed”, reported on her speech at a “pro-

Bolshevist” meeting in San Francisco.152 A week later, the Board of Education in Salt

Lake City, Utah barred Bryant from speaking on the “Russian Revolution” as she saw it, after consulting with a local agent of the Department of Justice.153

Louise Bryant lived as a woman “in revolt,” encouraging fears of disorder by virtue of her sex, and cultural commentators found in her a powerful symbol for the discourse on radicalism. In mid-1919, as two communist parties operated in America, as Louise

Bryant‟s friends were arrested in an increasing trickle, as bombs exploded, reporters continued to play up the significance of her sex in their coverage of Bolshevism. The Los

Angeles Times noted in a headline that an “Audience Applauds Impertinence of Women

Writer.” The Hartford Courant carried the very same story written by the Associated

Press, with a large type headline reading “Senators Clear Room As Female Bolshevist

Talks.” The New York Times headlined with “Senators Hear Woman Defend the

Bolsheviki.”154 Mentioning her sex somehow upped the ante, and made the work of radicals seem more perverse.

The tendency to exploit Bryant‟s sex did not fall only to conservatives. In April of

1919, The Liberator ran a full spread cartoon by Boardman Robinson, depicting Louise facing the Overman Committee alone. She sits in a long coat and round hat, in an oversized chair with her feet dangling, not tall enough to touch the ground, appearing innocent and child like. Robinson mocks the notion that she could embody the radical

152 Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1919, p2. 153 Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1919, p11. 154 The Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1919, p12; The Hartford Courant, February 21, 1919, p1; The New York Times, February 21, 1919, p5.

88 threat, titling the cartoon “Our Elder Statesmen Investigate the Bolsheviki.” The

Senators are portrayed as old, confused looking men, who shout questions like

“Whazzat?” and "Do you believe in infant damnation?” Like a tiny mouse which frightens the elephant, Robinson used Louise to portray the absurdity of the Committee‟s heavy handed tactics. Yet, in this capacity, he also portrays her as a meek figure, as one not worthy of their bluster.155 Would this have worked as well if Robinson sketched

Raymond Robins before the Committee? On the following page, The Liberator published a selection of excerpts from the “inquisition of Louise Bryant by the Overman

Investigating Committee,” demonstrating their rude treatment and their prejudice against her. Readers felt the violation, felt more sympathy, because editors presented her as a vulnerable figure. She was a woman, with all the implications her gender carried. Bryant and her husband both wrote for The Liberator, and surely she felt no exploitation. But it seemed that her sex mattered at least as much as her political views.

Broadly during the Red Scare years, in magazines, newspapers, non-fiction and fictional works, postwar writers covering Bolshevism demonstrated a persistent preoccupation with women. In much the same way writers used Louise Bryant as a symbol to evoke horror or sympathy, contributors to popular culture portrayed women as victims in need of protection or as dangerous figures capable of sexual and social transgressions. These writers relied on the explanatory power of gender to make political arguments more salient. They used women to symbolize what was at stake, for better or worse, in defending American values from the changes the Russian Revolution threatened to unleash into the world.

155 The Liberator, April 1919, Vol 2, No 4, p26-27, and p28. .

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Nationalizing Women: Dissecting the Power of a Rumor

Like many conservative and antiradical writers at the time, Samuel Saloman demonstrated the disastrous implications of radicalism for women, specifically, by portraying Socialism, Communism and Bolshevism as theories founded on lascivious and exploitative sexual behavior. He reached back to classic socialist texts to draw parallels between ideological considerations of property and those of marriage and monogamy, constructing a vision of unfettered sexual license in Soviet Russia. He noted with relish the warm reception August Bebel received from mainstream socialists both abroad and in the United States for his book, Women and Socialism. American Socialists supported

Bebel, even when he wrote that the “free choice of love” and the right to dissolve marriage went hand in hand with “a change in the industrial system,” he argued.

Saloman turned also to Friedrich Engels, who in The Origins of the Family, Private

Property and the State declared the monogamous family a historical development of capitalism. Engels argued that when the desired social revolution came, these economic foundations for monogamous marriage would crumble and “individual sex love” would rise. Again, mainstream Socialists did not disapprove. Through a long list of textual references Saloman demonstrated that many radical and conservative Socialists not only agreed, but made similar connections between capitalism and family in their work.156

Aiming to educate his readers, he pointed out that radical doctrines would release, or expel, women from the confines of marriage and monogamy. The way Saloman saw it,

156 Saloman, p23-35.

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“the student of socialism can not help but come to the conclusion that the community of property necessarily and logically involves the community of women.”157

This line, “the community of women,” would have struck a note of recognition in each of Saloman‟s readers in the early 1920s, for it more than anything else fueled fears of

Bolshevism‟s effect on women and on marriage. Americans‟ real concern for the effect

Bolshevism might have on their own notions of womanhood and manhood, on their own family values, stemmed not from the works of these socialist theorists, decades old, but instead from a rumor. Stories about the Bolshevik government nationalizing women, and in some versions, children too, lit the fires of righteous indignation in the United States as nothing else. The socialization of industry, and the cruelty to capitalists, were all to be expected. Yet the alleged plan for the relations between the sexes, for the treatment of women, “sprung on an unsuspecting world,” as Samuel Saloman put it, made that world

“sit up and gasp.”158

The rumor stemmed from several decrees posted in Russian villages and in newspapers, purportedly with the support of the country‟s Central government. The local government in the city of Vladimir allegedly decreed that all unmarried women over age eighteen were required to register at the Bureau of Free Love, through which a man could choose a “cohabitant” wife, or, vice versa. Rumors indicated that the chance to choose spouses came around but once a month, and in the state‟s interest, a man could choose a woman entirely without her consent. Another decree reported out of the village of

Saratov stated that the “right to possess women having reached the age of 18 to 32 is

157 Saloman, p47 158 Saloman, p69.

91 abolished.” Women were no long private property, or, available for monogamous marriage, but instead were “proclaimed the property of the whole nation.”159 The terrifying images churned up by these reports, thoughts not only of “free love” but of forcible rape, permanently branded the Bolsheviks in the eyes of many Americans.

The juicy details of these supposed nationalization policies permeated the press when the Overman Committee began its hearings in February 1919. American newspaper editors and many anti-Soviet writers carried on their own war against Bolshevism through consistent use of exaggeration and sensationalism about sex and marriage. On the front page of The Washington Post, reporter Albert Fox declared the “„new political creed‟ as it is practiced in Petrograd” to include the “the abolition of marriage, making all women the property of the state, so that future Russians will never know their own parents.”160 The salacious story apparently sold books as well as newspapers. In an advertisement for The Red War on the Family, Saloman‟s publisher positioned the book specifically as one that addressed the nationalization rumors. Even in 1922, Saloman‟s coverage of the nationalization of women was considered a prudent selling point.161

The free love rumor enjoyed tremendous staying power in American culture for reasons well beyond the popularity of the story in the press and in antiradical literature.

First, the issue of sex offered conservatives a convenient and powerful way to talk about radicalism of any kind. Socialists defended their movement against charges of free love

159 Saloman, 71-73; Evans Clark. Facts and Fabrications about Soviet Russia. (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1920), p34-36, Nielsen, p30-32, Washington Post, February 18, 1919. 160 Washington Post, February 6, 1919, p1. 161 Beckwith Bulletin No. 4. Winter and Spring 1923. Publication and Booklist of The Beckwith Company, p5. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 4.

92 since the mid-1800s, so these allegations were hardly new.162 But the historical context is central to understanding why it persisted at this time, and why Bolshevism garnered such vigorous opposition. In the 1910s the intellectuals in Greenwich Village celebrated the work of the New Moralists. They confronted the free love epithet and blithely put the image of the sexually and socially emancipated new woman squarely in the public eye.

While most Americans did not wish to forego marriage and traditional family lives, the

Village radicals, including, of course, Louise Bryant and John Reed, received a great deal of public attention as they professed their belief in sex liberation as a vehicle for social revolution.163

Free love rumors persisted in 1919 not just because some radicals in the Village embraced it, but because of what their actions represented in the wider American culture.

The war prompted people to take stock of their world, and family relations did not escape inspection. As Walter Wilcox, a leading economist and professor at Cornell University, insisted when considering the nation‟s postwar sex and social problems, Americans could no longer ignore the ongoing “radical readjustment” of the family as an institution.164

Many assaults on family life surfaced in the years before and after the war, rupturing the fabric of America‟s sexual and moral customs. Vast changes in American culture in these years severely weakened what remained of the Victorian moral code. Feminists grew more and more visible after the war, pushing for the passage of the suffrage

162 Mari Jo Buhle notes the prevalence of the free love allegation at the turn of the century, when a host of cultural and social factors led Americans to fret over the stability and future of the middle class American family. While many Socialists did name the capitalist system as the despoiler of womanhood, positing socialism as a system of sex equality, most worked to defend their party against such potentially damaging claims. Women and American Socialism, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p252 163 Buhle, p262. 164 Walter Wilcox contributed a preface to WF Robie‟s 1924 edition of Sex and Life: What the Experienced Should Teach and What the Inexperienced Should Learn. (Ithaca: Rational Life Publishing Co, 1924).

93 amendment. Birth control advocates continued their work, and by the early 1920s most liberals and progressives firmly believed in the necessity of legalized birth control in the

United States.165 Margaret Sanger noted the transformed cultural landscape in 1920, compared to just a few years before, writing, “The American public, in a word, has been permeated with the message of birth control.” She pointed out that “Puritanism” was “in the throes of a lingering death,” thanks in no small part to the massive United States

Government‟s social hygiene campaign to stamp out venereal disease during the war.

Even though Sanger dropped her revolutionary class analysis by the early 1920s, her feminist agenda undoubtedly still frightened those holding onto the vestiges of an older moral order. She heralded the dawning of a new era, where “American womanhood is blasting its way through the debris of crumbling moral and religious systems toward freedom.”166

A profound cultural anxiety over this changing notion of womanhood surfaced in fiction too; in the novel The Crimson Tide, author Robert Chambers created a story about

Bolshevism‟s effect on women and on wider cultural norms in the postwar period.

Chambers‟ novel is a slowly evolving love story between returned soldier and well to do real estate broker Jim Shotwell and parlor socialist Palla Dumont. Palla, back from the chaos of revolutionary Russia, preached her own version of mild socialism and took up with a variety of radical, though mostly “pink,” friends. Jim, her suitor, complained about the clear lack of morality in Palla‟s crowd, and he soon realized that she fully intended to live a life outside the bounds of conventional moral and social values.

165 William Fielding. Sanity in Sex, (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co, 1920), p240. 166 Margaret Sanger. Woman and the New Race. (New York: Brentano‟s, 1920), p167 and p225.

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Chambers indicted his main character Palla‟s socialist inspired refusal to marry as well as the broader sweep of feminism‟s influence. Jim, Palla‟s ardent suitor, wished very much to marry her. He bitterly resented her radical social creed, placing her ideas firmly within the larger context of women‟s social and cultural advances. To a friend, he complained,

Women have had too much of a hell of a run for their money during this war. They‟ve broken down all the fences and they‟re loose and running all over the world….They want sex equality and a pair of riding breeches! Bang! They kick over the cradle and wreck the pantry. Wifehood? Played out! Motherhood? In the discards! Domestic partnership?—each sex to its own sphere? Ha-ha! That was all very well yesterday.167 Women, Chambers feared, wanted to discard their old roles as wives and mothers. In this scheme women‟s sexuality existed with no structure, no restraints.

In the postwar years, self styled modern American men and women celebrated the separation of sexual relations from parenthood and marriage.168 Birth rates dropped and divorce rates rose. Through the notion of a liberated sexuality, commercialism, and a

Freudian inspired sense of self apart from community and family, sexuality became public by the early 1920s. This trend was undoubtedly the continuation of a process begun before the war, in the 1910s, but it flowered fully in the early 1920s. Working class women, or charity girls, mingled with men who treated them for sexual favors in dance halls and amusement parks. The nation‟s youth celebrated sex, petting in automobiles. The flapper took the limelight, gaining mostly undeserved credit for rocking female gender norms, as she stepped into a place carved out for her by those working class girls and the settlement house workers who eschewed marriages and

167 Ibid, p169. 168 See Elsie Clews Parsons, “Sex,” in Harold Stearns ed. Civilization in the United States, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), p310 and Sanger, p230.

95 families to work and support themselves independently. Leisure and consumption promoted instant gratification and a life lived outside the confines of the private home.

A host of interested intellectuals and social scientists observed these shifts and brought them to light, cultivating a broader awareness and acknowledgement of change.

Sociologists and sexologists increasingly catalogued the presence of homosexuality among men and women, starkly separating sexual desire from reproduction.169 The rise of psychology and the reality of modernism encouraged writers to critique the development of gender roles within traditional, heterosexual, marital relations.170 Some were acutely aware, then, for better or worse, that “the glory of the patriarchal household has visibly departed, leaving only the biological minimum in its stead.”171 Even if this was a long time in the making, the context of early 1920s America made the realization of it more palpable to many.172

These seismic shifts led many Americans to believe their moral system was inherently fragile to begin with. Under the weight of radicalism and modernity, the reality of communism in Russia proved too much for them to bear. Samuel Saloman warned, “if we throw aside the safeguards that to-day surround the marriage relation, we will find only too soon that love under such conditions will be a very evanescent thing…we would too soon find that morality practically would disappear.”173

169 KB Davis, Journal of Social Hygiene article, 1923, Robie, 1924, p146, and Joseph Collins, The Doctor Looks at Love and Life. (New York: H Doran Company, 1926), p91-92. 170 See Elsie Clews Parsons and Katherine Anthony in Stearns, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, p318 and 335 respectively. 171 Anthony, p320. 172 See Kathleen A. Brown and Elizabeth Faue, “Revolutionary Desire: Redefining the Politics of Sexuality of American Radicals, 1919-1945,” in Kathleen Kennedy and Sharon Ullman eds, Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past, (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003), p275. 173 Saloman, p133.

96

So, social conservatives were already wringing their hands, anxious, when the

Russians established Bolshevism and set out to spread the cultural and economic agenda of communism beyond their borders and into the world. The free love rumor defined

Bolshevism and held sway even when it was firmly denied by many people, because, a

Socialist style government with its new marriage and divorce laws, and plans for world domination, existed for the first time. All predictions and hopes to the contrary, the

Russian state survived the revolution and developed, albeit clumsily, into a government.

Louise Bryant chided her countrymen and women in her book on Russia, stating,

“Socialism is here, whether we like it or not--just as woman suffrage is here--and it spreads with the years. In Russia the socialist state is an accomplished fact. We can never again call it an idle dream of long-haired philosophers.”174

Because of this inescapable fact, by late spring of 1919, it mattered very little whether the rumor was true or not. Through a variety of machinations in popular culture,

Americans already associated Bolshevism with a threat to family life. The rumor, with all its potential for imagined violence and lust, simply confirmed their fears. And, despite the many denials and retractions, the rumor had staying power, for the Russian

Revolution changed the landscape of sexual relations in America. The revisiting of controversial Socialist texts on marriage and sex, the belief that Bolshevism was an ideology dangerous to women, these issues permeated popular discussions of Bolshevism and morality.

Most importantly, while not actual “nationalization,” the radically new laws on marriage and divorce in Soviet Russia deeply affected American thinking on sex, family

174 Bryant, pix.

97 life, and marriage. Americans shuddered as they read about these laws in newspapers and in magazines, for the nature of these real Russian policies confirmed their fears. The historic and familiar Socialist critique of capitalism‟s destructive effects on the family did form a framework for the Bolsheviks. Just weeks after seizing power they affected drastic changes to family policy, deemphasizing the role of property, money, and religion. New laws called for civil marriages and no longer recognized church weddings.

Bolsheviks made divorces easily attainable by either party and they legalized abortion.

Party officials scrapped illegitimacy laws, making a man responsible for any child he fathered regardless of what type of relationship spawned the child. In the later 1920s de facto unions were recognized as legal unions.175

Generally speaking, then, most Bolsheviks in Russia agreed that the family fostered unfavorable bourgeois capitalist values. Alexandra Kollontai, in Communism and the

Family, written in 1919 and published in the United States in 1920, presented a comprehensive picture of the emerging Russian family life. Kollontai and other party leaders understood women‟s double duties as workers and mothers and sought to free women from this double oppression. She acknowledged, without sorrow or nostalgia, that the family “is ceasing to be a necessity for its members as well as for the State.” In

Russia, ideally, husbands and fathers no longer supported their families, cooperative housekeeping displaced notions of “individual households,” and the wellbeing of children

175 Gregory Carleton. The Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p3, and p51.

98 shifted from their parents‟ shoulders onto “those of collectivity.” 176 Sex, she felt, should be removed from its economic trappings.

The Russian people interpreted these new mandates on sex and family life in very different and personalized ways, and reality did not always live up to American conservatives‟ imaginings. While the changing landscape of sexual relations garnered interest from young people, many Russians felt confused by the new dictates, and others held to the spirit of monogamy, marriage and family life. Highly prized ideals on women‟s social and economic emancipation fell far short of the mark, mostly due to ingrained notions of sex prejudice and attachment to tradition despite ideological motivations. While some soldiers and exuberant young people celebrated the revolutionary possibilities of sex for the sake of instinctual urges, or for pleasure, serious

Bolsheviks and most Russian people did not, with many feeling that such trivial issues took away from the serious work of the revolution.177

Still, the fact that these laws existed made the authenticity of the nationalization rumor irrelevant in the eyes of many. After all, Americans knew little about actual social and sexual practices in Russia. In the official report of the Overman Committee, the Senators acknowledged the confusion surrounding the issue, as “conflicting reports have been passing current during the last few months relative to the nationalization of women by the new Russian government.” Documenting the mixed reports they received from

176 Alexandra Kollontai. Communism and the Family, (New York: Contemporary Publishing Association, 1920), p9-17. 177 Sheila Fitzpatrick. The Russian Revolution. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p86; George Robb, “Marriage and Reproduction,” in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houllbrook, eds, The Modern History of Sexuality. (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p101. See also Carleton‟s Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) p186. Carleton demonstrates that this new openness towards sexual activity, bolstered by sex education and access to abortion, ebbed by the end of the 1920s and completely ended with the rise of Stalin by the 1930s.

99 witnesses, the Committee still confidently claimed that a few local soviets “apparently thus degraded the womanhood of their particular districts,” but that the central government never made a policy decision that nationalized women. However, in the very next sentence of the report, the Senators asserted that the Bolshevik government had

“promulgated decrees relating to marriage and divorce which practically establishes a state of free love.”178 Even with proof that the Bolsheviks in Petrograd did not issue a blanket decree stripping men and women of the right to marry, mandating free love, to the Senators after their weeks of investigation, the new Russian marriage and divorce laws amounted to the same thing.

Fiction writer Robert Chambers further elaborated on the generally perceived incompatibility of sexual morality and Bolshevism in The Crimson Tide. Fundamentally the novel operated by juxtaposing two parallel narratives, where both Bolshevism and the specter of unrestrained sexuality embodied the “crimson tide.” Chambers informed the reader of the “tide” in carefully placed moments throughout the narrative, always in direct reference to radicalism, sweeping across the world from Russia, or, directly in reference to the fear, shame, passion and anger sparked by the flouting of traditional sexual customs. In the novel these instances include denigrating marriage as an institution, promoting sex out of wedlock, and the accepting of illegitimate children. A working class Russian immigrant preaching Bolshevism in New York City warned a business man, “yoost vatch out already! Dot crimson tide it iss rising the vorld all ofer!”179 Another Russian, an intellectual and a seductress who practices free love,

178 New York Times, June 15, 1919, p40. 179 Chambers, 289.

100 defends herself when accused of creating unrest by pointing out the sheer scale of disorder; “There seems to be already sufficient mischief loose in the world, with the red tide rising everywhere—in Russia, in Germany, Austria, Italy, England—yes, and [in

America] also the crimson tide of Bolshevism begins to move.”180

Illustrating the paramount lesson of the novel, Chambers employed the same foreboding imagery to describe his characters‟ sexual impropriety. As Palla, Chambers‟ main character, pondered her unmarried best friend‟s sexual relationship with a man,

“without warning, her face grew hot and the crimson tide mounted to the roots of her hair, dyeing throat and temples. A sort of stunning reaction followed as the tide ebbed.”

Palla realized the potential pitfalls of her socialist and anti-marriage creed as she anxiously worried over the possibility of Ilse becoming pregnant. “She found herself stupidly repeating the word “safe,” as though to interpret what it meant. Safe? Yes, Ilse was safe. She knew how to take care of herself…unless…Again the crimson tide invaded her skin to the temples...A sudden and haunting fear came.”181 The practical implications of this modern behavior provoked her to blush crimson, and the crimson tide functioned as both the spread of Bolshevism and the spread of shame and fear over sexual misbehavior.

Due to the widespread acceptance of the implications established by Chambers, despite the fact that the Russian state issued no blanket order nationalizing women, the rumor almost went unchallenged in the United States in early 1919. A receptive public read news reports, tales offered by American government officials and business men

180 Ibid, p254. 181 Ibid, p250.

101 demonstrating that the Russian state cared little for western notions of marriage and morality. Americans read stories and saw plays that reinforced these notions. No one could, or perhaps no one chose to, quash the rumors dead on. That is, until Louise Bryant barraged Senator Overman‟s office with telegrams asking to be called, so she could tell the “truth.”

As Senator Overman snickered, “I think she wants to tell us about Russia,” Bryant began her testimony before the Senate Committee, saying, “I want to tell you about one thing before anything else—about the so-called nationalization of women, which has been so largely discussed here.” Bryant started off her two day interrogation with this information, fully aware that she had first hand knowledge others lacked. She felt an imperative to stamp out the persistent rumors linking Bolshevism to immoral and illicit sex practices. As Senator Overman diverted her, saying “Do not go into that,” Bryant continued to explain the falsity of the well publicized rumor. In some individual villages there were decrees, she acknowledged, but they were not legitimately the product of local

Soviets or of the Central Government. They showed up in Russian newspapers merely as news items, not official proclamations. Samuel Saloman, in his own book, sardonically argued that Bryant should have known the reports were not simply published as news coverage, given the government‟s tight control of the press. Like most writers and members of the press, he portrayed her as deceitful, misguided, or childishly naïve.182

As several other credible sources began discrediting the nationalization rumors, the press gave them limited coverage, perhaps preferring to mark the communists as social and cultural savages to warrant Americans‟ visceral reaction. The New York Times cited

182 Saloman, p77.

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Jerome Davis of the Y.M.C.A., who Bryant claimed had proof that the Central government was not involved in any decree. Davis, who was traveling in nearby Samara at the time the decree was issued in Saratov, investigated its validity. He opposed the

Bolsheviks, but stated that it “never pays to make charges that are untrue.” The report in

The New York Times on February 18, claiming that the Soviet in Saratov did indeed nationalize women, was untrue Davis insisted. The anarchists in Samara, close allies with anarchists in Saratov, issued a decree stating this fact, which Davis claimed to have in his possession. Shortly after, according to Davis, “one of the wealthy men in the town admitted to me that the decree nationalizing women had been prepared as a joke by some of the rich young men of the town.” No apologist for Bolshevism, Davis further asserted,

“I am certain that no responsible leader of the Bolsheviki, such as Lenine or Tchitcherin, would ever approve of the nationalization of women. Whenever I mentioned to a Soviet man this decree I was told that it was too ridiculous to talk about.”183 Yet many were convinced.

Other explanations for the decree came to light in the months after the rumor began circulating, but all denials insisted the Central government in Russia neither saw nor advocated a connection between nationalizing land and nationalizing women. In Facts and Fabrication about Soviet Russia, in which Socialist Evans Clark aimed to refute “the most obvious falsehoods about Russia that have passed current in the United States” since the Bolsheviks took power, he discussed the rumor about women.184 This was,

Clark argued, the most absurd of the many circulating stories. He printed in full the

183 New York Times, February 21, 1919, p5. 184 Clark, p3.

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Samara anarchists‟ decree mentioned by Jerome Davis, though Clark‟s own evidence came from Oliver Sayler, another American in Russia. Sayler insisted the Bolsheviks posted the flyers themselves, hoping to discredit the Anarchists in Saratov at a time when

Bolshevik power in that area was entirely uncertain.185 In an official press release on

February 28, 1919, the United States Department of State even acted to squelch the false story, stating, “The rumor as to the nationalization of women is not true.” Clark noted that New Europe, the organ which first published the decrees and thus sparked the rumor, retracted the story and publicly apologized on March 13, 1919.186 Then, in April, Louise

Bryant added her voice to the chorus of denials one more time, in The Liberator, criticizing the “defenders of the old order” for continuing to perpetuate the false story.187

Despite these official and very public denials, Americans‟ genuine anxieties over shifting gender norms and sexual codes, as well as conservative politics, fueled the perpetuation of nationalization rumors. Writers insisted that official post-revolutionary moral codes in Soviet Russia amounted to free love. A pamphlet published in the 1920s, titled “Radical Socialism or Bolshevism Exposed,” listed a series of over twenty questions with answers by “An American.” The obligatory question on free love provoked this response, with evidence taken from the former Ambassador to Russia;

“Ambassador Francis says: „Several provinces have gone so far as to nationalize their women. But the Central Government has issued a decree making marriage and divorce

185 Clark, p34-37. 186 Clark, p34. 187 “Are Russian Women Nationalized?” The Liberator, April 1919, Vol 2, No 4, p20-21. In addition to condemning the hypocrisy and small mindedness of these old guards, Bryant asked readers to imagine what “ignoramuses we would call the Russians if their papers…proclaimed far and wide that every man in America had three or four wives because there was once polygamy in Utah!”

104 so easy that a mere notice to that effect is sufficient.‟”188 Samuel Saloman of course concurred, arguing that even if the rumors about nationalization were entirely false, which he did not believe, “we have sufficient information from possibly more trustworthy sources to prove that determined efforts had been made utterly to destroy the institution of marriage as it had existed from time immemorial.”189

Ironically, this discussion about the nationalization of women bared the ugly side of

American patriarchal society. With the trappings of romanticized bourgeois family life removed from the equation, antiradicals found themselves openly conceiving of women as a form of property being taken away from individual men and opened up to society as a whole. In J.B. Cooper-Reade‟s pamphlet The Perils of Bolshevism, he asserted that under the Russian system “the position of women seems to be little different from that occupied by breeding animals on a stud farm.”190 When George L Walker explained the benefits of capitalism in his 1919 pro-capitalist missive, Capitalism and Bolshevism, he made similar allegations. Walker, editor of the Boston Commercial, and vigorous defender of the capitalist system, faulted Bolshevism for its threat to women and the family. Bolsheviks, he claimed, “advocate making woman the property of the state, which from their standpoint means common property.”191 Walker easily referred to woman as property, but cringed at the thought of woman as common property. He demonstrates that the fear of free love hinged on fears of men‟s loss of women more than

188 Radical Socialism or Bolshevism Exposed. Questions and Answers by An American. Milwaukee: Phoenix Publishing Co, 192?. From Pamphlets in American History Microfilm; Socialism; S 510, p13. Francis‟ views were published in The Outlook on March 19, 1919, p463. 189 Saloman, p71. 190 JB Cooper-Reade. The Perils of Bolshevism. 1919, p11. From Pamphlets on socialism, communism, bolshevism, etc, Microfilm, Library of Congress. Reel 3, Vol 7, No 19. 191 George L. Walker Capitalism vs. Bolshevism. (Boston: Dukelow and Walker Co, 1919), p9, 88-89.

105 it did on the loss of women‟s dignity and self-determination. Revealing the ugly side of patriarchy, the menace of the Russian system provoked American men to acknowledge their vested interest in women as property.

Well known writer, Heterodoxy Club member and open lesbian Katherine Anthony attacked this overt categorization of women as property when she reviewed “The

Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia,” a pamphlet on the civil status of domestic relations, marriage, the family, and guardianship.192 Anthony interjected her bitter and salient opinion into the public outcry over nationalization. “It was a very sobering experience for observant women in America,” she surmised,

to witness the reception of the rumor about the „nationalization of women‟ in Russia. The abolition of private ownership had been carried so far, said the horrified dispatches, that it also included the abolition of the private ownership of women. The newspapers instantly perceived this to be the logical outcome of a complete program for the nationalization of property. Americans fell victim to this collapse in thought, marking mothers, wives and daughters as the possessions of men in the very same way land and homes were possessions. This accidental, and, albeit misguided, revelation spoke volumes about the true status of women in America in 1919. Anthony continued,

This syndicated fantasy had a curious vitality; struck down by official and authoritative denials, it revived again and again in the original, unaltered form, with the same painful implication concerning the accepted status of the respectable married woman. If we had ever considered that the property basis of bourgeois marriage as defined by the late Herr Bebel was perhaps overdrawn, apologies to his memory were now in order.193 The nationalization rumor did just this: it reinforced the fact that talking about women facilitated talking about Bolshevism. And, it revealed the deeply seated connection between private property and the patriarchal home, and the status of married women as

192 Anthony refers to this pamphlet as published by Soviet Russia Magazine, but it is printed by a number of news outlets and as a pamphlet by the Russian Government in 1920 and 1921. 193 Katherine Anthony. “Marriage Laws in Russia.” The New Republic. May 4, 1921, p301.

106 dependents, or, property, within that home. Women represented what was at stake for men in the fight against radicalism, yet, under capitalism, as symbols they were merely objects to be owned or lost. Efforts to criticize Bebel‟s theories only served to confirm them.

Due to these free love rumors, interpreted through the lens of Americans‟ own experiences with social change, many conservatives could not shake their gaze from the far away land where Bolsheviks successfully implemented communism. Russia became the example held aloft whenever any social conservative or patriot discussed what they saw as unprecedented changes in morality or in sexual relations in the United States. The nationalization of property, the disenfranchisement of capitalists, and particularly the squashing of the church all received extensive coverage in the American press. Yet, it was the hint of sexual deviance, the discarding of bourgeois morality, and the grasping for equality between the sexes that caught Americans‟ imaginations. No denunciation of

Bolshevism was complete without a reference to their morally bankrupt social order. It became almost axiomatic, the American belief that, as antiradical author Joseph J. Mereto phrased it, “Once the Socialists gain control of a country, as in the case of Russia, laws legalizing free-love are very soon passed.”194

The international scene dictated Americans‟ own beliefs and fears about sexual behavior, and it marked internal sources of sex disorder as dangerous too. At the close of

Red War on the Family Samuel Saloman pointed to the domestic implications of the frightening reality of Bolshevism in Russia, noting that radicalism in the United States would engineer the “destruction of the present-day family and the substitution of the „free

194 Joseph J. Mereto. The Red Conspiracy. (New York: National History Society, 1920), p296.

107 union‟ of the sexes, sung of by Bebel, Engels, and the other anointed ones of socialism in those blessed days when socialism was but a theory instead of, as in bankrupt Russia, a sad fact.”195 The red war on the family, a sad fact, at first just a theory and then a reality in Russia, was on the march. Yet, another group also waged the red war inside the borders of the United States.

Feminism is the Bolshevism of Sex

By 1919 women activists had fairly well established feminism as a force in mainstream American politics, society, and culture, garnering reaction from opponents.

In addition to the host of cultural and social changes mentioned earlier, the movement of the Nineteenth Amendment to the ratification stage in the summer of 1919 fanned the flames of a growing backlash. Looking around at seemingly tenuous gender norms and unstable marriage customs, the large body of anti-suffragists angrily turned their attention to feminism in American culture more broadly. By pushing for economic rights, education, and political rights, feminists seemed on par with radicals. To conservative men and women, feminists aimed to destroy marriage and patriarchal power, and to sexually liberate women, all presumed goals of Bolshevist ideology. Fiction writers, magazine and newspaper journalists, and right wing anti-feminist antiradicals argued with conviction and ease that feminism and Bolshevism were connected.

Conservatives desperately worked to reaffirm the old moral and social order by discouraging the social disruptions stemming from feminism. One common tactic

195 Saloman, p178.

108 accommodated feminism‟s emancipatory message by repackaging Victorian sexual and gender ideals in a new light. The Ladies Home Journal, a longtime opponent of women‟s suffrage, utilized this agenda throughout the 1920s, well after Edward Bok‟s 1919 retirement.196 Particular attention must be drawn to an article by Harriet Abbott, titled

“What the Newest New Woman Is,” published in The Ladies Home Journal in the very same month the suffrage amendment became law. Abbott praised those American women who made the decision to prioritize the “old freedom” and the “old truths” of marriage and motherhood. Middle class women, ones who could afford not to work and yet chose to, ones who desired a family as well, were merely “self centered,” she argued.

Abbott candidly acknowledged women‟s changed status in 1920, conceding that

“every woman among us to-day has had her sense of values so shaken that sometimes she stands bewildered on the edge of revolt.” In light of this, yet, in spite of it, Abbott pushed marriage, home making and motherhood as women‟s best occupations. She felt the reassessment of personal values, encouraged by the work of Havelock Ellis and Ellen

Key, would only enrich women‟s traditional roles as homemakers and mothers. This is because the newest new women, those who consciously chose not to “smother” their

“womanhood,” but rather to stay within the home, did so not with the “unquestioning intelligence of the medieval or Victorian woman” but because they understood and appreciated the true meaning of home life.197 The new woman as mother and homemaker had seen the light and willingly, consciously, chosen merely to dust it.

196 Martha H. Patterson, The American New Woman Revisited. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p221. Patterson points out that Bok opposed the amendment for women‟s suffrage. 197 Harriot Abbott. “What the Newest New Woman Is,” The Ladies Home Journal, August 1920, p154.

109

Abbott‟s work is relevant here because she named those who would destroy her

“newest” version of womanhood the “Bolshevist party” of the woman movement. She pegged feminists, along with any others working to weaken the family, as Bolshevists.

Noting the Bolshevist element in industry which was working to shake up “organized economics,” Abbott easily and purposefully made the parallel, identifying that element working to shake up gender and sex relations in the United States. She called on women to make an enlightened choice, highlighting the notion of choice over tradition, coercion, or accident. Like a number of other writers taking stock of American life immediately after the war, Abbott hoped to provoke a movement of women back to the home, calling it an “after war movement.”198 This movement, she insisted, would save womanhood, and this “new woman faith,” from the “threat of Bolshevist invasion.”199

Because feminists stressed women‟s equality, threatening unrest in a moment of crisis, anxious writers easily declared that feminism was Bolshevism. Vehement anti-feminist

Fernand J.J. Merckx elaborated on the disorderly nature of feminism, indeed casting it as

Bolshevism in The Bolshevism of Sex: Femininity and Feminism, published in 1921.

While the Belgian born Merckx wrote just this one book, he enjoyed a lengthy career in the United States as a magazine editor and as a correspondent for French and Belgian newspapers, writing on sociological issues and international relations.200 A confident conservative, Merckx aligned himself with men like the blustering Reverend John Roach

198 Anna M. Galbraith. The Family and the New Democracy, (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co, 1920), p17. Galbraith made a similar call for women to meet their after-war duties. 199 Abbott, Ladies Home Journal, August 1920, p154. 200 Merckx came to the United States in 1915, worked for several newspapers and as an editor for Le Messager de New York, a French American magazine. See New York Times, May 1, 1932, pN3 and New York Times, Jan 9, 1940, p29.

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Straton, moral crusader and condemner of dance halls in New York City.201 Straton heartily recommended Merckx‟s book, quoted in an advertisement in the New York Times saying it would “work a far-reaching and most helpful revolution in our public and private life.”202

In essence, Merckx argued that Bolshevism, though a new name, represented a very old idea. Throughout history “social unrest and strife” existed in many places and in many time periods, always because of “the individual inability of great numbers of people to obtain…the realization of their aspirations.”203 “Normal people,” he asserted, were then affected by the propaganda of the dissatisfied, and society as a whole was overthrown. This unhappy turn of events played out in places like Carthage, Rome,

France and Russia, and Merckx made the suggestive leap to ask his central question:

“Has the social problem of the sexes developed along the same lines?”204

To Merckx, as to others, feminism represented one more facet of a broader postwar transformation where women enjoyed increasing economic independence. He argued that people across the world craved change, and indeed he felt the world of business, politics and international relations showed signs of adaptation. Calling this a trend toward individualism, Merckx saw it pervading family life in America, “tending toward

201 While Merckx did not enjoy a prolific publishing career, with this book on Bolshevism and feminism published with the little known Higher Thought Publishing Co, he edited and wrote for several mainstream media sources. And, he represented a larger trend, a conflict between newer values and the old order. Historian Angus McLaren lists Merckx‟s book as one small representative piece of a much broader postwar reaction to a perceived crisis in sex relations borne of the war. See Angus McLaren, Twentieth Century Sexuality. ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), p18. Also, for information on Reverend Straton, see Ralph G. Giordano, Satan in the Dance Hall: the Reverend John Roach Straton, Social Dancing and Morality in 1920s. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2008). 202 The New York Times, Oct 9, 1921, p52. 203 Fernand JJ Merckx, The Bolshevism of Sex. (New York: Higher Thought Publishing Company, 1921), p7. 204 Merckx, p7-8.

111 the wife‟s independence of her husband, and the child‟s independence of its parents, and this has found its most complete realization in Soviet Russia.”205 Of course, the government in Soviet Russia did prioritize women‟s roles as workers, but changing

Russian laws did not seek to foster individual rights. Rather, the socialist state, the collective, potentially benefited from an expansive view of women‟s roles. But to

Merckx, at the expense of the family, any push for women‟s economic independence appeared selfish. And like Bolshevism in Russia, feminism in the United States advocated this same goal.

Feminism represented the liberation of women from patriarchy, individualism at its most extreme. If women broke loose from the need to care for husbands, children, or the home, placing their own individual desires and aspirations before those of society as a whole, the very structure of capitalist society could not survive. Because women‟s roles intertwined so intimately with this basic societal structure, Merckx condemned the selfish actions of women seeking independence. Feminism, which, he sneered, “passed the joking stage three years ago,” achieved modest goals in a number of countries, including the United States. This movement proposed, not without success, a “reconstruction of the social order.” Thus, Merckx insisted, “a definite and final stand has to be taken.”

As he declared feminism a form of Bolshevism, Merckx focused his attack on women whose work affected sex and family relations. He worried over the growth of state paternalism, which could be dangerously exacerbated by communism in Russia. In fact,

Merckx acutely feared the possible loss of men‟s power and authority. He pointedly criticized female leaders like Charlotte Perkins Gilman for working to move childcare

205 Ibid, p10.

112 outside of the home, Alice Paul for trying to replace the father‟s authority with the

State‟s, and Mary K. Simkhovitch for setting foreign born women “free” from men by encouraging them to work.206 Casting these settlement workers and political activists as a menace, as Bolshevists, Merckx derided feminism for its purported goal to “substitute the authority and influence of strange committee women…for the natural and beneficent authority of the husband over his wife and the father over his children.”207

A similar conflation of Bolshevism and feminism became a literary staple in fictional works that sought to interpret the significance and impact of the Russian Revolution on

American shores. Several writers honed in on the sexual disorder apparent in Bolshevism and created stories where marriage, or women‟s resistance to it, played a central role in the plot. Here, American readers and theater goers watched characters negotiate the sexual and social possibilities catalyzed by the happening of Revolution.

Robert Chambers aligned himself with Fernand Merckx when he equated his main character Palla‟s disregard of marriage standards directly with Bolshevism in The

Crimson Tide. While she denied any approval of free love, for her, any kind of official marriage was “entirely out of the question.” Confused and angry, Jim asked, “Do you imagine that you and I could ever get away with a situation like that?” In other words in

1919, it would be rather problematic for a man of Jim‟s social background to publicly engage in a sexual relationship with a woman he was not married to.208 The young couple kissed and caressed, but according to Palla‟s radical wishes, their relationship would never be socially or legally sanctioned.

206 Merckx, p184-5. 207 Ibid, p158. 208 Chambers, p114.

113

In Chambers‟ view, Palla‟s refusal to marry Jim, despite their petting, threatened society as much her politics. When Palla promised monogamy, only without “any degrading ceremony,” her soldier and beau exploded in anger, representative of a disapproving society. He asked Palla, “Do you realize what you say? You are crazy!

You and your socialist friends pretend to be fighting anarchy. You preach against

Bolshevism! You warn the world that the Crimson Tide is rising. And every word you utter swells it! You are the anarchists yourselves! You are the Bolsheviki of the world!”

Here, at this moment in the story, Chambers most powerful point emerged most clearly.

Disregarding established social conventions undermined the integrity of the social order as a whole. Palla‟s disapproval of a marriage ceremony was disorder, it was Bolshevism.

Jim further explicated this point: “You don‟t have to tell me that the Crimson Tide is rising. I saw it in Argonne…I wish I had never lived to come back here and see what demoralization is threatening my own country.”209 A reviewer noted that never had

Robert Chambers “written a more timely” story.210

In another story, The Gibson Upright, refusal of marriage again helped to mark the lead female character as a Bolshevik, reinforcing connections made by others at the time.211 At the start of the play written by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, referred to by a reviewer in The Dial as “one of our most successful novelists and perhaps our most successful humorist,” a socialist piano tester named Nora refused the overtures of her factory‟s owner because of the class divide between them. Partly in a nod to her

209 Ibid, p321. 210 Publishers’ Weekly, November 15, 1919, p1. 211 The play was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1919, with a circulation of over two million. It was then scheduled for theater production and publication in full by Doubleday Page in the Fall of 1919.

114 happiness, Gibson, the owner, decided to hand the factory over to his workers, allowing them to manage the business and distribute profits as they saw fit. Still, Nora refused him, content and self satisfied in the work of “living out her ideals.” Though the play‟s writers never identify her as such, several reviewers of the play assumed that Nora was

“Russian,” and, a “Bolshevik.”212

The very premise of The Gibson Upright, which the Christian Science Monitor called

“a bit of anti-Bolshevist propaganda,” belied the popularly understood connection between radicalism and women‟s status in 1919. In the struggle between radicalism and capitalism the traditional woman‟s role was at stake. Tarkington and Wilson satirized the contentious relationship between worker and employer, revealing much about popular conceptions of both classes. Ultimately, Gibson‟s employees failed miserably and, at times, comically, being utterly ill equipped to run the factory. Lacking the superior skills of a capitalist, like Gibson, they ran the business into tremendous debt and sparked volatile labor unrest. In the play‟s final moments, disaffected workers detonated a bomb inside a piano in the factory. An already bereft Nora “unconsciously” sought protection from the blast in the arms of Gibson. After consoling her, Gibson lectured his employees on the necessary hierarchies within the capitalist system, pointing out that some economic inequalities are justified and rather necessary for good business. Nora sat defeated, crying, head in hands, when Gibson turned “briskly” to her, and in a

“businesslike way” asked her yet again if she would marry him. Stage directions note that “meekly,” Nora says, “Yes—I will.” Only after her ideals are destroyed, in practice

212 The Christian Science Monitor, July 22, 1919, p22, and Chicago Daily Tribune, July 13, 1919, pE1, respectively.

115 and by the violence of the bomb blast, Nora swallowed her bitter pill and agreed to marry. The “Bolshevist” labor organizer agreed to stop work, to live in the “quiet house” of a paternalistic capitalist who has been redeemed by the story‟s end.

This notion that marriage, a capitalist bourgeois convention, tempered both radicalism and women‟s striving for independence marked other Red Scare stories too. Marriage worked as a device in Alice Duer Miller‟s short story The Beauty and the Bolshevik, revealing the bankruptcy of stereotypes, orchestrating the acceptance, albeit grudgingly, of some agreement between capital and labor, and quelling the radical tendencies of two young lovers.213 Ben, the suitor and representative radical, and Mr. Cord, the father and representative big business man, are forced together in this story by their common love for Crystal, love object of radical Ben and daughter of business man Mr. Cord. Through

Miller‟s anti-stereotypical portrayals, the reader finds that rich capitalists can be sincere and discerning, more than merely reactionary and repressive. And, as it turns out, not all radicals favor free love and violent overthrow of the government. Despite a sometimes superficial nature, even Crystal defies stereotypes as a pretty young rich girl with at least some recognition of bourgeois culture‟s emptiness.

Through this humorous tale the reader sees that Beauty does not tame the Bolshevist, as she does the fairy tale Beast, but marriage tames them both. First, the engagement of the radical and the debutante parlor socialist dampened the conflict between the

213 Over eighty thousand Americans saw Miller‟s story serialized in Harper’s Magazine in May and June of 1920. Harper and Brothers published the short story in full later that year. Alice Duer Miller wrote a well read column in the New York Herald Tribune, titled “Are Women People?” in the years before the suffrage amendment passed. The Heterodoxy Club was a club of politically radical, literary and social activist women in Greenwich Village between 1912 and 1940. Miller was also a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table; Filene, p289. In a list of circulation numbers for major periodicals in 1920, Filene notes that issues of Harper’s reached 85,896 in 1920.

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Bolshevik and her capitalist father. Crystal plans to move into Ben‟s modest apartment in New York City, where she tells Mr. Cord he will come and dine regularly to get to know Ben and all of his radical friends. She tells her fiancé Ben that he will spend summer months in Newport, dining with Mr. Cord, meeting his business men friends.

Both men protest and worry over their credibility with their peers, but do so only in a perfunctory way. For their mutual love of Crystal, the reader knows, they will do as she asks. With tongue in cheek, Miller used marriage as a resolution between father and future son in law, or, in terms of their representative value, between capitalism and bolshevism. And while Crystal remained a carefree parlor radical, her impending marriage, along with her concessions to her father, represent her own process of being tamed. Her feminism and Ben‟s radicalism were regulated, by Miller‟s humor and by traditional family and marriage arrangements.

The Crimson Tide also ended with an engagement, resolving the crisis of Palla‟s social radicalism with her wholehearted embrace of marriage to Jim. At last Palla herself realized that her own parlor socialism mixed with a nascent feminism was indeed a form of Bolshevism. She professed her crime at a meeting full of “reds,” speaking her confession publicly. To the hardened radicals and working men and women, she conceded, “I have said that the conventions and beliefs and usages and customs of civilization were old, outworn, and tyrannical.” But now, transformed by Jim‟s love and by Ilse‟s pregnancy out of wedlock, Palla realized, “I have preached disorder while attempting to combat it; I have preached revolution while counseling peace.” Love and sex outside of marriage amounted to disorder and revolution. To the crowd she said outright, “What I preached was Bolshevism. And I was such a fool I didn‟t know it…If

117 the marriage law seems unnecessary, unjust, then only by common consent can it be altered; and until it is altered, any who disregard it strike at civilization.”214

The novel resolved with the actual engagement of the couple, as Chambers emphasized

Palla‟s “conversion” from Bolshevism, feminism, and immorality. To promote stability in society and to find personal happiness, Chambers implied, Palla had to accept the cultural conventions Jim represented. And accept them she did. Jim teases that she deserved a war medal for standing before the Red club, for denouncing her “creed.”

Sincerely and “smiling at him sideways,” Palla responded, “all I aspire to is a very plain gold ring.”215 All was well in a world where Chambers‟ characters surmounted the crimson tides of Bolshevism and sex radicalism.

Fernand Merckx had harsh words for women, feminists and bolshevists, who did not aspire to that plain gold ring. He cast aspersions on the sexual and gender normality of those women not moved by the potential protection of marriage, using all tactics available to him. As Harriet Abbott did in the pages of The Ladies Home Journal, though with more vitriol, Merckx scolded women who deviated from marriage and motherhood.

This included the less overtly political but nonetheless alarming flapper girls, who

Merckx portrayed as either “empty headed” or as a “she shaped neutral beings” who only hoped to become “head of her department.”216 And then there were the “committee women,” the “she-politicians,” who challenged the patriarchal family as the locus of

214 Chambers, p356. Italics are mine. Immediately after Palla finishes, a striking garment worker yells at her and Kastner, a threatening Russian immigrant, calls her a silly “rich young girl.” He moves to the podium and says now “a poor man speaks to you out of a heart full of bitterness against this law and order which you haff heard so highly praised.” With this comment, Chambers clearly demonstrates the presence of dangerous radicals, yet at the same time he mocks the seriousness of “parlor Bolsheviks” like Palla. As Kastner is removed from the stage by police, a bomb goes off in the hall. 215 Ibid, p366. 216 Ibid, p177.

118 political and social power in America. These unnatural women “assumed a mannish character, and some of them have even succeeded in acquiring a man‟s habits.” He went on, “[their] sternness makes them unresponsive to the average man…[their] mentality suffers an encystment while their sexual organs by age grow less and less flexible and unfit for procreation, as well as for sensual enjoyment.”217 With an allusion to the fear of lesbian sexuality, Merckx categorized women who deviated from the heterosexual norm as unsexed, incapable of perpetuating the race and of strengthening the nation.

Samuel Saloman agreed with Merckx, as both men, representative of a wider if less forcefully articulated feeling, bristled against the broader attack on marriage and women‟s traditional role in American culture, finding feminism and Bolshevism to blame. In addition to the reds, Saloman claimed there were others, people who did not necessarily subscribe to the whole Socialist program, yet who fought to make marriage a personal matter, who believed marriage to be merely a vehicle to keep women subjugated to the male sex. The laws governing the relations between the sexes were, Saloman thought, the very laws “against which the feminist rebels.” Feminists, then, shared the most nefarious part of the Socialist agenda. “The liberals among the women,” who,

Saloman chided, were similar to the “dyed-in-the-wool” socialists, “lash themselves into a perfect rage over wrongs or pretended wrongs,” for “emancipation.”218

Saloman encapsulated the popular notion then, put forward by Merckx, by numerous fiction writers, by the Ladies Home Journal, that the attack on marriage within American culture stemmed not just from Bolshevism, but from feminism too. While the political

217 Merckx, p96. 218 Saloman, p119-120.

119 and economic points between them diverged, Socialists and feminists shared the same socio-cultural goals with regard to sex and gender norms. Both threatened disorder through the destruction of marriage. He pleaded with his readers to widen their vision, to work to save women and to save the family, urging them to be “insensible to the siren‟s song of the socialist and the feminist.”219

Nervous Americans used discussions about women as a privileged site through which to discuss the larger ideological struggle taking place between Bolshevism and

Americanism, between social radicalism and social conservatism. Growing concern over gender differences accentuated by the visible rise of feminism before the war only increased after the war ended. Thus the Red Scare coincided with a moment of intense anxiety over changing sex and gender norms. This allowed conservative writers, in fiction, in books and in the popular press, to use women‟s status as a barometer of national health or sickness. Women‟s actions, their gender conformity, always important in American society, now contributed to a national environment of order or disorder, strength or weakness, in the face of Red Scare fears of Bolshevism. Feminism, in this light, took on dire implications. Even in the early 1920s the bright light of women‟s activism was being diminished by larger international concerns.

Furthermore, as the two ideologies of Bolshevism and feminism converged in the minds of antiradicals, the potential impact of radicalism in America was portrayed as sinister and perverse. The persistent rumor about the nationalization of women colored

Americans‟ understanding of Bolshevism from the very start of the Red Scare. And,

219 Saloman, p137-138.

120 beyond the truth of the rumor, actual changes in Soviet Russia that diminished the significance of economic concerns in family life and in sex relationships powerfully impacted Americans. Despite some vocal advocates of sexual modernism in the early

1920s, most Americans wished to uphold capitalism and the family unit that supported it.

These men and women were wholly unprepared and unwilling to embrace the notion of sexuality removed from the marriage bed and from reproduction.

Yet, advances in birth control, the visible existence of homosexuality, and the emergence of a thriving youth culture steeped in sexual adventure belied the truly genuine nature of Americans professed disgust with the place of sex in Bolshevist thought. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this creeping acceptance of change, the

Bolshevist menace, packaged neatly as the “red war on the family” by reactionary conservatives, gave the very many anxious or ambivalent Americans a powerful symbol upon which to act out their confusion, anger, and denial. The context of sex and gender relations in American culture during the Red Scare facilitated the usefulness, on many levels, of talking about Bolshevism by talking about women.

Chapter Three “Every Homeowner is a Bulwark of Americanism and a Safeguard Against Bolshevism”: Constructions of Social Order and Working Class Masculinity in the Postwar Own Your Own Home Movement

Days before the new year, in December 1918, The Mail Bag, a social hygiene newsletter for Army chaplains both in the United States and Europe, informed the social and spiritual advisors that their “job—the country‟s job—is to keep the arrow of these boys‟ thoughts and dreams pointing ever homeward, towards their new-old duties and responsibilities, as citizens and fathers of families.” In a bid to maintain the cooperation of demobilizing soldiers with social hygiene directives, these writers and other creators of social hygiene literature focused their moral and patriotic propaganda on family centered strategies. In this December issue, Mail Bag writers addressed the emergent need for these new tactics. Noting the problems of demobilization, where men sat idly waiting to go home, not to mention the temptations awaiting them once they got there, the Mail Bag editor declared “the menace to clean manhood” to be more significant after the armistice than in wartime.220 Common deterrents from sexual activity, like potential weakness in combat or punitive measures from officers, no longer factored in to soldiers‟ decisions, and chaplains reported lowered morale amongst the men. As they sought out strategies to safeguard men‟s morals, to maintain and reinforce their new-old duties and responsibilities as citizens and fathers, chaplains and officers tried to tap into the soldiers

220 The Mail Bag, Dec 28, 1918, p1. Box 131, folder 7, American Social Health Association Records (hereafter cited as ASHA), Social Welfare History Archives (hereafter cited as SWHA), University of Minnesota. 121

122 thoughts and anxieties about their futures. The Mail Bag editor explained, for the former wartime slogan “„keeping fit to fight,‟ there must now be substituted a new appeal to

“keep fit to live.”221

During the war the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) equated men‟s and roles as citizens with their current or future roles as fathers and husbands. They centralized the family and chaste sexual behavior in their models of good citizenship, not only for soldiers in camps, but for civilians as well. In a general effort to control the social and sexual behavior of soldiers and citizens during the war, just days after the start of American involvement, President Wilson created the CTCA, a federal agency, in April

1917. Most specifically, the agency worked to protect soldiers from venereal disease in camps and in battle.222

More remarkably here, after the armistice, when the actual wartime crisis ended, the

United States government persisted in tying sex and gender norms to patriotism in constructions of masculinity. These white, middle class officials imposing their own world view on the nation‟s citizens viewed social hygiene as more than just a war problem, and they worked to integrate their message into the fabric of a postwar moral citizenship. The “fight” for health, to defeat the Hun, transformed into a wider struggle.

The War Department offered “clean living” as the soldier‟s new battle, painting a picture

221 Ibid, p1. 222For complete coverage of the wartime activities of the CTCA see Nancy Bristow. Making Men Moral. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p7. Bristow argues that the efforts of CTCA reformers represented progressivism at the height of its power. They envisioned a new cultural nationalism to be imposed upon the country in wartime, to realize all the positive changes American society needed. The reformers inflexibility and inherent racism alienated many people they worked with directly, in camps and in camp communities, so their vision went unrealized. Their attempts to create a shared, national culture based on their own white middle class values was unsuccessful by the war‟s end, and their decline coincided with the decline of progressivism in general.

123 of homes with “happy wives” and children as the “happiness” soldiers should aspire to.223

Responsibility to the family and the nation replaced soldiers‟ responsibility to their fighting brothers.

A shift in strategy, to one focused not on victory but specifically on the family, signaled the important role the home and family life would play in formulations of nationalism in the years following the war.224 Thus, both government and civilian groups tried to influence communities to persist in prioritizing family life, to continue shutting down red light districts, to provide wholesome recreation, to offer venereal disease clinics, and to offer education on matters of sexual health, all in the name of good postwar citizenship.

The Army‟s chaplains, as evidenced in The Mail Bag, encapsulated the move to link men‟s personal choices regarding family life to their citizenship and the strength of the country. Chaplains claimed that loose morals and disease made “a man a bad soldier, a bad citizen, a bad husband, a bad father.” All four roles for men came together in constructions of patriotic manhood.225 Furthermore, chaplains championed a morally

“awakened” nation, where men and women realized the consequences of their sexual choices, where personal sexual decisions affected much more than the individual.

After the war, the government also continued its efforts to intervene in shaping civilians‟ sexuality and morality. Social hygiene workers took advantage of the structures set up during the war to do so. Different pamphlets were prepared, to spread sex knowledge and social hygiene to the general public, parents of children, young men

223 Keeping Fit to Fight, (postwar version), n.d. Box 131, folder 6, p3, ASHA, SWHA. 224 War on Venereal Disease to Continue—Country Must be Kept Clean. United States Public Health Service, nd. Box 131, folder 4, AHSA, SWHA. 225 Ibid., p4.

124 and boys, girls and young women, and educators. In December 1918, William Zinsser,

Director of the Social Hygiene Division of the War Department sent a form letter to employers throughout the country, urging them to take up the fight in civilian life by purchasing the requisite posters, pamphlets and pay envelope enclosures to prevent dangerous sexual relations and the inefficiency brought on by venereal disease. Zinsser‟s closing statement revealed the government‟s emphasis on national regeneration after the war; “out of the destructive wreck of the War, the Government is conserving and using machinery proved indispensable for the better building-up of our great nation. Join the reconstruction army which must never be demobilized.”226 Enclosed in the sample packet was a refashioned wartime social hygiene pamphlet, instructions for plant supervisors on education and treatment, sample placards, and pay inserts which warned men of prostitutes, explained the dangers of sexual immorality to wives and unborn children, and encouraged them to wipe out venereal disease in their plant. A similar letter went out to employers directed at women workers.227

Thus, during and more importantly after the war, government funded social hygiene agencies constructed a dominant discourse on citizenship and nationalism threaded through with scripted gender roles and conservative sexual values. On some level, the real and well-founded fears of venereal disease played a significant role in this process.

But government efforts went beyond stopping disease, and the process of defending the country in war transformed into the need to fight for the American family after the war.

They regulated sex by bringing cultural nationalism into the lives of soldiers and

226 Form letter from William Zinsser, Dec 24, 1918, War Department. Box 131, folder 3, ASHA, SWHA. . 227 Form letter from Josephine Hemenway Kenyon, War Department, nd, Box 132, folder 7, ASHA, SWHA.

125 civilians, and they explicitly linked citizenship to appropriate gendered and sexual behavior. Writers of social hygiene literature produced less overtly patriotic and nationalistic copy after 1920, when the USPHS took over the struggle against venereal disease from the decommissioned CTCA, but the links they made from during and after the war became integrated into American cultural and social life. The model of masculine citizenship created by the CTCA laid the groundwork for American attempts to control radicalism through the family.

In order to fully understand the history of family life we must fully account for the things that have influenced it, the ideas, institutions, legal structures. This governmental foray into the morality of soldiers and citizens even after the war came to a close represented the expansion of the state in wartime and the extraordinary willingness of state officials to intervene in intimate maters of sex and family life. During the war and in the postwar Red Scare years, government propaganda helped to shape the way ordinary Americans saw themselves and their families in relation to the nation. At the war‟s end, government officials, reinforced by civilian reformers and agencies, utilized the power of another institution that framed family life: the home.

After a brief foray into the field of housing as an emergency wartime measure, the federal government sponsored a home ownership campaign in 1919 that continued the work of celebrating the role of family life in the nation‟s interests. A model of masculine citizenship, borne of the war, persisted and strengthened through these efforts.

Government officials and reformers of housing policy used the sway of appeals to masculinity to achieve tangible goals, like end a housing shortage, but in doing so they

126 propped up ideas about the parameters of patriotism, the importance of proper gendered behavior, and the nature of Bolshevism.

“America‟s Next Problem”: The Heightened Significance of Home Ownership

In December, 1918, just one month after the war came to a close, a local Own-Your-

Own-Home organizing committee in Portland, Oregon prepared to launch one of the nation‟s earliest campaigns. In their efforts to gain publicity, committee members, local town leaders, and businessmen constructed a bungalow complete with a manicured lawn, with construction and all materials donated by local firms and labor organizations. The committee used the home as the Portland movement‟s headquarters, and from there they planned two major publicity stunts for the campaign‟s kick off on December 31, 1918.

First, they printed up cards to pass out to the crowd they hoped would gather at the bungalow on New Year‟s Eve. The cards were promises of an “Own-Your-Own-Home

New Year‟s Resolution,” where one could write an address, give their signature, and thus make their New Year‟s resolution, solemnly resolving to make their best effort to

“become a home owner in this great city” during the year 1919.228 The card pledged citizens to a belief in “the American home and its eternal power for good,” and in their duty to “own a home under the Stars and Stripes.” Over one hundred cards were signed and left at the bungalow by the crowd who gathered to witness the second publicity stunt of the evening.

228 Own-Your-Own-Home Campaigns handbook, , p43, Box 461, Publicity of Home Ownership Campaign, General Records of the “Own Your Own Home” Campaign (hereafter referred to as OYOH), part of Record Group 3: Records of the U.S. Housing Corporation, 1917-1952, U.S. National Archives & Records Administration (hereafter referred to as NARA).

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Own-Your-Own-Home (OYOH) organizers held a public wedding at the bungalow on

New Year‟s Eve, a celebration of heterosexual love, monogamy, and family, steeped in civil and religious tradition, as the center piece of the opening of their campaign. The wedding, a commentator noted, “offered a great opportunity for newspaper publicity.”

The committee filled the bungalow with over $1,000 worth of wedding gifts, all donated by local manufacturers. They announced the campaign event in the papers, asking for applications from young couples who, if chosen, would win the wedding ceremony and all the gifts. The bride and groom chosen by the committee both hailed from Portland since birth, and both “had a large acquaintance in the city.” Anticipating a crowd larger than the 200 people who could safely fit inside the bungalow, the Committee asked the city to create space by roping off the surrounding area. When New Year‟s Eve arrived, the bungalow at Fourth and Stark Streets and the surrounding roads were crowded with curious spectators eager to witness the big event.

The Portland OYOH campaign orchestrated this wedding as a public spectacle, including all the elements of tradition, yet they used the event to push a clear agenda. A band played the wedding march when the bride and groom entered. A best man and brides maids accompanied them down the aisle. The Revered Doctor William A. Waldo married the couple, but he did so only after delivering an address on home ownership.

After a brief musical interlude, Portland mayor George L. Baker followed suit, offering remarks on “what the home meant in stabilizing our Government.” The secretary of the

Oregon Industrial League then presented the newlyweds with gifts, following with a

128 speech of his own on the importance of using locally produced goods. All of these addresses appeared in the local papers in the coming days.229

The decision of the Portland organizing committee to use a wedding as the centerpiece of their campaign speaks volumes about the assumptions behind the OYOH movement, and it foreshadowed the nature of publicity campaigns developing across the country.

Proponents of home ownership canonized heterosexual monogamous marriage and responsible manhood. They strongly supported the notion that ideal family life existed in private, single family dwellings. Through appeals to patriotism, OYOH committees continued to build upon the groundwork laid by CTCA and War Department literature which established a causal relationship between proper gendered and sexual behavior, good citizenship, and national stability.

This postwar effort had deep roots in the experience of the war, which itself revealed the power of good homes and transformed the face of housing policy in the United States.

Edith Elmer Wood, a prominent reformer and expert on housing conditions, breathed a thankful sigh of relief because the war “awakened us to the importance of housing,” because “no nation can rise higher than the level of its homes.” 230 First and foremost, the war created a shortage of homes as early as 1914. Prices of building material went up, and then the necessities of wartime led to a freeze on building in 1917 and 1918. The number of houses built during the war sunk to levels reached during the depression of the

1870s. By the time the war ended, reformers and government officials estimated that

229 Ibid, p44-46. 230 Edith Elmer Wood. The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner: America’s Next Problem. (New York: MacMillan Company, 1919), p238-256.

129 there were one million fewer homes in the United States than there were those desiring to buy them.

Equally as significant as the housing shortage, the war spawned the experimental involvement of the government in the housing market. As some historians have noted, this experiment logically built upon Progressive Era thinking which fostered broad scale government intervention in the lives of Americans during wartime.231 Reversing traditional reticence to allow government activism, especially in the free market, in 1917, the realities of the war convinced Congress and other government officials to create the

Emergency Fleet Corporation and the United States Housing Corporation. Workers flocked to industrial centers and shipping towns as the economy took off, and soon, there were more workers than beds. The EFC took on mortgages to house war workers, setting prices and rent levels for occupants, and the Housing Corporation, in the Department of

Labor, worked to stimulate and follow through with construction of homes to house working people. The standards of home design and the standard of living increased in houses created by these government efforts. 232 All in all the two organizations produced more than 15,000 homes intended for working families during the war, though most remained unfinished at the time of the armistice. The government eventually sold these units at a loss, wishing to exit the housing industry for a number of reasons that will be

231 Margaret Marsh. Suburban Lives. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p129-131; This Progressive Era expansion of government intervention in Americans‟ lives during the war includes, most certainly, the activities of the CTCA. 232 Edith Elmer Wood. Recent Trends in American Housing. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), p82.

130 covered at the end of this chapter.233 But this kind of government activism set a precedent which all interested parties had to contend with in the 1920s.

Government housing propagated middle class, white values for working class families. Ultimately this government involvement stemmed from concerns about labor, about the smooth production of war material. Workers needed places to sleep to work most efficiently, and keeping family units together promoted stability. From the start leaders of these programs disavowed any wider reformist or social justice intentions.234

Yet, the ways in which these programs actually housed workers belied an agenda. EFC and Housing Corporation efforts focused on permanent, detached, single and double family dwellings for married workers, rather than arguably less expensive and perhaps more convenient apartment houses, which were constructed for single workers. These structures fostered lifestyles often associated with middle class living. Children and parents enjoyed separate bedrooms in wartime housing plans, which also prioritized parlors, and dining rooms, both separate from women‟s work space in the kitchen.235

By 1919 government officials and reformers endowed the “home” with expansive social significance. In a conference on housing, held immediately after the armistice,

Lawson Purdy, a New York City tax expert affiliated with the New York Charity

Organization Society and with the Russell Sage Foundation, elaborated on the need for better and more “homes” in the country in the coming postwar period. Purdy claimed a

233 Mason C. Doan. American Housing Production, 1880-2000. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), p27-29. 234 Eric J. Karolak. “No Idea of Doing Anything Wonderful”: The Labor-Crisis Origins of National Housing Policy and the Reconstruction of the Working Class Community, 1917-1919,” in From Tenements to Taylor Homes, John F. Bauman, Roger Biles and Kristin M. Szylvian eds. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), p64. 235 Karolak, p70-72.

131 distinction between a house and a home; what housing reformers wanted, he said, was

“homes.” To him, this word “signifies all that goes with family life; it means the house; it means sanitary surroundings in and about the house; it means an orderly arrangement of the city; it means suitable amenities of life; it means friends and neighbors; it means a community spirit.” All of these summed up “the social blessings of life,” in his view.236

And, Purdy pushed working men to see even beyond their own “owned” homes in order to “own” their own towns, to see beyond their fenced in backyards to “substitute the feeling that this town is my town.”237 By making one working family into stable home owning citizens, reformers could cultivate local and national community.

In short, the war changed things, marking a shift towards a more direct effort to use the home as an agent for change. Postwar efforts advocated a more organic view of home life within the larger community, and within the nation beyond it. Government officials, particularly within the Department of Labor, profit seeking builders, voluntarist middle class women and optimistic housing reformers sought to affect change by intensely cultivating a time honored, though often unexamined, connection between property ownership and good citizenship. Home owners, many felt certain, naturally contributed to good Americanism.

The concern of these groups moved beyond examining and ameliorating the unfavorable conditions of the country‟s poor, often immigrant, populations living in cities, the thrust of most housing policy and discussion of the home prior to 1917. And by the end of the 1920s, reformers envisioned the private home within a matrix of

236 Housing Problems in America: proceedings of the National Conference on Housing, (New York: American Housing Association, 1918), p274. Comments by Lawson Purdy, Chairman, Committee on New Industrial Towns, New York City. 237 Ibid, p284.

132 interconnected factors, including the internal design of homes, zoning, and city planning.

This widened vision was evident by 1931, when a prominent housing expert confidently claimed, “the home is no longer construed to be an isolated unit but is recognized as an important factor in the social process.”238

At the start of 1919, when this shift in thinking about the power of home ownership emerged, reformers eagerly offered ideas hoping to extend wartime governmental influence in the private housing market. Edith Elmer Wood published an analysis immediately after the war, titled The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner: America’s

Next Problem, where she proposed a housing policy for the United States. Wood, a Navy wife, mother of four, and Columbia Ph.D. had years of experience with issues of health and public welfare with which to build her perspective.239 She wished to ensure the ability of working people to have and own safe, sanitary homes and to prevent conditions that blighted families and neighborhoods. Restrictive legislation, creating and enforcing standards of safety and sanitation, existed before the war, she explained, but the United

States needed to move well beyond this in order to adequately house unskilled workers.240 Wood acknowledged the existence of model housing communities created by either philanthropic or industrial concerns, but believed these hardly satisfied the demand.241

Wood rightly anticipated a retraction of government influence over housing, a policy she disagreed with. The world did not collapse when the United States government

238 Blanche Halbert, ed. Better Homes Manual, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), pxii. 239 Frederick L. Ackerman, John J. Murphy, and Edith Elmer Wood. The Housing Famine: How to End It, A Triangular Debate between John J. Murphy, Edith Elmer Wood and Frederick L. Ackerman. (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1920), pvi-vii. 240 Wood, Unskilled Wage Earner, p19. 241 Wood, Unskilled Wage Earner, p132.

133 became involved in the housing market, she would dryly note some years later. To bolster her case Wood lauded the programs of other countries, most notably Great

Britain, where the government exerted extensive influence on the housing market by building homes for working families. Even as she did so, Wood realized the limits of the possible in the postwar United States and she advocated for considerably less. Local communities needed to provide workers with credit, she argued, and that credit needed backing by the federal government. Only this, she claimed would allow workers to obtain favorable mortgage terms devoid of commercial profit incentive. Really, she just hoped the United States government would still be willing to keep a hand in the housing market. But despite her hopes, and those of other reformers like her, on a large scale level, this was not to be. Ultimately, the irrepressible spirit of individualism, something

Edith Elmer Wood called distinctly “American,” won out over any form of direct government intervention in the housing market by 1920.242

Yet, the tactics of that Portland OYOH campaign did represent a program just beginning, part of a national effort pursued directly by the United States government to advocate for the expansion of home ownership in the year after the end of the war. The very first OYOH campaign began in 1917, created and run by the National Association of

Real Estate Boards.243 The success of such local campaigns in promoting building spurred government officials in the Department of Labor to support the movement at the federal level in late 1918. Because prices were still high after the war many builders and

242 Wood, Unskilled Wage Earner, p238-256. 243 Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan. “…be a genuine homemaker in your own home”: Gender and Familial Relations in State Housing Practices, 1917-1922.” Social Forces, June 2005, 83(4), p1603-1626; Janet Hutchinson. “Building for Babbit: The State and the Suburban Ideal.” Journal of Policy History, vol 9, 1997, p184-210, p187.

134 buyers kept out of the market, hoping for a better scenario in the future. OYOH officials believed inflated prices would hold, and therefore they urged construction companies to build, they urged real estate companies to sell, and they urged banks to provide mortgages.

Of course, the OYOH movement also encouraged Americans to buy, and this required a coordination of interests. Paul C. Murphy, a real estate broker and the head of Portland,

Oregon‟s successful campaign, took the helm as Director of the Own Your Own Home

Section of the Division of Public Works and Construction Development, in the U.S.

Department of Labor Information and Education Service. In Washington Murphy set up an advisory panel made up of representatives of national real estate and building organizations. Together these men promoted home building at the federal level by encouraging local campaigns across the country. They created a booklet with detailed information on starting and maintaining a campaign and sent it out to 148 different groups.244 The Section in Washington also facilitated publicity nationwide by passing around advertising copy to local campaigns, publishing high profile advertisements in major newspapers and magazines, and by fastidiously answering the many inquiries generated by the publicity.

Initially officials directed their campaign towards those within the real estate and building industries, but they soon re-directed their efforts, targeting average folks with aspirations for the American Dream. The campaign focused on bankers, as officials hoped to reorganize mortgage lending practices to make ownership a more feasible

244 US Department of Labor, Information and Education Service, “Suggestions for Own-Your-Own-Home Campaigns,” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919)

135 option for more Americans. They also prompted real estate and construction industries to advertise in an effort to increase building. But ultimately, the Own Your Own Home campaign captured the attention of the nation as a whole, garnering the intense interest of individual American men and women who long dreamed of owning their own homes.

James F. Bridges, a soldier just back from France living in Weaver, Alabama, saw an advertisement for the OYOH campaign, a set of floor plans with three private bedrooms and a porch, with a headline that read “Uncle Sam Will Tell You How You May Own

This Pretty Home.” In a letter fairly typical of the many received in Washington, Bridges sent a telegram, simply asking for advice on “how I may own this pretty home.”245

The campaign reached far and wide through publicity work on both the national and local levels. The central OYOH office in Washington sent out some 3 million posters and passed informational articles to newspapers three times a week in the first six months of 1919. Building organizations like the Southern Pine Association and the National

Lumber Manufacturer‟s Association created their own local advertising templates, which they passed around to campaigns in other cities for free, asking for a nominal fee only if their advertising cuts were published. Section officials sent information to business owners and managers, like J. Morton Jr., the manager of the Northern Redwood Lumber

Company. Morton Jr. wrote to the OYOH Section after seeing an informational article in the Pioneer Western Lumberman. Morton Jr. found the idea “very catchy,” and a “good

245 Telegram from James F. Bridges, May 14, 1919, Box 1, Alabama OYOH, NARA. Telegram originally sent to the Rural Engineering Department of the Bureau of Public Roads, Dept of Agriculture, as publicized in the advertisement, “Uncle Sam Will Tell You.,” which is clipped to the telegram. The paper the advertisement came from is not named. At the bottom of the telegram, the Dept of Agriculture wrote, “refer to Dept of Labor Own Your Own Home.”

136 idea from a business standpoint.” He asked the Section to send him campaign literature.246

The Section enjoyed personal interaction with hundreds of Americans who in the months of the department‟s existence wrote to the government office in response to the publicity of their campaign. Members of the Section responded to each letter they received, directly engaging in a conversation between the federal government and

American citizens on the importance of home ownership in good citizenship. Paul

Murphy responded to Bridges personally, as he did to most letter writers, explaining the need to contact a local OYOH campaign or savings and loan company to secure a mortgage. The United States was “not in a position to lend money,” Murphy conceded, despite the implication many read into their advertisements. Rather, the OYOH Section wished only to strongly encourage men with available means to build or buy rather than rent, to invest wisely and to boost the economy. Murphy advised Bridges not to build unless he had a fund for emergencies, or, as he specified, ownership of a lot and at least

$500.247

The overwhelming response from the public took OYOH officials by surprise as they readjusted the emphasis of their work. In March of 1919 Murphy found himself apologizing for the delay in writing back to a man in Little Rock, Arkansas who wished to start a local campaign. Murphy‟s reply was delayed, he explained, “on account of the sudden inrush of inquiries which we were hardly prepared to handle.”248 Executive

Secretary of the OYOH Section, Terry O‟Donnell, surveyed their accomplishments some

246 J Morton Jr to the Department of Labor, April 5, 1919, Box 1, California, General. OYOH, NARA. 247 Letter from Paul C Murphy to James F. Bridges, May 23, 1919, Box 1, Alabama, OYOH, NARA. 248 Letter from Paul C. Murphy to Mr. M.E. McCoy, March 22, 1919, Box 1, Arkansas. OYOH, NARA.

137 months later, noting that officials made a mistake in construing the campaign as one directed at business men rather than average citizens. “We were not in shape to handle the inquiries from private individuals,” O‟Donnell reasoned, “however, as long as we have Governmental connection, we must arrange to take care of all inquirers, as they feel they have a right to the information.” And so the Section took the time to respond to the returned soldier, like James Bridges, who wanted a home, or to the woman from

Colorado who wanted house plans for her unused second floor, because “these are people as important to us in the aggregate as Committees which may wish preliminary information on how to begin the Campaign in a certain city.”249

Local campaigns conducted a significant part of the OYOH Section‟s business. By

May 1, 1919, some 64 Committees were organized nationwide, and as of that date, 84 more were in the works. The OYOH Section in Washington, D.C. delivered over 12,000 copies of the Section‟s official manual on how to start a local committee.250 Local real estate firms, furniture makers, banks, business colleges, paint stores, hotels, lumber yards, sheet metal producers, insurance brokers and roofing companies were just some of the businesses supporting local campaigns with money and advertising.251 Boosters in the private sector also produced instructional material for local campaigns. In a widely distributed handbook, the National Lumber Manufacturer‟s Association instructed committees to seek potential home owners in churches and in women‟s clubs, and to

249 May 1919 Report, Own Your Own Home Section, Homes Registration Service, Housing Corporation, US Department of Labor. By Terry O‟Donnell, Retiring Executive Secretary, p2. Box 6, Report, OYOH, NARA. 250 Report of Activities in the Own Your Own Home Section of the Division of Public Works and Construction Development, US Department of Labor Information and Education Service, Paul C Murphy, Director, OYOH Section. May 1, 1919. Box 6, Report., OYOH, NARA. 251 Whittier News, May 8, 1919, Box 1, California, Publicity OYOH, NARA.

138 drum up publicity by offering prizes to local school children for the best essays on “why families should own their homes,” and for the best letters from adults on how they paid for their home.252

While these local campaigns spread the home ownership message far and wide, the

OYOH Section focused narrowly on prompting builders to build, banks to lend, and

American citizens to purchase. They relayed information about architectural plans and buying basics to enquirers, and as we will soon see, they informed their work very heavily with ideological underpinnings. But the Section did not emphasize the practical details of building a home, furnishing it, or creating sanitary and safe conditions.253

Another housing organization took up this task, one not directly run by a government agency, but affiliated with the government nonetheless.

In 1922 Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, argued that the nation needed to move beyond the directive to buy and build houses and progress to the development of homes. He did so in celebration of the work of the Better Homes in America movement, which, he claimed, canonized the family as “the unit of modern civilization.”254 Mrs.

Janet Meloney, editor of popular women‟s magazine The Delineator, started this movement in 1921, herself inspired by the work of the government‟s OYOH campaign.

But her purpose was not profit, as it was for most local OYOH proponents. Rather,

Meloney harbored social and cultural motivations, as she sought to educate ignorant

252 Own Your Own Home Campaign Handbook, National Lumber Manufacturer‟s Association, Chicago, IL, p11, Box 6, Publicity. OYOH, NARA. 253 Some other housing agencies existed, including the National Housing Association, which lobbied for safety and sanitary reforms of mostly urban dwelling houses, like tenements. 254 Better Homes in America Plan Book for Demonstration Week 1922. (New York: The Delineator, 1922), p8.

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Americans on how to construct and fashion better homes.255 She gathered government officials at the state and federal level, members of women‟s clubs, the American Red

Cross, and a host of other people interested in housing and in the welfare of children.256

With this gathering of supporters, Meloney launched a demonstration week in October of

1922, where committees all over the country prepared demonstration homes in their own communities, building or fixing up dilapidated residences with state of the art, modern, sanitary room layouts, kitchens, and furnishings. The demonstration committees paid close attention to every detail, for example, by making sure window placement in a house achieved optimum ventilation.

After a successful start, in 1922 Meloney sought the sponsorship of a very interested

Herbert Hoover in the Department of Commerce. This relationship represented an indirect government affiliation with housing programs, one that marked Hoover‟s tenure in the Commerce Department. Meloney garnered the approval of Hoover, President

Calvin Coolidge, and a number of other national politicians. Most of the BHA‟s published materials began with printed endorsements by both Coolidge and Hoover. In a few years time, Hoover could comfortably say that his Commerce Department more or less ran the Better Home movement.257 Recognizing the popularity and potential of the group‟s work, as the number of successful demonstration committees grew each year,

Meloney registered it as an educational agency, making it public in 1923. Handing over the reins at this point, she gave control of the Better Homes of America organization to

255 Janet Hutchison, “Shaping Housing and Enhancing Consumption: Hoover‟s Interwar Housing Policy,” in From Tenements to Taylor Homes, p88. 256 Guidebook of Better Homes in America: How to Organize the 1924 Campaign. (Washington, DC: Better Homes in America, 1924), p4. 257 Hutchison, “Shaping Housing,” p89.

140 prominent housing expert James Ford, former OYOH Section official and professor at

Harvard University.258

The BHA employed a much wider focus than most other groups in the housing field soon after the war. Looking to treat the “problems” of “housing and home life”

“comprehensively,” as James Ford put it, the BHA sought to attract local and national attention to the need to alleviate the building shortage as well as the need for labor saving equipment in homes, the need for more “artistic furnishings,” and in general “the development of home-life with reference to the high standards of wholesomeness and achievement.”259 The group relied heavily on publicity to spread the word about their demonstration week events. In Atlanta‟s 1925 campaign, the Demonstration Committee secured articles and photographs in local newspapers and magazines, including one special Better Homes edition, in addition to radio programs and a film reel that detailed the progress of the city‟s demonstration houses. Each year, beginning in 1922, the BHA published a lengthy guidebook detailing why and how Americans should organize a demonstration week in their towns.

The themes of home ownership and gendered citizenship promoted by the OYOH and

BHA movements spread rapidly through the United States after the war, especially as suburbanization advanced dramatically in the 1920s. While the suburban ideal existed before the war, not until the 1920s did it rely so fully on the notion of home ownership.260

258 Guidebook of Better Homes in America: How to Organize the 1924 Campaign. (Washington, DC: Better Homes in America, 1924), p4. 259 Halbert, ed., p741. 260 See Marsh, Suburban Lives. Marsh asserts the renewed connection between home ownership and citizenship in Chapter Five, “A Version of America.” She links this with the concurrent dramatic expansion of the suburban ideal, yet, she states, “the reasons for a dramatic shift to a preference for home ownership are not immediately self-evident.” Marsh hints that the war and the Bolshevik Revolution had

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People of all classes bought homes out of concern for their children‟s welfare and for the safety of the investment in this era. Those who continued to rent usually only did so for financial reasons, unable to save for a down payment, acquire a mortgage, or pay necessary taxes.261 Yet, several observers expressed anxiety over the fact that by 1920, only forty percent of American families lived in houses they owned, a drop from previous years, and the first time that number fell below fifty percent.262 Home ownership campaigns sought to turn the tide back.

“No man will hoist the red flag over the home he has paid for”: the social and political power of working class home ownership

While the movement to encourage home ownership developed after the war for practical reasons, borne of the housing shortage, building advocates and government officials acted for ideological reasons as well. Homes mattered to America, they argued, because homes promoted conservatism and social control, particularly in the face of the unrest best symbolized at this moment by Bolshevism. The patriotic thrust of the campaign focused on working men for two reasons. Skilled and unskilled workers tended not to live in homes they owned, and, in the view of many movement leaders, home ownership promoted social and political stability. Since the mid-19th century

something to do with it on pages 131 through 134. But she offers no substantial evidence or analysis to back this up. Rather, in the chapter that follows she offers a wealth of evidence, mostly from the late 1920s, demonstrating that advertisers, magazine writers and prescriptive literature authors pushed women to immerse themselves in the suburban ideal to the exclusion of all other life choices. Marsh finds that women in the 1920s were told it was their duty to their families and to their husbands to remain at home. But she does not link these trends directly to the political or cultural climate created by the war, or to the effects of the Russian Revolution in the United States. 261 Coleman Woodbury. Apartment House Increases and Attitudes Toward Home Ownership. (Chicago: The Institute For Economic Research, 1931), p70-71. 262Edith Louise Allen. American Housing: As Affected by Social and Economic Conditions. (Peoria, Illinois: The Manual Arts Press, 1930), p133.

142 middle class status and respectability hinged on the ownership of a single family dwelling. And, in a fundamental way, private home ownership symbolized solidity, fixedness, and contentment in a century where the American population moved around a good deal.263 The OYOH Section, along with a number of other similarly motivated organizations, fostered an idealization of the private household above all other types of housing for all of these reasons, despite other possibilities available, like apartments and cooperative housing.264

These housing advocates stressed the private home precisely because it embodied a middle class ideal, representing the individual male citizen with dependents, which they hoped would promote social cohesion. In a period where citizenship models were in flux, many conservatives, employers, and reformers wanted working class men to aspire to middle class citizenship ideals that supported the status quo. This desire transformed into a pressing need as radicalism and labor unrest emerged at the start of 1919. In May of that year, an OYOH campaign handbook demonstrated the relationship many imagined between home ownership and radicalism, quoting Governor F.P. Goodrich of Indiana saying that “every homeowner is a bulwark of Americanism and a safeguard against

Bolshevism.” 265

The writers of OYOH literature within the Department of Labor often made this axiomatic argument that in some fundamental way, home owning boosted patriotism and middle class ideals while blocking the advance of Bolshevism in the postwar era. OYOH officials solicited letters of support from national leaders, like Samuel Gompers and

263 Jackson, p50. 264 Hutchinson, p186.. 265 Own Your Own Home Campaign Handbook, National Lumber Manufacturer‟s Association, Chicago, IL, p12-13, Box 6, Publicity, OYOH, NARA.

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Carrie Chapman Catt, to use in local campaigns. The Section emphasized to the letter‟s recipients that “this is a time that demands patriotic effort quite as intense and as well organized as was necessary during the war.” They asked these national leaders to write a few words, with a “stress on the patriotic consideration that enters into the home-owning movement.” Home owning would, OYOH officials proffered, encourage returning soldiers and weary civilians to settle down and promote a healthy interest in local and national government. Keeping Americans emotionally satisfied and financially invested would quite simply block the development of discontent and unrest. In short, OYOH officials confidently claimed, “Nothing more surely will prevent the sort of discontent that develops Bolshevism.”266

This reasoning seemed axiomatic to OYOH leaders because they envisioned home ownership as a convenient ideological tool. An array of government officials, employers, housing reformers, and social conservatives drew on the well established appeal of consumerism as a means to their own ends. Home ownership allowed workers to exercise agency in their own lives and to take part in the world of consumer culture.

Most if not all wanted homes of their own for the stability and independence it brought.

But in the eyes of government officials and reformers, most of whom were middle class or elite, the movement crystallized that sense of stability, contentment and protective attachment in workers. In their view, the movement primarily yielded ideological benefits, vesting men with a stake in the capitalist order, giving them something to lose, potentially making them less likely to engage in labor disturbances.

266 Draft of form letter dated March 28, 1919. The date is crossed out with “April date,” written above it, which is then crossed out with “May date” above it. It seems the letter finally went out sometime in the first week of May 1919. Box 5, Oregon. OYOH, NARA.

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Home ownership boosters relied on the soothing affect family life and attachment to home might provide, holding such satisfactions up as an ideal for workers to aspire to.

Essentially they advertised emotional satisfaction, believing it would then transfer to the political realm. An advertisement section for home building in The Whittier News, a

California paper, stressed in the spring of 1919 the deep psychological benefits home ownership offered, claiming “the ideals of married life are best realized in a real home,” where “everyone shows his or her true self,” where “love, sympathy and tenderness take the place of trouble, worry and care.”267 This view of the home as a solace could go a long way in preventing unrest. An Ohio real estate man, Edward C. McKay, received posters and information letters from the OYOH Section, and wrote back to encourage the movement. McKay claimed with what he called absolute certainty that “labor will be less discontented if they own their own home.” 268

Government workers and local OYOH campaign directors focused specifically on the working class, then, in hopes of making men better citizens and workers by playing upon their desire for private property and white middle class family life. A poster used in the

St. Paul, Minnesota campaign featured two men, both in work overalls, pointing at a home. Signed by the U.S. Dept of Labor Secretary W.B. Wilson, himself a former worker and mineworker union leader, the poster‟s caption read, “I want every wage worker to own his home.” While working men are the clear targets of the advertisement, the happy families pictured living inside of these homes were dressed well in decorated

267 Whittier News, May 22, 1919. This appeal is followed by a note informing readers that complete information on plans, material and construction can be found at Barr Lumber Company or at Whittier Lumber Company, or from Home Building Editor, Whittier News. 268 Letter from Edward C McKay to Roger W. Babson, April 8, 1919, Box 5, Ohio, OYOH, NARA.

145 parlors, maintaining a distinctly middle class veneer.269 Aspiring to the life on the poster,

OYOH supporters hoped, would lead men to buy a home and stake a claim in the capitalist order for their families. And many men did, just like W.B. Stockton, who wrote to Secretary of Labor Wilson from Eureka, CA in June of 1919 asking for literature on how he could “get a home for my children‟s sake.”270

Employers also realized the benefits of home ownership amongst their work force, and in the early 1920s industrial institutions encouraged this development. To put it simply, as one lumber association did in an informational pamphlet, employers understood a manifest relationship between homes and stable workers, aware as they were that

“workers who are not home owners are more easily subject to all the cross currents of unrest and radicalism. They lack the stamina and conservatism that home owning gives.”271 This awareness led several companies to build communities in order to give their working men a chance to own a home, requiring less payment upfront and offering more advantageous interest rates than the typical savings and loan. They did so not in the interest of profit, but rather to promote stability among their workforce.272

In another strategy geared toward working men, OYOH officials consciously tried to assuage workers‟ anxiety over the debt created by taking out a mortgage, an anxiety evident in numerous letters men and women sent to the Section. Many campaign posters

269 Poster—“Jim! Your rent will pay for a Home.” St. Paul, Minneapolis. Box 3, Minneapolis, OYOH, NARA. In another Minnesota advertisement, this one in the St Paul Pioneer Press, in June of 1919, Wilson is quoted as saying he wants every “American” to own his own home. So while OYOH records indicate their primary target was working class men, the phrase used varied. 270 WB Stockton to Dept of Labor Secretary Wilson, June 9, 1919, Box 1, California, General, OYOH, NARA. 271 Housing Plans for Cities, (New Orleans: The Southern Pine Association, 1920), p5. 272 Housing Plans for Cities, p10. Examples include Indian Hill in Worcester, MA, built by the Norton Grinding Company in 1916, and Firestone Park in Akron, OH, built by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in 1919. See Wood, Unskilled Worker, p119-120.

146 offered little vignettes, stories that demystified the process of financing a home. One told the story of a couple who wanted a home but felt they could never save enough. A friend to the couple, aptly named Jack Wise, explained to the husband and wife, “You don‟t need any money!” He explained first and second mortgages, how they could borrow enough for the down payment as well. By dong this, Jack claimed, the couple could save enough in rent money to pay both mortgages back in “ten or twelve years.” The husband worried just like many other working men, saying, “I‟d hate to get in debt. Mortgages are millstones—what if they should be foreclosed?” “Absurd,” Jack replied, claiming that all successful business and individuals borrowed money to “get started.” So, the couple bought a house, and eleven years later, the husband assured the reader, they did fully own their home. All Jack said was true. “And,” the husband informed, “all this saving, remember, is in addition to the social benefits we have received.”273 These benefits are not explicated in the poster, but they did not need to be. Americans saw the messages in their papers and in business windows on a weekly basis. Despite the debt home ownership incurred, men could be better men, families would be stronger, and the nation would be peopled with better citizens if families owned homes.

This logic applied even more so to immigrant workers, a group often eager to embrace the American Dream through home ownership and, in 1919, a group perceived as potential cause for labor unrest. In a letter to the OYOH Section, one approving real estate worker claimed that home ownership might go “a long way towards making

[immigrants] good American citizens, because they become so attached to the ground

273 The House That Bought Itself, advertisement printed by the Own Your Home Committee, Philadelphia, PA. Box 5, PA. OYOH, NARA. At bottom it says, “We have no list of properties for sale. This campaign is purely educational—to teach the advantages of home ownership.”

147 they own that it is almost second nature” to find themselves interested in local improvements for their communities. Then, according to “perfect logic,” these men became interested “in politics as it effects [sic] the home.” The process of becoming attached to one‟s community through the home could powerfully affect the social order.

For “love and ownership of home,” he argued with certainty, acted as an “almost absolute preventative of the spread of Bolshevism.”274

Some years later, the Better Homes in America movement signaled the continued significance of assimilating immigrants through the private realm of the home. BHA leaders praised Atlanta, Georgia‟s demonstration work for 1925 particularly for its efforts in schooling immigrants on the benefits of orderly, self-owned homes. Better Home workers there very consciously set out to appeal to a wide swath of the city‟s residents, offering different demonstration homes for the “native white population,” the “large negro population,” and “the immigrants, whose knowledge of American standards of housing and home life is slight,” and, they pointed out, “who may experience difficulty in adjusting themselves to American conditions.”275 Local volunteers imagined their efforts for immigrants quite specifically as “an Americanization demonstration.” To ensure the successful proliferation of their notions of home life for immigrant workers, the Better

Homes group in Atlanta cooperated with a local part time school for employed and unemployed workers. The American Citizenship Chairman of the Atlanta Parent Teacher

Association testified to the success of the demonstration, both for immigrants and to those working with them.

274 Letter from Edward C McKay to Roger W. Babson, April 8, 1919, Box 5, Ohio, OYOH, NARA. 275 Better Homes in America. Guidebook for Better Homes Campaigns: Better Homes Week, April 25 to May 1, 1926, p41.

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Yet, curiously the Atlanta BHA Committee lowered those American standards when constructing immigrant quarters. Seemingly on purpose the group chose an older house broken up into apartments, making the demonstration home “cheerful and comfortable” by adding bright wallpaper and painting the woodwork white. The Atlanta organizers noted the going rates to rent such an apartment, clearly indicating that they did not envision immigrants engaging in home ownership in their early years in the United

States. They modified the “model” home in this case, scaling it down, while furnishing it

“in accordance with the best American standards.”276 The single family house for the native white population boasted six rooms on two floors. The single family house for the

“negro” population held four rooms on one floor, and was created with the help of a negro “subcommittee” which helped plan a “Better Home for people of their race.”277

In reality, home ownership boosters likely found immigrants who were financially able to be very eager to buy their own homes after the war. As early as 1912 two prominent Progressive reformers, Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, published a study on the role of the home in delinquent children. In it, they criticized the tendency of immigrants who came to America determined to buy a home at any cost. Citing statistics, they found that one quarter of delinquent boys came from homes owned by their parents. This fact told Breckenridge and Abbott that immigrant parents sacrificed the childhood and the education of their children by sending them to work, and, by sending the mother to work, just to scrape up enough money to purchase a home and

276 Guidebook for 1926, p43. 277 Ibid, p44.

149 partake in the dream of America.278 By 1921, based on Breckenridge‟s further investigations in to the home lives of immigrants, she claimed that according to an inquiry of savings and loan associations, most immigrants persisted in their desire to have a single-family dwelling rather than the “group” or “multiple” house. When immigrants lived in such quarters, especially in cities, Breckenridge found that most often this was due to circumstance, to “their acceptance of what is before them.” For, she believed, “the dream of almost every immigrant family is to have a house of its own.”279

Whether it was native-born American or immigrant workers buying homes, advocates of ownership cultivated that development because they envisioned a deep and powerful relationship between the nation‟s homes and the well being of the nation itself. Reformer

Edith Elmer Wood‟s statement that a nation could only be measured by its homes resonated back to the American Revolution, yet it resonated with particular intensity in the immediate postwar years. The Whittier News in California sounded a familiar call when it claimed in a building booster insert that, “history proves that the decay of a nation begins with the decay of the home.” The same paper quoted Jacob Riis, progressive housing reformer, as saying, “American citizenship in the long run will be, must be, what the American home is.”280

This notion drove the work of all home ownership advocates in 1919 and into the early 1920s, and the OYOH officials at the Department of Labor hoped their intervention would promote stability locally and nationally. James Ford, manager of the Home

Registration and Information Division and future Executive Director of the Better Homes

278 Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home, (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1912), printed in The Suburban Reader, 2006, p199. 279 Breckenridge, New Homes for Old, p71. 280 Whittier News, May 8, 1919, Box 1, California, Publicity, OYOH, NARA.

150 in America movement, issued a memo explaining in sharp detail the negative effects of inadequate housing. This memo went to all chairmen, managers, members of committees, and field agents of the United States Home Registration Service.281

Ford articulated his government branch‟s expanding belief that poor housing broke down social values and prevented a solid base of citizens from investing in the welfare of the community. Cities without good housing options garnered “bad reputations,” and failed to attract both industry and the “better type of families.” In cities like this, the streets would be dirty, and the risk for fire would increase. A “migratory spirit” amongst working men in such cities would hinder the development of “civic pride” and the

“acquisition of American ideals.” These workers, unanchored to place or national ideals, would thus develop an unstable family life. Families without private homes experienced

“strained family relations” and “high infant mortality.” Juvenile delinquency would increase, and, Ford argued, “immorality” would rise. Edith Wood concurred, arguing that Americans experienced the social consequences of crowding during the housing crisis. She cited the rise of illegitimate births as evidence of her assertion.282

Most important in 1919, the government believed that the instability caused by poor housing created maladjusted, unruly workers and citizens. Inadequate housing created problems for both workers and employers. Without stable, private homes, workers suffered loss of wages, higher instances of sickness, and lower efficiency. They generally dealt with more personal issues, contributing to a “weakened morale of labor forces,” and “strikes and labor trouble.” Employers, therefore, endured “lower vitality of

281 This memo went out on June 10, 1919 to the Home Registration Service because Ford‟s section had taken over the remainder of the OYOH Section‟s work by June 1st, 1919. See the close of the chapter for further information. 282 Ibid; Wood, Recent Trends, p85.

151 workers,” less desirable workers, and “frequent absences.” On the national level, Ford claimed, these localized issues translated into a “waste” of manpower and national wealth. Citizenship would be inadequate. The lack of widespread home ownership after the war would bring “industrial discontent and social unrest.”283 The ripple affect of inadequate housing was expansive.

The belief in government circles that homes and families affected the consciousness of working men rested on more than local observations. Of course, the Russian situation provided an unforgettable illustration of the relationship between social order and home life. Famed Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai would write a few short months later in

Communism and the Family, “The capitalists themselves are not unaware of the fact that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well- being of the family, that the family of this type is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort toward liberty…Worry for his family takes the backbone out of the worker.”284

The OYOH movement hoped as much. Supporting movement hopes, in his book The

Psychology of Bolshevism, John Spargo identified the link between workers and homes.

Specifically addressing the growth of the Industrial Workers of the World, prominent in western mining and lumber towns where men could not gain citizenship or maintain families without a place to call home, Spargo argued that capitalists benefited from the rootlessness of these men‟s lives. However, rootlessness discouraged good citizenship.

The capitalist system did not want “men with civic ideals,” Spargo claimed, rather it

283 Memorandum from James Ford to Chairmen, Managers, Members of Committees, and Field Agents of the U.S. Housing Registration Service, June 10, 1919, Box 6, Miscellaneous, OYOH, NARA. 284 Alexandra Kollantai, Communism and the Family, (New York: Contemporary Publishing Association, 1920), p17.

152 wanted “men content...without home and family life.”285 Tying homes and families to the actualization of citizenship, Spargo revealed what he saw as the very necessity of a solid home life to the durability of capitalism and Americanism. Whether one was for or against Bolshevism, most believed the home acted as a foundation for order and class stability in America.

The act of buying a home represented the worker‟s embrace of capitalism and his disregard of Bolshevism and other radical doctrines. An investment in private property, a home, gave men something to hold on to, something to lose. In the California home ownership campaign, a Western movement leader claimed “No man will hoist the red flag over the home he has paid for; it is the antidote to Bolshevikism.”286 A few years later, in a home ownership manual produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce, then

Secretary Herbert Hoover explained that a home owner worked “harder outside his home,” linking productivity and motivation in the workplace to one‟s ownership status.

Men and women who owned homes perpetuated capitalism outright, according to

Hoover, as they had “an interest in the advancement of a social system that permits the individual to store up the fruits of his labor.”287 Movement leaders viewed home ownership as a physical, economic, and social anchor for the working man‟s family, and as a boon to the working man‟s drive to work at all. Home ownership was capitalism and patriarchy embodied in a set of rooms, mortgage payments, and a permanent address.

285John Spargo, “Why the I.W.W. Flourishes,” World‟s Work, Vol 39 (January, 1920), pp243-247, p.245. This article came from his larger work, The Psychology of Bolshevism, which, along with Spargo himself, receives a more thorough introduction in Chapter One. 286 Newspaper clipping from the Tulare Advance, May 12, 1919 Box 1, California, OYOH, NARA. Quotation is from Fred E Reed. 287 John M. Cries and James S. Taylor, Preparers, A Handbook for Prospective Home Owners. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923), pv, in foreward by Herbert Hoover.

153

Some proponents of home ownership linked its practice to battling Bolshevism in more targeted ways throughout 1919, playing directly on the popularly understood notion that radicalism threatened family life. In a particularly striking and demonstrative example, Reverend Doctor James Gordon, pastor at First Congregational Church in

Washington, D.C., denounced “anti-home, anti-morality, anti-marriage-Bolshevism” from his pulpit in a speech he called “Bolshevism, Debs and 1920.” In this April 1919 sermon, Gordon set out to criticize Eugene Debs, who would, a week later, begin his prison sentence for violating the Espionage Act in 1918. Accusing Debs of trying to spread a “false thought wave” throughout the United States, Gordon identified a general wave of unrest with Bolshevism specifically, and pushed citizens to suppress radicalism in the 1920 elections. Most significantly here, Gordon announced that there was a way to

“safeguard America from Bolshevism,” aside from keeping men like Debs behind bars.

“Let every man, even the poorest, own a home,” he said. And, “if he is unable to buy one, let the government loan the money to him.”

Something essential in Bolshevism itself, in its disavowal of private property and its marriage codes, made some envision home ownership as its antidote. The OYOH

Section never intended to loan men money to buy houses, an act that would border on socialism itself, but they did happily notice Gordon‟s endorsement of their aims. Hattie

Stein, of the Division of Advertising, passed on a clipping from the Washington Herald detailing Gordon‟s speech to Terry O‟Donnell to demonstrate the fruits of their pervasive publicity campaign.288 One day later the clipping made its way to Paul C. Murphy, who

288 Memo from Hattie Stern to Jerry O‟Donnell, April 7, 1919, enclosed with clipping from newspaper of same date. She writes Jerry, though his name is Terry. Box 461, Publicity, OYOH, NARA.

154 then wrote directly to Gordon to thank him for his cooperation with the ideas of the movement. Murphy thanked the Reverend for pointing out the “owning of homes as a means of safeguarding the American people from the evils of Bolshevism.” Murphy then informed Gordon of their work, implying that Gordon had no prior personal contact with the OYOH section. Thus, the notion that home owning somehow combated the anti- family overtones inherent in radicalism stretched beyond the offices of the Department of

Labor.289

Average Americans digested the patriotic message of the OYOH movement and agreed. One Housing Corporation officer revealed this in a series of letters he read before Congress in a bid to secure more funding for the campaign. Mr. K.V. Haymaker read aloud a plea for aid from a Brooklyn man, one which was “simply a sample of literally hundreds of letters from individuals that have come to my desk in the last few months,” he explained.290 This member of the “low-salaried class” wished to own his own home, but like so many others, he confronted impassable difficulties in the high cost of materials and in the difficulty obtaining a mortgage. When this working man caught wind of a possible bill in Congress to make credit flow more easily to home owners and builders, he felt inclined to write to the Housing Corporation to ask “what is the

Government doing for the small man in this housing crisis?” Keenly aware of both the current environment of unrest and of the degree of government regulation active during wartime, this Brooklyn home seeker dramatically revealed the depth of his dissatisfaction

289 Letter from Paul C Murphy to Rev. Dr. James Gordon, April 8, 1919. Box 461, Publicity, OYOH, NARA. 290Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency of the House of Representatives on the Federal Building Loan Act (H.R. 7597), Friday October 31, 1919, Sixty-sixth Congress, First Session. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p22.

155 and sense of injustice. He wrote, “I am a Republican and my wife is Republican, but we are only two of many hundreds of thousands of Republicans, Democrats, and others who will turn Socialists, Bolsheviki, or any thing if conditions in this country are not remedied. The Government controlled things during war time, why can‟t they do something for the lower classes now?”291

In similar fashion, representatives of the labor movement proffered a causal relationship between home ownership and social order, through the development of content, efficient workers. Immediately after the armistice, at the National Housing

Association‟s national conference on Housing Problems in America, Matthew Woll, assistant to Samuel Gompers in his capacity as Chairman of the Committee of Labor in the Council of National Defense, articulated labor leaders‟ own concerns about the ill effects of inadequate, unsanitary and unaffordable housing for workers. He too argued that “the ownership of a home, free from the grasp of exploiting and speculative interest, will make for a more efficient worker, a more contented and happy family, and a better citizen.” Woll suggested the government offer credit to workers and offer tax incentives to promote building and buying by working men.292

Perhaps more than any capitalist or middle class reformer, labor representatives knew the dangers of discontented workers without homes to ground them, both personally and politically. At the same conference Edward F. McGrady, State Superintendent of the

U.S. Employment Bureau in Boston, explained to his fellow participants that while traditionally, housing existed as a secondary concern for workers trying just to earn

291 Ibid, p22. 292 Housing Problems in America: Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on Housing, Boston, November 25-27, 1918. (New York: National Housing Association, 1918), p198-199.

156 enough to “keep body and soul together for themselves and their families,” with rising wages many working men were becoming “ambitious.”293 Acutely aware of the social and political context of the war and its immediate aftermath, McGrady forewarned his listeners, saying, “we hear a great deal of talk about Reconstruction. We hear a great deal of talk about the Bolsheviki across the water. There is nothing that will create that kind of a movement in America more than to make the workers dissatisfied, more than to make them discouraged with the present conditions of living.”294 Preventing access to home ownership might make working men doubt the very validity of the American

Dream. McGrady believed in the postwar period workers might fight for more than just the bare minimum, that they might reach for “more dignified lives” having realized through the war the sheer importance of their labor.

The raised expectations of laborers actually presented a little acknowledged challenge to the axiomatic argument of home boosters who believed that ownership bred conservatism in workers. Logically, the vast majority of home ownership organizations and leaders claimed, men who owned homes for their families had too much to lose by participating in labor and political unrest. Yet, journalist Mary Heaton Vorse found the very opposite to be true in her investigation of the highly publicized steel strike of 1919, itself a trigger for much Red Scare anxiety. In the fall of that year, Americans witnessed three spectacular strikes, and organized labor helped firm up national suspicions of a radical conspiracy at home. Just a few weeks after 1117 of Boston‟s 1544 policemen walked off the job, the nationwide steel strike began, followed by a national coal strike.

293 Housing Problems in America, 1918, p302 and p297. Comments by Eward F. McGrady, State Superintendent U.S. Employment Bureau, Boston. 294 Ibid, p299-300.

157

By the close of the first week, some 365,000 AFL steel workers walked off the job. The strike lasted until from September of 1919 to January of 1920, and resulted in failure for the strikers.295 But it greatly affected the national mood.

Interestingly, as Vorse investigated “behind the picket lines” during the strike in Ohio, she found that among the Slovaks she met, home ownership provided workers with more to stand up for. The steel town neighborhood her Slovak host lived in struck her as

“lately built,” demonstrating, in her view, “the modern impulse toward better housing.”296

The striking workers in Ohio stayed out to stake a claim for opportunity for their children. Vorse acknowledged that the “strike technically concerns the right of organization, hours and conditions,” but the source of these issues “will lead you back to a home and a woman sitting in it.” The basis for the strike could be found in a “father and mother [who] are such good Americans that they are willing to risk everything so that these boys shall live in a more American way.”297 Amongst these steel strikers, home ownership signaled rising aspirations, which potentially increased rather than depressed labor militancy. But Vorse‟s opinions were not widely shared, at least not among those shaping housing policy.298

The home ownership movement did garner outright critics, though again, this criticism was less prominent than the advertisements of the OYOH Section and other groups like it. One labor newspaper editor caused a splash amongst OYOH Section leaders when he challenged the wisdom of working men taking on debt for mortgages, casting aspersions

295Murray, p.122-165. 296 Mary Heaton Vorse. “Behind the Picket Line: The Story of a Slovak Steel Striker—How He Lives and Thinks.” Outlook, January 21, 1920, p107. 297 Ibid, p109. 298 Ron Rothbart. “„Homes Are What Any Strike is About‟: Immigrant Labor and the Family Wage,” Journal of Social History 32 (Winter 1989): 267-84, p272.

158 on the integrity of the OYOH campaign. The Progressive Labor World, a Philadelphia paper, carried an editorial calling the movement a plan to swindle working men out of money. The editor explained that the cost of building materials and labor increased during the war, and real estate speculators were trying to make Americans buy at these higher prices before prices fell to pre-wartime levels. Not only did this gouge working men, but when prices went down, these home owners would owe more than their homes were worth, leading to foreclosure. The Progressive Labor World editor‟s real problem lay with the patriotic veneer of the OYOH movement, however. Home boosters had “the audacity to pretend that it is a public-spirited movement,” he argued, as they “pretend” they are trying to make “better citizens of these alleged home owners.” Instead, he claimed, “they are merely enslaving them into false inflated valuations by tying unwarranted mortgages around their necks.” The editor sounded the call to end the “Own

Your Own Home” robbery” and its strategic patriotic motivations.299

The publication of this editorial touched off a flurry of reaction within the OYOH

Section, as officials worried over the impact it might have on working men particularly.

Letters flew back and forth between the Section office in Washington, D.C. and the

Philadelphia Committee‟s headquarters, who forwarded the article on to the Assistant to the Secretary of Labor.300 But OYOH officials believed their program could provide contentment and happiness to workers, and the opposition only made them surer of their work. Paul Murphy, OYOH Section Director, wrote to O‟Donnell to say, “this article is a very strong endorsement, in my opinion, as to the importance of the “Own Your Own

299 Editorial, The Progressive Labor World, Philadelphia, PA, April 4, 1919. 300 Letter from Terry O‟Donnell, Dept of Labor, Information and Education Service to Thomas F. Egan, Jr, April 8, 1919, Box 5, Philadelphia, OYOH, NARA.

159

Home” campaign. One can see that this article flows from a diseased mind of a very ordinary Bolsheviki—and should encourage us to put more energy and enthusiasm into this campaign.” Furthermore, Murphy assured O‟Donnell that after interacting with workers all his life, he was certain that “there is no class of people who are as hungry for their own homes as the laboring classes…In my judgment, they will turn a very deaf ear to the ordinary Bolsheviki “Soap-Box Orator” opposing that very desire which would make them more independent and contented.”301 In Murphy‟s estimation independence and contentment fostered responsibility and order.

The belief that homeownership offered pathways to stability and to the valuation of labor by working men themselves endured, as evidenced in the report from President

Hoover‟s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, called in 1931 after the start of the depression. Two prominent housing experts, John M. Gries, Executive

Secretary of the Conference, and James Taylor, Chief of the Division of Building and

Housing, U.S. Department of Commerce, analyzed the power of home ownership on a man, claiming the home-owner to be “master of his dwelling.” As master, “he cannot be ordered to vacate, and the rent cannot be raised. He can make alterations as he sees fit,” and most importantly, “his family feels a sense of security, and finds a stimulant in earning and saving to pay for the home and in making it attractive.”302 A decade later, in another era of upheaval, these home ownership proponents still envisioned homes as spurs to better working men, and as agents of social order.

301 Letter from Paul C Murphy to Terry O‟Donnell, April 15, 1919, Box 5, Oregon, OYOH, NARA. 302 Halbert, ed, p7.

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“The man who owns a home is a 100 per-cent man”: postwar constructions of the breadwinning citizen

As reformers and government officials revitalized the power of home ownership, they also restructured the male citizenship model for working men to emphasize patriotic breadwinning. Really, the success of the home ownership campaign relied on the success of the patriarchal model. OYOH boosters posited the ownership of private property as a distinct reward for the conscientious breadwinner‟s hard work and eagerness to provide for his family. Home ownership, in this equation, ignited men‟s desire to work hard, in order to protect and provide. This breadwinner status embodied men‟s citizenship role after the war for native born American and immigrant workers alike.

This version of manly citizenship rooted in the home offered men a virile, patriotic identity during the late stages of tremendous economic and social shifts, ones that lessened men‟s ability to find this in their place of work. For decades men were losing their sense of pride and connectedness in work that became industrialized and increasingly bureaucratic. In the 1920s, social scientists, educators and advertisers would push middle class salaried workers to ameliorate economic and political change by fulfilling their masculinity at home, as consumers and as fathers and husbands.303 But right after the war, home ownership boosters focused on skilled and unskilled working men particularly. The OYOH Section and those connected to it articulated a citizenship role for men that encouraged them to follow a scripted set of gender norms as masculine

303 Susan M. Ross, ed. American Families Past and Present. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p22.

161 breadwinners, but, as breadwinners who challenged Bolshevism and working class unrest.

Americans envisioned home ownership as part of a distinctly national aspiration, a dream available to all who worked hard. Owning a home entrenched the worker in the capitalist system, no doubt. But the process by which he became entrenched represented a set of capitalist, American values that OYOH supporters celebrated. Why would no man “hoist a red flag over the home he has paid for,” as that Western OYOH booster phrased it? The answer lay in the construction of the male citizenship model put forth by

OYOH officials.

Home boosters framed the ideals of patriotic Americanism with the equal access opportunities inherent in the capitalist system. A movement tagline printed in The Dallas

Dispatch illustrated the assumptions behind the ideal postwar male citizenship model;

“Bolshevism will never get very far in a land where any man who is willing to WORK and SAVE may readily become a HOME owner.”304 A fair and just system, like

American capitalism, the tagline implied, rewarded the worker with material comfort for himself and his family, and what worker would overthrow that system? In another instance, editors of The Whittier News in California claimed the right to own homes was a distinctly American right, one men should appreciate. They claimed, “few Americans really appreciate the privilege of owning real estate—a right denied many citizens of other countries, with exception of gentry or nobility.” These boosters exhorted men to

“do your duty, exercise the right of every American citizen—build a home.”305

304 Dallas Dispatch, Box 6, Texas, OYOH, NARA. 305 Whittier News, May 8, 1919, Box 1, California, Publicity, OYOH, NARA.

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Men‟s successful performance of their gender roles, in both a private and public setting, depended on their ability and willingness to provide for their families.

Advertising copy distributed by the National Lumber Association in Chicago called out to men, “Do Your Duty By Your Family.” “If you are a real citizen,” the organization goaded, “you want some time to own your own home. You will not have done your full duty by your family until you have given them a home. All over the country men are realizing more and more that this is one of their first duties to their country and their loved ones.”306 Suddenly, the act of purchasing property and taking out a mortgage defined the parameters of manliness and citizenship.

The Own Your Own Home campaign made direct and overt links between true and effective citizenship and breadwinning in widely published advertisements, in newspaper and magazine articles, and on posters plastered in windows all over American cities and towns. A poster from the Philadelphia campaign laid it on thick, placing a sketch of a man above the headline, “The Man Who Owns His Home—is a better—worker— husband—father—citizen and a real American.” Any identity or role a man aspired to occupy could be accomplished through home owning. And this stress on being a “real”

American underscored the notion that in 1919, not all men living in America could make claims to citizenship.

By taking on and cultivating dependency, OYOH campaign directors explained, men could attain the highest degree of American manhood. A Philadelphia campaign poster demonstrated the direct appeal to men‟s sense of conscious pride in their masculinity. “It should be a matter of personal pride with you to own your home,” publicity writers

306 Advertisement by the National Lumber Association, Chicago, IL. Box 2, Illinois, NARA, OYOH.

163 insisted, “Pride—in your proved ability…Pride—in the ownership of real property, an ownership that places you among the bigger men of your community. A home-owner is a marked man—marked in letters that can‟t be missed—“Success.”307 The Dallas Gas

Company, in their own self-interested advertisement, insisted that home ownership would inflate a man‟s opinion of himself, beyond his standing in the community, saying “it will

STIFFEN your CHARACTER, build up CONFIDENCE in yourself, add to your SELF-

RESPECT—and make you FEEL like a MAN!”308 And in an era when “100 per-centers” symbolized loyal, native born Americanism, a San Francisco citizen‟s newsletter headline shouted, “The man who owns a home is a 100 per-cent man.”309 These home building boosters offered men a way to stake a personal claim on success and on successful manhood.

Congress even enforced this patriotic masculinity when divesting the Housing

Corporation of its wartime holdings later that year. Representatives in the House agreed that any man who wished to buy property from the Housing Corporation had to meet several criteria. According to Arkansas Representative Thaddeus Caraway, any sale by the Secretary of the Treasury had to be “to a citizen of the United States,” to a man “who is the head of a family, and to one only who can show by satisfactory evidence that he is law-abiding, industrious, and patriotic,” and that he “intends to occupy said premises with his family.” Other Congressmen sought clarifications of the term “head of a family.” Representative John E. Raker of California pointed out that a family head might

307 Poster “The Man Who Owns His Home,” Own Your Own Home Committee, Philadelphia, PA, , Box 5, PA, OYOH, NARA. 308 The Dallas Dispatch, April 5, 1919, Box 6, OYOH, NARA. 309 Citizen’s Report, San Francisco, May 12, 1919, Box 461 Publicity of Home Ownership Campaign, OYOH, NARA.

164 not be married, but rather, he “might be a man whose wife may be dead, or he has brothers and sisters, or a mother and father, or other relatives living with him, dependent upon him.” Raker wanted to be sure that while “a single man or a single woman” would be prohibited from buying property from the government, a condition all agreed upon, those in the categories he mentioned would still be allowed. These Congressmen privileged patriotism and heterosexual marriage, and in certain circumstances, they privileged unmarried men who were willing to take on the burdens of dependency.310

By providing dependents, most often women, with homes of their own, men could bolster patriarchal power and male control in marriages. The Bank of California in

Portland, Oregon asked the question “Why should every married man own his home?” In the publicity article that followed, the Bank asserted that first, a married man should own a home “to give his wife a chance to make a home, which is the natural desire of the normal woman.” Giving the wife a “chance” to make this home would then, secondly,

“supply his family with an environment where paternal love and devotion may have ample room.” Women and the children which would naturally follow would love and obey the breadwinner who built them such a home. As usual, these very personal reasons for home ownership, meant to appeal to men‟s desire for pride and power, directly linked to reasons of importance “from the national standpoint.” Children and families needed safe homes, and, according to the Bank of California who would be loaning the money for these endeavors, the “future of our country depends” on it.311

310 Congressional Record, House of Representatives, December 17, 1919, p777-778. 311 Article draft by The Bank of California, Portland, Oregon, nd. Box 5, Oregon, OYOH, NARA.

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Reformers also did the work of cementing men‟s responsibilities to their families when they cultivated men‟s patriotic duties as breadwinners. Throughout the Progressive

Era, leading up to the postwar period, the newly developing family court system acted on a national anxiety over men “slacking” on their duties as breadwinners. Courts worked to criminalize the desertion of women and children by men, in efforts to mediate concerns about an expanding welfare state and mothers‟ pensions. 312

Fear of men shirking their duties to dependents was longstanding then, by the time the influence of the Russian Revolution reached American shores. This breadwinner citizen role directly contradicted popular images of Bolshevik men demonstrated in the first chapter, men portrayed as shiftless and lazy, dependent on the government, and eager to shrug off the dependence of their families. American home owners, celebrated by home boosters, welcomed the dependency of their families. In fact, their citizenship was defined by it.

The breadwinner citizen depicted so frequently in OYOH literature always appeared with a dependent wife. Home ownership proponents never pictured a man moving into a home by himself. A wife, one who reveled in consumer culture, always stood by his side.

It is worth noting that she never moved into a home on her own either. OYOH advertisements strengthened a gender trope for women based on their roles as consumers, as individuals who needed things from men to be happy. Headlines in block print claimed, “Her greatest desire—she will never be happy until she has a home of her own.

Hardly a day passes that she does not think of her home, as she would have it.” In

312 Michael Willrich. “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” in the Journal of American History, Vol 87, No 2.

166 another OYOH advertisement, a sketch of a young woman hugging a miniature sized house appeared with the line, “Make her happier—build a home first,” as “the Home is the fortress of domestic happiness.”313

In the following years, the Better Homes in America movement appealed directly to women‟s domestic instincts, exploiting deeply ingrained connections between women and the private domestic realm. President Calvin Coolidge praised the movement for its ability to tap into what he called the “intuition of woman.” This was fruitful because “her first thought is always of the home, her first care is for its provision.”314 The local activities of the BHA also reinforced the ancillary role of women in the home.

Demonstration committees engaged young people in the home ownership movement using a model for “civic effectiveness” created by teacher Elizabeth Carlisle of Port

Huron, Michigan. Carlisle held essay contests, had children study housing plans, and ultimately put her junior high school boys to work in the actual construction of demonstration houses. She specifically noted that “because home-makers are so closely associated with womanhood, girls were given places upon all of the Better Homes committees which had to do with the beauty and equipment of the home.”315

Enticing men to build homes by appealing to their desire and need to please their wives worked as a conscious strategy in the OYOH campaign. The Southern Pine

Association, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, created a large collection of advertising copy and offered it free of charge to other campaigns in other cities. The image of a

313OYOH advertising copy for posters, billboards and slides for sale from the Southern Pine Association, 1919, Box 6 Publicity, OYOH, NARA. 314 Better Homes in America. Plan Book for Demonstration Week, October 9 to 14, 1922. (New York: The Delineator, 1922), p5. 315 Elizabeth Carlisle. Why and How to Teach Civic Effectiveness as Illustrated by School Participation in the Community Better Homes Campaign, (Washington, DC: Better Homes in America, 1923), p11.

167 woman hugging a tiny house struck them forcefully as a perfect trademark for their own local effort. They sold the breadwinner ethic by enticing men with the image of a happy dependent housewife. In a publicity piece for their advertising copy, the Association noted that “each advertisement tells a different sentimental story…We have placed the picture of the girl-in-the-circle in each of the advertisements because we believe it will make an effective campaign trademark.” This strategy would work because men all over town would see these images, on posters and in print, and would thus be “reminded of their need for a home.”316

Officials‟ anxiety about the need to fix the roles of male breadwinners and dependent female housewives stemmed in part because of the success of the Russian Revolution.

Officials undoubtedly feared charges of paternalism and socialism when they received letters written by women asking the government for money to buy homes. Men wrote letters with great frequency, requesting loans to buy or build, and the OYOH Section expended much energy responding to each one. OYOH officials encouraged these men to contact their local offices for information on local savings and loan companies. But men asking for money to be better breadwinners seemed less problematic than women appealing directly to the government for subsidies to buy homes. This edged dangerously close to communism, where many Americans believed that women and all citizens depended on the government and not on patriarchal breadwinners.

Women also struggled to achieve the idealized family life promoted by the OYOH movement. Mrs. Dorothea Petterson, a married woman from Chicago wrote in response

316 OYOH advertising copy for posters, billboards and slides for sale from the Southern Pine Association, 1919, Box 6 Publicity, OYOH, NARA.

168 to Secretary Wilson‟s public wish to see every “wage worker own his own home.”

Petterson asked Wilson if he had “taken up this matter,” and if he really planned to “take it in hands to help the poor people.” Begging him not to throw away her letter, she asked if Wilson could let her know “if there will in the future my long long dream come true,” a dream to own a home, one she wanted the government to purchase. “It certainly would be a great thing if the Government would,” she gushed.317 Another woman, a mother from Jersey City, wrote to Secretary Wilson. Aware of the “patriotism of building now” thanks to the many advertisements she saw, Mrs. H.W. Steever worried that both she and many others like her would be unable to do so without government help. Struggling to pay rent, deal with disreputable landlords, and raise “our babies up in a scientific manner” proved too difficult to bear, and “there are so many other young mothers in a like predicament,” she wrote.

The welfare of the family took precedence for these women, above the need to firmly install male citizens as breadwinners through their purchase of homes. Steever sharply perceived the government‟s inconsistent approach to lending money to needy citizens, noting that farmers were loaned money to promote their work. Turning the discourse of the OYOH campaign back around on the government, she asked, “What is more important than housing the present generation in sunny comfortable homes? Homes that will eliminate a good deal of needless drudgery and are built for the welfare of the mothers and babies.”318 Paul C. Murphy responded to Mrs. Steever, agreeing that the government did help farmers, informing her that a possible “project” was in the works

317 Letter from Dorothea Petterson to Secretary Wilson, March 21, 1919, Box 2 Illinois, OYOH, NARA. 318 Letter from Mrs. HW Steever to Seceretary WB Wilson, April 4, 1919, Box 3 New Jersey, OYOH, NARA.

169 which would allow the government to lend money to “prospective home owners.”

Murphy thanked her for her letter, claiming that the OYOH section earnestly tried “to make home ownership easy and profitable for a great many people and we appreciate letters from thinking women like yourself who have an eye for the future and the welfare of their family at heart.”319

As OYOH boosters of all kinds idealized the family man who owned a home, in reality, few had “the welfare” of those families at heart. Some found motivation in the desire to spur the housing market, others in the impulse to forestall Bolshevism and unrest. But all bolstered patriarchal power within homes in their efforts to encourage home ownership. The reasons for this connection on the smallest level are perhaps obvious. Families acted as localized centers of social control, and the male head of household, if a docile and efficient worker and loyal citizen, supported national stability in the postwar moment. Owned homes buttressed this process.

The moment for government sponsored home ownership campaigns passed somewhat quickly, for the OYOH Section flourished in a transitional period, established after the war but benefiting from the bureaucracy built during the war, before Congress started to dismantle the wartime state with vigor. Ultimately Congress squashed the hopes of reformers like Edith Elmer Wood and the hopes of men and women working in the

OYOH Section itself. The Home Loan Bank Bill, a plan to increase the flow of credit, backed by the federal government, failed to make it to the debating floor that year. In the meantime, Congress cut off appropriations for the OYOH Section and for wartime

319 Letter from Paul C Murphy to Mrs. W.H. Steever, April 11, 1919, Box 3 New Jersey, OYOH, NARA.

170 housing work in general. Paul C. Murphy noted in a report that government backing garnered the movement “great prestige,” but that across the board cuts to Sections and

Divisions of the Department of Labor meant that his Section could no longer operate effectively. He expressed hope that Congress might appropriate funds in the coming session, but in the meantime, at the start of June 1919, all leftover materials and unfinished business were moved under the purview of the Housing Corporation, another

Section of the Department of Labor and the original housing agency set up by Congress during the war.320 And, support for the Housing Corporation was fading too.

This effectively spelled the end of federal involvement in encouraging home ownership in the postwar period; the government left the housing business until the

1930s. While funding for the OYOH Section and the Housing Corporation ended, other efforts continued. The Better Homes in America movement, always a civilian agency largely run by women, enjoyed the benefits of government sponsorship throughout the

1920s, but not outright financial or supervisory support. While the popularity of the movement grew, and as demonstration weeks brought millions of Americans into contact with ideal homes, the movement produced few tangible results. On its own the BHA built no permanent homes for workers. 321

One can not accurately gauge the influence of demonstration weeks in creating better homes, or of the OYOH movement on American workers. Between 1921 and 1928, after recovering from postwar housing instability, the United States did experience an as yet

320 Report of Activities in the Own Your Own Home Section of the Division of Public Works and Construction Development, US Department of Labor Information and Education Service, Paul C Murphy, Director, OYOH Section. May 1, 1919. Box 6, Report. OYOH, NARA. 321 Hutchison, p96. By the early 1930s the number of committees around the country reached several thousand.

171 unparalleled housing boom. The number of new homes being built skyrocketed from under five hundred thousand to just about a million per year in 1925 and 1926, with construction all around the country. By contrast, in the three years between 1917 and

1920 fewer than one million homes were built. Housing construction surged, thanks in part to the war produced shortage, but also due to increases in non-farm populations as people both immigrated and migrated to cities, the stabilization of building costs, relatively high employment, and increased automobile ownership. Generous mortgage lending practices helped matters even though the structure of borrowing was risky, with the common practice of short term renewable mortgage loans coupled with high interest rate secondary mortgages.322 In a trend continued from previous years, most new construction focused on single family dwellings. Throughout the decade white

Americans enjoyed the most unfettered access to communities and to mortgage money.323

And, while the number of apartment houses rose, between 1921 and 1928, for the first time since 1880, the number of home owners increased at a higher rate than the number of renters.324

These tangibles, the end of the housing shortage, the increase in home ownership, only tell part of the story of the movement encouraging working men to buy homes for their families. The federal OYOH campaign, and the civilian programs built around it, boosted the housing market and capitalist Americanism by stimulating the desire of working men to provide for their families, to attain successful manliness and good

322 Doan, p28-30. 323 Doan, p33. 324 Doan, p31.

172 citizenship. Many men bought homes, although for most unskilled workers that dream remained elusive.

So, while it may be difficult to accurately gauge the influence of these programs, it is undoubtedly crucial to our understanding of the history of the family to recognize these federally sponsored OYOH movements for their expansion of the social significance of the home, particularly in response to domestic labor unrest and Bolshevism abroad.

When officials promoted private, home centered family life as a panacea for working class men, they expressed the conviction that home owning acted as a form of social control, tying men to family and community and thus preventing radical consciousness.

Furthermore, the campaign constructed a male citizenship model based on breadwinning and women‟s dependency, simultaneously negating the growing clamor for women‟s independence and disavowing the dependency associated with Bolshevist doctrines.

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Chapter Four Getting “Personal and Intimate”: The Americanization of Immigrant Family and Sexual Values

As we have seen, in 1919 housing reformer Edith Elmer Wood argued that “no nation can rise higher than the level of its homes.” 325 Her belief, one widely shared, suggested that Americans placed a great deal of faith in the utility of the home to keep the country strong. That faith relied on more than the physical space afforded by the private single family dwelling popularized so vigorously in the postwar years. Americans believed the culture of home life could affect good citizenship and good morals. This function of the home appealed to reformers of all political persuasions working in Americanization.

Well furnished and well planned homes needed to be inhabited by stable families, capable of regulating themselves as a social and political unit. Again, here, family life functioned as a tool for those wishing to stabilize the country and to fend off the social values associated with radicalism.

In the nativist 1920s, immigrants inhabited an oppositional space in American culture, right along with working class radicals and middle class sex radicals. While historically, immigrants held tightly to the family group, using it to mediate the harsh realities of their new urban, industrial lives, both conservative and liberal reformers acted to shape the culture of that family life in ways they believed best served the nation and immigrants themselves. Americanization workers identified the culture of immigrant homes as a

325 Edith Elmer Wood. The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner: America’s Next Problem. (New York: MacMillan Company, 1919), p238-256.

174 fertile and productive space to assimilate the foreign born and their children to American values and behaviors. In fact, in comparison to the workplace, the other primary site of

Americanization efforts, many believed the culture of the home, through access to women, offered avenues for deeper, more fundamental transformation.

Rising middle class anxieties about the strength of the family and about young people‟s sexuality inflected Americanization efforts, as middle class reformers problematized the same things in working class immigrant homes. Social workers in

International Institutes, spawned from the Young Women‟s Christian Association, identified the tension between immigrant mothers and their daughters as a primary threat to the integrity of immigrant homes. They created programs to cultivate understanding between the two, hoping to further Americanize the mother while also regulating the behavior of the daughter. Settlement leaders at the United Neighborhood Houses joined

Institute workers in their concern for the morals of immigrants‟ children. Taking a more direct approach, the UNH provided sex education as an assimilative tool, one that acknowledged and yet accommodated sexual modernism.

Americanization by progressive reformers in the 1920s was a movement for cultural conformity, deployed through a regulation of family life. These social workers and patriotic reformers stressed American values over old world values in their efforts to stabilize the immigrant family. At stake in this project was the smooth assimilation of working people in a period marked by fears of radical unrest, the financial solvency of immigrant households, however meager, and the force of social control that a well functioning, happy family life exerted over wage earning men, protective mothers, and potentially problematic children of foreign born parents.

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Beyond Macaroni and Lace: Americanizing the Home

In 1921 social welfare activist and researcher Sophonisba Breckinridge published New

Homes for Old, a study in which she addressed the difficulties immigrant women and their families faced adjusting to life in the United States. Her analysis of case work and records of contact with many “new” immigrant housewives and mothers was the sixth volume in the expansive Carnegie Americanization Study funded by the Carnegie

Corporation after the war. With her contribution to the series Breckinridge hoped to identify and publicize avenues of social support for struggling families. Emphasizing the costs of the transition from old world standards to new ones, she analyzed relationships between husbands, wives, parents and children, care of the home, diet, and family finances. Breckinridge studied the family in the context of Americanization, specifically, hoping to “make the immigrant home an integral part of the domestic development of this country.”326

In this, as in her prior work, Breckinridge argued that difficulties in immigrants‟ lives stemmed from their environment. Researching and writing for over two decades, by

1921, much of her progressive work focused on women, children, and immigrants. In

1912, with Edith Abbott, she published The Delinquent Child and the Home, a study of the causes and structural treatment of juvenile crime. Breckinridge found that that most juvenile criminals were children of immigrants, yet in this and later works she stressed that this stemmed from environmental, cultural causes. Issues like delinquency and

326 Sophonisba Breckinridge. New Homes for Old, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921), p17.

176 truancy existed because of social forces largely beyond the control of immigrants themselves, and not from any inherent racial characteristics.327 Breckenridge‟s belief in the cultural roots of immigrants‟ problems and her zeal for social welfare reform framed her approach to her volume on Americanization studies.

In the 1920s, this cultural approach typified the Americanization efforts of many liberal reformers. The tumult of the war and the Red Scare indelibly marked

Americanization as a movement, popularizing coercive programs and eugenic thinking.

But social workers and progressive reformers continued to champion democratic methods over coercion and environmental theories over racial ones, in their efforts to change immigrants‟ lives. In the settlement tradition, these Americanizers looked to the possibilities for transformation in the private sphere, in the relationships and values that ruled immigrant homes.

Americanization efforts, including ones focused on the immigrant home as a vehicle for change, emerged with organization and purpose first in the 1890s. Earlier in the nineteenth century, most Americans worried little over the process of foreigners becoming American. Some certainly developed nativist anger, articulating a defensive response to immigrants‟ presence on American shores, but most assumed the transformative power of education and experience would make aliens proper Americans in due time. At the turn of the century, though, in a decade marked by a deep depression, particularly in urban, industrial centers, two competing impulses developed in response to immigration.

327 Ellen Fitzpatrick. Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p183-199.

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Workers in settlement houses, which rapidly rose in number around the turn of the century, recognized the plight of immigrants and acted to alleviate some of their suffering, to temper their sense of alienation. In Hull House in Chicago and in other cities middle class reformers, mostly women, opened their doors to immigrants as a way of familiarizing them with their new country. Workers tried to celebrate the gifts these groups brought to American from the old world, at the same time. Many programs catered specifically to women as mothers and wives, and to the children of immigrants.328

These early efforts tended to lack focus, and did not force change. Social workers and settlement workers acted out of sympathy, sometimes with a bit of condescension, wishing merely to provide tools of adjustment.329

On the other hand, prompted by the formation of several national patriotic societies at the turn of the century, another group of reformers quite purposefully sought to enforce patriotism and loyalty to American ideals amongst unassimilated immigrants. This type of early Americanization operated through patriotic education, where self professed patriots claimed citizenship could be realized through obedience to the nation‟s laws.

Groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution offered civic classes, lectures, and reading material printed in an array of languages. Outreach efforts extended to men in the workplace, women in homes, and children in schools. These Americanization programs, borne of fear, existed to stamp out radicalism and discontent amongst immigrants.330

328 Elizabeth Ewen. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), p77. 329 See John Higham. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1981), p236. 330 Higham, p237.

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In the Progressive Era, a period not marked by intense nativism, the program exemplified by the settlements garnered the most popular support. Social workers, intellectuals, educators and religious officials worked to improve the welfare of immigrants and to harmonize urban communities, work that meshed with the larger

Progressive reform impulse. Cities and states created commissions to do research on the status of immigrants, religious organizations offered English and civics classes at night, reformers created immigrant protection societies and ultimately, the federal Bureau of

Education created a Division of Immigrant Education.331 Still, most Americans did not concern themselves with these efforts.

Only with the advent of the war in Europe did Americanization grab the attention of a large swath of the public. The American people developed a deep fear that immigrants maintained their utmost loyalties to their country of origin, a fear that exploded once the

United States actually entered the war in 1917. The genuine swell of nationalist fervor engendered by the war, helped along by patriotic societies and by anti-labor business interests, carried enthusiasm for Americanization to new heights. Leaders of the growing

Americanization movement called on all immigrants to throw over their ties to the past, and to be 100% American in act and belief.332

The tenor and tone of the movement began to shift towards coercion, away from the democratic visions of the settlements, and this side of the Americanization movement dominated during the Red Scare. Patriots in government, business, and in organized

331 Higham, p238-242; Allen Freeman Davis, Spearheads for Reform: Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), p93-94. 332 Higham, p250.

179 civilian groups articulated Americanism as an antidote to Bolshevism.333 They presented

Americanization work as an urgent necessity. At first, the wartime and postwar surge of interest in Americanization manifested in a wave of federally sponsored legislation intended to educate immigrants in the English language and teach them citizenship skills.

Assimilation, some argued, could be forced by teaching the common language and by handing out naturalization papers. With the onset of the postwar recession much of the money in these bills failed to materialize, so states sponsored education programs locally, joining forces with a host of patriotic and civic organizations. However, state government programs emphasizing repressive requirements, that all teachers be citizens, that all children only be educated in public schools, lost steam as well. These fizzled out by the very early 1920s due to a continuing lack of public funds and to the passing of the initial shock of the Red Scare.334 In the big picture, this type of repressive government action constituted one small part of the Americanization movement.

But fears of disloyalty during the war, postwar anti-radicalism, racism, and widespread concern about living conditions in immigrant enclaves of American cities, continued to fuel the interest of many average Americans in the status of the immigrant.

Reflecting on life after the war, Edward Bok, immigrant and editor of the influential

Ladies Home Journal, articulated the country‟s urgent and “outstanding question.” The most important issue to “immediately face men and women of the country was the problem of Americanization,” he wrote. In Bok‟s view, “The war and its after-effects had clearly demonstrated this to be the most vital need in the life of the nation, not only

333 Higham, p254-255. 334 Higham, p259-263.

180 for the foreign-born but for the American as well.”335 Along with countless other editors, writers, and influential leaders, Bok drew Americans‟ attention to issues of adjustment and assimilation. In an essay collection aptly titled Immigration and Americanization, published in June 1920, the editor stated outright that the nation‟s “real problem is not immigration per se…but the Americanization of the millions of immigrants in our midst.”336 At the 1920 national conference of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the President General agreed, noting, “we are now all talking Americanization.”337

As interest in Americanization swelled, the more coercive Americanization groups identified old world impediments to conformity within immigrants‟ homes. One example, which amused several magazine reporters, newspaper editors and popular writers in 1919, involved some unfortunate “gentlewoman” who zeroed in on the power of food to prevent assimilation. She reportedly claimed, “One‟s very food affects his

Americanism. What kind of American consciousness can grow in the atmosphere of sauerkraut and Limburger cheese? Or what can you expect of the Americanism of the man whose breath always reeks with garlic?‟”338 These concerns about food, quite real to many, joined with concern for immigrants‟ style of dress and standards of cleanliness to make the transformation of the home seem a necessity. Coercive Americanizers advanced methods to affect what could only be a surface transformation in homes, an

335 Edward Bok. The Americanization of Edward Bok, (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1920), p419. 336 Philip Davis, ed, Immigration and Americanization, (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1920), pvi. 337 Daughters of the American Revolution, Proceedings of the Twenty Ninth Continental Congress of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. (Washington D.C.: A.B. Graham Company, 1920), First Day, p14. 338 Quote taken from John Daniels. America Via the Neighborhood. (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1971), p1-2. Daniels cites an editorial in The New York World where the editor commented on this woman‟s claims, asking if high society women intended to give up French fashion to shore up their own Americanism. This same words by this “gentlewoman” are quoted by Walter Lippman‟s in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippman cites The New Republic, June 1, 1921, p21 as the source. Lippman, p53.

181 easily acquired and widespread emphasis on American things rather than American values.

The DAR offers a representative view of one of the more high profile programs motivated by super patriotism in the postwar period. These middle and upper class women worked hard for Americanization because they felt it was “America‟s greatest weapon in her fight against Bolshevism.” This worthy goal elicited in each chapter and in each member a “high resolve” in postwar years.339 At the 1920 national conference of the DAR, the President General celebrated the work of her organization in this crowded field, claiming in rhetoric characteristic of super patriots, “It is a fine thing in these days to be an American. It is a fine thing to be an American woman. But it is the finest thing to be an American woman engaged in the Americanization of all our women.”340 Alice

Louise McDuffee, Vice-Chairman of Americanization work, claimed that patriotic education and Americanization took up most of the efforts of many chapters in 1919 and early 1920.341

Reformers within the DAR focused on the powerful role of mothers in their attempt to make the home more American, and they took up this work with gusto. At their 1920 conference the President General of the group even gave her keynote address over to the topic of the Americanization of women and girls.342 “An American father,” or in fact

“any other kind of a father, cannot make a home,” she reasoned. Only a woman made a home a productive space for building patriotism and orderly family life. Logically, then,

339 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, Third Day, p138. 340 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, First Day, p14. 341 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, Third Day, p138. 342 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, First Day, p8.

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“the home that is American” required a thoroughly “American woman” to be a success.343

The Daughters sought innovative ways to engage with and transform foreign born women. They understood that Americanization efforts more readily reached men in factories and children in schools. Through home visits, community houses, “foreign-born woman parties,” civic meetings, tea parties, shopping trips, sewing clubs, literary clubs, and group outings to public libraries, chapters across the nation tried to lure the elusive, over burdened, and home bound immigrant wife and mother into the fold of

Americanism.344 Each member of a chapter in Pennsylvania personally befriended one foreign born girl or woman, hoping to demonstrate Americanism by example.345 This tactic proved popular. A home economics professor at Columbia‟s Teachers College claimed in 1922, “The silent influence of the good [native born American] housekeeper, surrounded by neighbors from other lands who are eager to learn American ways, is a potent factor in the great work of Americanization.”346 Clean laundry, spotless curtains, and good ventilation might spur the assimilation attempts of foreign housewives. And, these would serve to strengthen their roles as citizens. Chapters in several states, including California, Idaho, Texas and Maryland held classes in English, cooking, sewing, and home-making. These skills, steeped in DAR members‟ comfortable culture of middle class domesticity, reflected what the group anxiously wanted immigrant women to learn.

343 Ibid, p12. 344 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, Third Day, p136. 345 Ibid, p138. 346 Cora M. Winchell. “For the Homemaker: Homemaking as a Phase of Citizenship.” Journal of Home Economics, January 1922, p27-33. p28-29.

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The DAR effectively raised Americanized housewives and reinforced traditional gender norms by imposing these standards on immigrant girls, as well. The group prided themselves particularly on their work with foreign children, with one speaker at the 1920 conference referring to the DAR as “pioneers” in this field. Local chapters across the country purposefully instructed immigrant girls on the duties of American motherhood and homemaking through Girl Homemakers clubs. Most clubs enrolled over two hundred girls of all different nationalities. Some volunteers and some paid teachers instructed girls on sewing, cooking, infant care and maintenance of the home including sweeping, making beds, and cleaning. Reformers sought to train young girls, like their mothers, in American standards, in the right way of doing things. It goes without saying that little boys did not take these classes.347

While efforts like these represented the thrust of Americanization during the Red

Scare years, the settlement house tradition did not completely disappear. Certainly, the war did hinder more liberal, sympathetic approaches to Americanization. The Russian

Revolution, and the response of many prominent liberals, marked settlements in particular as beyond the bounds of Americanism, due to their long cherished tradition of creating an open forum for all ideas. Fund raising became more difficult and many houses exhibited more caution, politically, than they did before.348 But the progressive framework of pre-war settlement Americanization efforts persisted throughout the conservative 1920s.

347 DAR, Twenty Ninth Continental Congress, Third Day, p133-134. 348 Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p117-118.

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Liberal Americanizers criticized the utility of conformist measures, pushing instead for a program that supported immigrants, respected their differences, and encouraged them to adjust to American standards. These dissenters believed the forced acquisition of

English language skills and formal citizenship had no value when reformers cared little about what immigrants did thereafter. Allen T. Burns, Director of the Carnegie

Corporation‟s Americanization Study, criticized such work in 1919, and hoped for a time when Americans might abandon the “panicky idea of reducing all to a homogeneity,” a sentiment he called “a sad by-product of the war.” 349 As one researcher of immigrant assimilation noted, only by transmitting cultural and social values could anyone hope for the “constructive participation” of foreign born people in American life.350

Mary K. Simhkovitch, highly prominent settlement worker and longtime director of

Greenwich House in New York, also repudiated the tactics of groups like the DAR who envisioned Americanization as the full adoption of new world food and homemaking practices. Immigrants‟ home lives did not need to conform exactly to “American traditions and ideals,” she claimed, arguing that continued adherence to their own customs was only “natural and normal.” Stating it plainly she said, “there is nothing un-

American in macaroni or in copper dishes or lace bedspreads or tomato paste…The sooner, in fact, that we can get rid of early American cooking, uniformity of dress, standardization of manners, the better.”351

349 Allen T. Burns, Director Study of Americanization Methods, Carnegie Corporation, NY, The Foreign Born in His Relation to the Community, Proceedings of Americanization Conference, Held Under the Auspices of the Americanization Division, Bureau of Education, Department of the Interior, Washington, May 12-15, 1919. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p291. 350 Quote taken from Daniels, p1-2. 351 Mrs. V.G. Simkhovitch, Director of Greenwich House, New York, “The Relation of the Foreign Born to His Home and Neighborhood,” Proceedings of Americanization Conference, p280.

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Simhkovitch argued that Americanizers would better serve immigrant families and the country as a whole by working to make immigrant homes into microcosms of democracy.

Rather than imposing dietary habits or clothing standards, reformers needed to ensure the presence of American ideals like “freedom and opportunity” in immigrant homes. She wished to cultivate a love of America through these higher ideals. This type of

Americanization work could eradicate what she called the “tyranny of parents” over children and the subjection of women, relics of the old world. She claimed “freedom for the woman and the child is what we should be working for in considering Americanizing the home life of the foreigner who comes to us.” Reformers could also create “free” homes by curbing disease, holding back the reach of industry into the home, and ensuring adequate space for families to live.352

The significance of the home as a space for adjustment for women and families, a democratic space free from conformity or repression, also marked the pages of

Sophonisba Breckinridge‟s New Homes for Old. Herself a social worker and a product of the settlement movement, like Simhkovitch, Breckinridge demonstrated the continuity of settlement principles in postwar Americanization. In her view, Americanization work needed to very consciously battle the tendency to let immigrant women stumble into awareness of altogether new standards for their homes and their families. She positioned her study as a guide, one that offered “deliberate and systematic methods” specialists could use to familiarize themselves with immigrant families. Ultimately, she hoped her analysis might help reformers meld changing American social and familial values with

352 Simhkovitch, p280.

186 the immigrant‟s own traditions.353 Representative of a strain of progressive

Americanization, then, Breckinridge‟s focus on the family also reflected her belief in its possibility as an agent for change.

Like the women of the DAR, liberal Americanizers focused in on immigrant women, but the emphasis lay in the roles immigrant women played in the cultural nexus between the old world and the new. Americanizers envisioned the immigrant mother as the

“keystone of the home,” in the words of one writer on Americanization.354 Settlements and social workers taught immigrant mothers modern childcare practices, proper dietary standard, sanitary needs, and about the structure of family life in urban, industrial

America more generally, things that would help their families adjust to new conditions.

The parent education movement emphasized the child-centered family model, as organizations like the General Federation of Women‟s Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers spread ideals of scientific motherhood to immigrants in conscious attempts to assimilate them into American culture.355 Cooperation and kindness crucially helped smooth efforts to transform immigrant mothers, which reformers hoped would go a long way towards changing the culture of immigrants‟ lives at home.

Belief in the changeability of immigrants and their homes confronted popular convictions about immigration and racial degeneration. Fears of racial degeneration appeared prominently in the early years of the twentieth century, with Theodore

Roosevelt‟s appeal to Anglo Saxon women, but eugenics reached new heights of

353 Breckinridge, p18. 354 John Palmer Gavit. Americans By Choice, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922,) p305; see also Ewen, p94-97. 355 Ewen, p85-86; see also Julia Grant. Raising Baby by the Book: the Education of American Mothers. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p75. .

187 popularity after the war. A host of intellectuals and social scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, both very widely influential in the 1920s, convinced Americans that both positive and negative eugenic measures would save the country from ruin.356

More immigrants on American shores creating more racially inferior children, in contrast to native white families with falling birth rates, would cause the downfall of American greatness and of civilization on the whole. Immigrants‟ experiences did not result from the transplantation, from the difficulty with a new environment, eugenicists argued. They criticized the belief, rooted in the Progressive Era, that environmental and cultural forces affected the fitness and adjustment of immigrants.357 When immigrants failed in adjustment attempts, and contributed to crime and squalor, it stemmed from their inherent racial inequalities.

Liberal Americanizers grounded in the social sciences counteracted these theories of racial degeneration, as they counteracted coercive measures, with their increasing confidence in the power of culture in determining behavior and development. The ideas of Franz Boas, “father” of modern anthropology and influential professor at Columbia, percolated through American society in the 1920s. Boaz preached cultural relativism, the belief that a people and their customs only had meaning in the context or contexts that produced them. Culture made people what they were. Researchers working on the

Carnegie Americanization Study operated on this theoretical foundation, rejecting popular beliefs about the innate inferiority of the new immigrants. These trained

356 See Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 1916, and Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, 1920. See also Leon F. Whitney and Ellsworth Huntington, Builders of America, 1927; Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics, 1918; William McDougall, Is America Safe for Democracy,1921. 357 David Joseph Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s. (Baltimore: John‟s Hopkins University Press, 1999), p149-154.

188 sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists did not attribute immigrants‟ problems and low status to any inherent traits, but rather recognized the cultural basis for the problems in immigrants‟ adjustment. In a review of Old World Traits Transplanted, a volume of the series written by three sociologists including Robert E. Park, Boas commended the authors for disregarding “innate differences that may perhaps exist” and for pressing “the purely cultural problem which is due to the transfer of the foreigner to

American environment.”358 His review, published in the New York Times Book Review, advanced this theory and bolstered the methodology of the settlement house tradition of

Americanization.

Applying this belief in the power of culture to transform family life created real possibility amongst reformers. In a study of immigrants and their children, built upon the

1920 census, sociologist and professor Niles Carpenter presented a comparative analysis of native white birth rates and foreign born birth rates, addressing eugenicist fears of race suicide. His research demonstrated the groundless nature of these concerns. Foreign born individuals reproduced at a slightly higher rate, however, immigrants suffered higher death rates, particularly amongst infants, which diminished the overall impact of their fecundity. Carpenter took care to suggest firmly that differences in reproduction rates and in overall vitality related not to any inherent racial or ethnic differences, but instead to “differing circumstances of environment and culture.” He confidently asserted that these differences would “disappear as the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of to-day achieve social, economic, and intellectual parity with the other

358 Boas quoted in Milton M. Gordon, “The American Immigrant Revisited: Review of Americanization Studies,” Social Forces, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Dec, 1975), p472. The Boas review appeared in the New York Times Book Review on February 6, 1921.

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Americans of to-morrow.”359 Culture, according to Carpenter, explained differences in reproduction and marriage rates more satisfactorily than ideas about inherent racial characteristics.360 And culture, unlike inherent racial characteristics, was changeable.

So, reformers could influence birth rates, economic pressures, and family relationships by affecting the culture immigrants lived in.

In the decade after the war, then, a variety of reformers focused intently on the possibilities present in Americanizing the culture of immigrant homes.361 Antiradicals felt certain that Americanized mothers would create a stable family environment and block the development of Bolshevism. Home economists characterized patriotic homemaking as a kind of cultural citizenship, a model for unassimilated immigrants.

Social workers sought to lead mothers and their children to an Americanized way of seeing the world. All together, these social workers, sociologists, educators and super patriots located the immigrant home as a transformative place, where a foreigner turned into an American.

This approach reflected the continuing belief, at least among progressive

Americanizers, that democratic approaches to assimilating immigrants would bear fruit.

Despite the knee jerk response of patriotic and antiradical organizations, the settlement vision persisted. But by the 1920s it was shaped by new discourses on nativism, antiradicalism, and eugenics. In the face of these realities, progressive reformers acted on

359 Niles Carpenter. Immigrants and their Children, Census Monographs 7, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927), p208. The International Institutes report on second generation girls in 1930 reproduces information from Carpenter‟s study, which speaks to his credibility. 360 Carpenter, p249. 361 See George J. Sanchez, “Go After the Women”: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929,” in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden eds., Mothers and Motherhood. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997); and John McClymer, “Gender and „The American Way of Life‟: Women in the Americanization Movement, Journal of American Ethnic History 10, no. 3, (Spring 1991).

190 the spreading belief, rooted in progressivism and in anthropology, that environmental factors dictated people‟s values and behaviors. The immigrant home seemed to them to the best place to affect Americanization. If they could successfully change the environment of the home, by modernizing it and making it function democratically, immigrants might no longer trouble society or the state. They might enjoy genuine assimilation and adjustment.

Rebellious Daughters and the Complications of Americanizing Families

Americanization efforts that relied on the family as a site for assimilation cultivated the stability of immigrants‟ homes first and foremost. The primary concern for many reformers lay in the intergenerational conflict between unadjusted immigrants and their

Americanizing children. International Institutes, an organization in the settlement tradition, problematized the behavior of adolescent immigrant daughters, or second generation girls, in response to larger concerns about adjustment problems and adolescence. The “problem” of the second generation girl gave Institute workers reason to regulate the culture of immigrants‟ home lives, and the structure of relationships therein, to ensure proper Americanization.

Like several other organizations working to Americanize immigrants, the International

Institutes focused their efforts on immigrant families, and specifically on women. Yet, they worked exclusively with women, a task founder Edith Terry Bremer felt distinguished them within the wider Americanization field. She explained that when approaching a foreign family, one needing help adjusting to American life, Institute

191 workers took note of young children, and of the man of the house. They did not intend to deny the “the social dominance of the man,” she insisted. But, these family members existed merely in the “background” for Institute workers, as “factors in the environment of the individual who has our major interest—the women.”362

The female focused Institutes sought specifically to affect Americanization in woman‟s sphere, the private sphere. Bremer, the founder and executive director of the

Institutes, graduated from the University of Chicago, engaged in social welfare work in settlements, the Women‟s Trade Union League, and with the United States Immigration

Commission. Schooled in these spaces, Bremer advocated an outlook she characterized as uniquely female, and she proudly claimed that her social workers and administrators provided something different in the field of Americanization. The peculiarities of a feminine outlook allowed for more meaningful Americanization, she argued, as her

Institutes operated with a “peculiar sensitiveness to the more personal and intimate problems of immigrant people.”363 These problems, ones characterized as more personal and intimate, went well beyond macaroni and lace.

By focusing on the women, Institutes ultimately wished to support and strengthen the immigrant family as a unit. As Bremer put it, Institutes believed the “integrity of a foreign home must be upheld.”364 Quite simply, social workers saw the folly in conceptualizing women as separate from the family, and so in reality their scope included all family members. As one California Institute worker explained, Institutes recognized

362 Edith Terry Bremer, The International Institute: A Re-Analysis of our Foundations, in Report on Conference of International Institutes, May 1923, pA20, Box 16, Folder 170, International Institute of Boston (hereafter referred to as IIB), Immigration History Research Center (hereafter referred to as IHRC). 363 Ibid. 364 Ibid, pA23.

192 the need to bring “every member in the foreigner‟s home” over to “the American point of view.”365 They understood the utility of the home as a tool of social control for immigrant parents, and for their children. By Americanizing women and their daughters,

Institute workers sought to reinforce the power and stability of the immigrant family as a whole in order to limit their vulnerability and to reinforce the strength of the national fabric.

A primary focus of Institutes in this task was the immigrant daughter, as workers tried to temper the much discussed tensions between immigrant parents and their American born children. The Institutes referred to this conflict between mothers and daughters as the “problem” of the second generation girl. One Institute worker called this troublesome group “the problem everywhere we go of the girls of 16 and 18 in the family,” while another relayed how many times she heard that “the most serious problem of the immigration question is that of the child of the foreign born parents.” 366 Due to the pervasive concern for these girls and their disruptive potential, the “Y.W.C.A.s, schools, case work agencies, settlements and foreign language societies, to name but a few, swell the chorus that is discussing the „second generation problem.‟”367

Sophonisba Breckinridge specifically highlighted the work Institutes performed to

“reconcile foreign-born mothers and Americanized daughters.” 368 This work stemmed from the fact that many foreign born parents—but mostly mothers—were “unadjusted” to

American customs. Daughters, exposed to American culture daily outside of the home,

365 The Second Generation Girl,” in Record of Proceedings of Conference on International Institute Work, 1927, p52-60, Box 16, Folder 171, IIB, IHRC. 366 “The Second Generation Girl,” p52, and p60, Box 16, Folder 171, IIB, IHRC. 367 Report of the Commission on First Generation Americans to the Eleventh Annual National Conference of International Institutes, 1930, p16, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 368 Breckinridge, p247.

193 adjusted more quickly and more completely. The “rebellious, unhappy, and at times exaggeratedly independent daughter” created by this scenario stressed the bonds of the family, and jeopardized the ability of the family unit to serve as a controlling, assimilative institution.369

With a careful and respectful approach, Institute workers tried to ease the friction between the “daughter whose girlhood is shaped in America and the mother whose girlhood belonged to a far-off environment.”370 The first International Institute began operating in 1912, and by the mid-1920s over fifty five existed in the United States, spanning the continent in cities like Brooklyn, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis,

San Antonio and Los Angeles, each city serving thousands and thousands of immigrants and their families.371 Case work and individual contacts formed the backbone of Institute relationships with women and girls. These organizations, devoted to work with foreign born families, operated as a subsection of the Young Women‟s Christian Association.372

They explained to defensive and embarrassed adolescents that their mothers‟ old world language and customs should be sources of pride rather than shame. And, to nervous mothers, they tried to explain the “freedom granted to American girls.” 373

Anxiety over the freedom granted to all girls in the United States, or the freedoms they wrested for themselves, swelled in the first decades of the twentieth century. Institute

369 Report of the Commission, p18, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 370 Bremer, The International Institutes, pA23, Box 16, Folder 170, IIB, IHRC. 371 The New York City Institute claimed to have reached over 22,000 foreign born women between 1914 and 1920 alone. Comments of Miss Edith Jardine, International Institute, Y.W.C.A., New York City, National Americanization Conference, p733. 372 In the 1930s the Institutes formally separated from the YWCA and continued their work as independent agencies, merging together to create a new national organization, the National Institute of Immigrant Welfare, A. Mohl. “Cultural Pluralism in Immigrant Education: The YWCA‟s International Institutes, 1910-1940,” in N. Mjagkij and M. Spratt eds., Men and Women Adrift: YMCA and YWCA in the City, (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p114. 373 Breckinridge, p247.

194 workers and immigrant mothers joined a chorus of other voices concerned about the fact that young women enjoyed more opportunities and more time away from home, away from their parents, than ever before. Parents, reformers, and social scientists wrung their hands over the plight of immigrant daughters well before the Institutes recognized a problem with second generation girls. Fundamental and very deep divisions existed between immigrant parents who grew up in rural, family centered environments and their children, often products of fast paced, modern, commercialized urban spaces. Since the turn of the century settlement house workers and researchers feared the immigrant family in America teetered on the edge of crisis. They compiled data to support their contention that American-born girls chafed both against the culture of their parents, and against the culture of the United States. The evidence existed all around them.374

Dance halls, dark movie theaters, and amusement parks pulled immigrant daughters out of their homes, away from family chores and the influence of the Old World. These new patterns of public leisure Americanized girls, and lured them away from traditionally home centered leisure activities, ones located in the private sphere, focused on children, community, and religion. These young women, over half of whom worked for wages by

1920 in industrial, clerical and domestic positions, tested the bounds of their freedom, enjoying time away from tenements and parental supervision.375 They often paraded in fashionable clothing, bought with the money and with the influence they earned by

374 See Mary Odem. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 4, “The „Delinquent Girl‟ and Progressive Reform,” and Chapter 6, “This Terrible Freedom,‟ Generational Conflicts in Working Class Families,” Sarah Chinn. Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the- Century America, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Pres, 2008), Chapter 3, Irreverence and the American Spirit. 375 While some estimates are higher, the International Institute‟s report on First Generation Americans in 1930 cited the 1920 census figures, showing 881,660 immigrant daughters between the ages of 16 and 20, with 452,396, or 51.3% of those, employed, p12; Ewen, 190-193.

195 contributing to the family‟s coffers.376 If unable to afford amusements with pocket money culled from their paycheck before turning it over to parents, girls found men to

“treat” them in exchange for romantic attentions and sexual favors. In fact, most of these urban activities excited young women with the possibility of mixed sex fun of some type.377

The group of reformers and social scientists providing the perceived “girl” problem with actual meaning in the late 1910s and 1920s expanded its boundaries, moving beyond delinquency to encompass adolescence for girls generally.378 Female juvenile delinquency received much attention from progressive reformers, including Sophonisba

Breckinridge. These studies, ones disproportionately focused on immigrant working class girls, revealed that neither race nor ethnicity created maladjusted children. The roots of delinquency were social and cultural. This turn to an analysis of environmental causes for the criminal or sexual transgressions of the children of immigrant workers coalesced with the emerging analysis of adolescence itself.

The ideas of anthropologist Margaret Mead, student of Franz Boas, greatly bolstered the Institutes work. After researching adolescence in several primitive cultures, she compared her results to the adolescence of American youth, first in Coming of Age in

Samoa, A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. Mead argued that the “storm and stress” of adolescence, something G. Stanley Hall, originator of

376 Ewen, p197-199. 377 Many historians cover the affect of commercialized leisure on working class women. See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements. Sarah Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, particularly the Introduction and Chapter 3, Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal, p55, Priscilla Murolo, The Common Ground of Womanhood, p142- 143, Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters, p103-105, 378 Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), p132.

196 adolescence study, believed to be natural, was in fact peculiar to western civilization.

American adolescents paid a high price for their urbanized, industrialized and commercialized society, she claimed.379 At a series of supper meetings devoted to the study of second generation girls in 1929, Institute leaders invited Mead to address workers and representatives from other immigrant organizations, “because of her thesis that the conflicts of adolescence are of social causation, that they are not due to the phenomenon of adolescence itself, but to being adolescent in America with its shifting economic conditions and conflicting cultures.”380 Her theories spoke directly to their work. Her analysis legitimized Institute workers‟ focus on reforming the culture of the immigrant home as a space productive of maladjustment. The Institute could potentially undo what transplantation and the particular American environment had done.

Girl problems, then, and the troublesome female adolescent stage more generally, were constructed and framed by the culture that spawned them. This belief fundamentally informed the work of the International Institutes. Social workers there cast the problem of the second generation girl as one that encompassed a wide range of behaviors, extending well beyond the transgressions that might make one officially a juvenile delinquent. Institutes saw the second generation problem as one borne of adolescence and the pull between old world and new. As explained in a 1930 report, the

“problems of adolescence are increased by conflicting cultures, contradictory standards

379 See Kent Baxter, The Modern Age: Turn of the Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), Chapter 2; Sarah Chinn, Inventing Adolescence, Chapter 4; Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. 380 Report of Commission, p6, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC.

197 of conduct, and changing economic conditions.”381 Thus the problem of the second generation girl needs to be considered in light of the problems of young working girls in general.

There were, of course, unique characteristics that marked second generation girls as different from their female peers. The problematic second generation girl was either born in the United States of foreign born parents or mixed parentage, or she arrived as an immigrant herself at a very young age. Based on information from the 1920 census,

Institute workers considered young women between 15 and 34 years of age to be in danger of feeling this conflict, but much of their practical work was with girls in their teens and early twenties. Social workers placed these immigrant daughters into two categories. First, there were girls whose parents adjusted to life in America, and thus the

“manners and customs of American society” reflected the “the standards of their own homes.” The other group of girls, the problematic ones, “was sensitive to decided differences between the mores of American society and those of their own families.”

The background and migration process of a family often determined which of these two categories their daughters‟ fell in to. The first group of native born daughters often came form “old immigrants,” in communities “long established,” from “homes that show some sophistication and formal education,” or from families who did not have to make a transition from “European peasant community to American industrial city.” The second group, those girls deemed problematic, more often came from the most recent wave of immigration, from groups with “less economic security and social status.” These families held fast to a “clearly defined code of family relationships which suited peasant life and

381 Report of the Commission, p18, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC.

198 peasant economy, but which is at variance with the practices of American society outside their homes.” And ultimately, according to Institute workers analyzing these patterns,

“unadjusted” parents created “unadjusted, unhappy and rebellious” children.382

Thus, the culture of these young women‟s homes very much dictated their social and psychological adjustment. Simply being born of foreign parentage did not create the “so- called second generation problem,” an Institute report argued, but rather “social conditions and attitudes which make the child constantly aware of a „sense of difference‟” did.383 Immigrant daughters experienced double alienation as they lived lives immersed in modern American culture, in neighborhoods, at school, and at work, lives greatly removed from the old world culture of their homes. In fact, one Institute worker noted that school “entirely takes away girls from their families.” Many mothers lagged behind in shaping their daughters‟ worlds, unable to speak English, unable to counsel or understand the new world their daughters inhabited. Parents held fast to expectations and values borne of old world conditions. Many found themselves

“voiceless,” she reported.384 Institute workers described a young woman with no moorings; “She has no country. She has no traditions. She is just between two different nations, with nothing as a basis.” As another worker, one from Boston, phrased it, “the poor creature is neither foreign nor American.”385

The second generation girls also suffered under the weight of their class status in the matrix of respectability in American culture. While they struggled with “being

382 Report of the Commission, p16, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 383 Report of Commission, p16, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 384 “The Second Generation Girl,” p52, Box 16, Folder 171, IIB, IHRC. 385 “The Second Generation Girl,” p53 and “Our Responsibility to Girls and Young Women from Other Lands,” Miss Yerenian, Oct 5, 1925, p5. Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC.

199 transplanted,” as one keenly observant worker phrased it, they also felt the effects of life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Miss Aghavnie Yeghenian of the Boston

Institute wondered about the universality of adolescence among American girls at a 1927 conference. Beyond the element of transplantation, she argued that other girls of “older

American stock” existed on a completely different “social and economic level.” The two experiences, not even taking the culture clash into account, “cannot be compared” in any meaningful way, she claimed.386 So while American life made adolescence difficult overall, transplantation, poverty, and class bias amongst peers made that stage even more difficult for second generation girls.

The consequences of unresolved intergenerational conflict stressed the fabric of the social order, and prevented the seamless assimilation of immigrant families. Institute workers reported, “Social agencies are disturbed because they realize that constant conflict between the older and younger generation may lead to open revolt on the part of the children, or even to complete disintegration of the family group.” In this scenario, immigrant parents lost their authority, diminishing their own identities rooted in old world understandings of family. When fathers or mothers tried to discipline their children, one Institute worker noted from personal experience, the girl rebelled because their way was not “the American way. She goes back to the factory and is ashamed of her parents and nationality…She doesn‟t know where she stands.”387

In a family devoid of parental authority young women were at risk, particularly in the newly modern culture of the 1920s. Many engaged in “exaggerated recreation, dress,

386 The Second Generation Girl, p54, Box 16, Folder 171, IHRC. 387 “The Second Generation Girl,” p54, Box 16, Folder 171, IIB, IHRC.

200 manners, and social behavior.” In even the best possible cases where parents did not adjust to American culture, if “constant friction and open rebellion at home” was avoided, families endured “uneasiness” and “unhappiness.”388 Children learned to redirect the controlling force in their lives, seeking “emotional satisfaction as far away from home as possible.”389 The family unit, in a case like this, no longer exhibited social control over its young people.

In their efforts to ameliorate the difficulties of second generation girls, and to rescue their family structure, as Bremer so proudly noted, the Institutes employed a personal, intimate approach. Institutes relied on what they called “nationality workers,” female immigrants with a good many years spent in the United States, or second generation immigrant women with parents from the old world, who spoke the language and shared experiences with assimilation. As one Boston nationality worker phrased it, these women knew and understood the “fears, prejudices and suspicions of foreign-born young women toward things American,” and realized “what it is that dazes, confuses and shocks them.”

Nationality workers were “the bridge between America and their own foreign sisters,” she claimed.390 Acting as human bridges, these workers visited the homes of newly arrived immigrant women to offer help and protection in their adjustment to American life. Breckinridge observed that many Institutes employed nationality workers with the ability to communicate with four foreign language communities, while some could reach eight or nine different language groups.391

388 Report of Commission, p17, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 389 Report of the Commission, p18, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 390 Narrative Reports 1924, Box 1, Folder 2, IIB, IHRC.. 391 Breckinridge, p244.

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Institutes focused on helping immigrant mothers by teaching them about American standards and customs, shoring up their position in an Americanized household. The Los

Angeles Times, noting the Los Angeles Institute‟s popularity as a “social center,” took care to point out that “effective work is done” with immigrant women “in the way of education and Americanization,” including courses in the English language, sewing, and housekeeping.392 Institutes formed Mother‟s Clubs in many cities, to draw out women who spent their days at home. They offered language instruction, housekeeping tips, parenting clinics and food demonstrations, all with a cooperative, respectful approach.393

Different mother‟s clubs catered to older immigrant women, those with a few years of experience in America, and new arrivals.394 Given the importance of the culture of immigrant home life, Americanized mothers could contribute greatly to diffusing the second generation girl problem. By learning about American culture in some depth, these mothers could mediate the conflict they and their daughters experienced. Research by 1930 convinced Institute workers that the “best adjusted girls are the daughters of parents who are themselves emotionally adjusted to American life.”395

Institutes offered social services for second generation girls themselves, and they studied the cultural conditions of those girls intensely. Nationality workers adopted a program of “continuous „selective friendly visiting‟” to ensure direct cooperation between workers and young women. Numerous clubs provided for associative activities, most often within nationalities in “nationality clubs,” which Institute workers felt

392 Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1919, p18; Breckinridge, p246. 393 Comments of Miss Edith Jardine, National Americanization Conference, p733. 394 Florence Cassidy, Memorandum A, The Status Quo of Group Work in International Institutes, November 1, 1929, p2-3. Box 16, Folder 169, IIB, IHRC. 395 Report of Commission, p21, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC.

202 cultivated pride in the national community of their parents. Second generation girls in the workforce joined Business Girls‟ clubs and Industrial clubs, while clubs also existed for mingling among nationalities and for study.396 Workers viewed these clubs as spaces of great opportunity. Institute leaders noted the need for skilled club leaders, able to help girls negotiate their parents‟ expectations with their own in regards to “sex, to work, to new independence, and at the same time to responsibility for family support.”397

At the national level the International Institutes coordinated to compile information about second generation girls, to analyze issues and suggest solutions. The organization created a commission to study second generation girls, or as they sometimes called them, first generation Americans, in 1925. At every annual Institute conference from 1923 through to the end of the decade the issue received wide attention. The actual

Commission on Second Generation Girls met over the course of several years, sent out questionnaires to be filled out by each local Institute, gathered case studies of well adjusted and poorly adjusted girls, and finally presented a sweeping report to the annual

Institute meeting in 1930, the culmination of their years of effort. At this conference the commission laid out their goals for second generation girls explicitly:

To help the second generation youth to understand and appreciate both the things that are fine in their parents‟ culture, and the things that are expansive and hopeful and challenging in American life, and to realize that they should not think of themselves as self-pitying victims oppressed by tyrannical parents, but as young persons peculiarly fitted to sympathize with the social conflicts and social changes through which their parents have had to pass, and to appreciate the struggles which all youth, first, second, third, fourth or fifth generation American has to make to build jointly with the older generations the America of the future.398

396 Edith Terry Bremer, The International Institutes: A Reanalysis of Our Foundations, May 1923, pA16- A18, Box 16, Folder 170, IIB, IHRC. 397 Report of Commission, p18, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 398 Report of the Commission, p37, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC.

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To participate in creating progress, second generation girls needed to develop bonds with their past and their American futures through their family ties.

For reformers and social workers at the International Institutes in the 1920s, in an ant- immigrant, antiradical, sexually modernizing era, the need for their work with immigrant daughters seemed clear. Second generation girls‟ discontent mattered, because popular discourse on immigration problems castigated many immigrants in the United States as unassimilated, disruptive, and unfit for citizenship. And, at the same time, Americans all over the country worried loudly about the morals and roles of young women in general.

Institute workers felt these two pressures acutely when they re re-imagined the girl problem and invested it with new meaning. They identified the “problem” of the second generation girl as an impediment to the procession of good Americanism, an obstacle for the girls themselves, for their families, and for society as a whole. The solution to this problem lay in establishing the security of the immigrant home as a site of assimilation.

As workers identified the culture of the home as a crucial building block in securing the future of the country, once again tying successful private home life to national strength,

International Institutes privileged the immigrant family as a site for Americanization.

Even progressive Americanizers bolstered the home as space of social control and embodiment of national strength in response to intertwined fears of radicalism, immigration, and gender disorder.

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“I‟d rather kiss anybody than be called a „ginny‟”: Sex Education as Americanization

The problem of the second generation girl struck parents and reformers most acutely when it involved matters of sex. Through the tumult of adolescence in America and the confusing clash of standards and traditions they experienced, the children of immigrants faced complicated sexual arrangements with little guidance from parents or from their national communities. Identifying sexuality as a necessary and valid site of assimilation, progressive reformers in the United Neighborhood Houses and in the International

Institutes identified these young people‟s budding sexual selves as part of a larger adjustment problem. Even these liberal reformers employed dominant prescriptions of sexual propriety and heterosexual monogamous marriage in the service of national stability, solidifying heterosexual norms in the 1920s.

Workers in the International Institutes struggled with the moral values of immigrant daughters, logically extending the girl problem to include sexual matters. The breakdown in parental authority they witnessed in many immigrant homes left second generation girls in risky moral territory. Broken families could not exert the social control necessary to make the home a successful producer of sexual standards and gender norms. How would these young women learn about the family life they were to aspire to, about

American marriage traditions, about the nature of acceptable sexual relationships? These questions haunted Institute workers, who discussed among themselves ways to achieve some social benefit from evening meetings before the jazz music and socializing started up.

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Conflict between young women and their immigrant parents usually intensified when these girls reached sexual maturity. The Commission on Second Generation Girls reported this increase in friction at the time girls reached marriageable age, a point based on years of observation and experience. Parents wished to preserve their own mores, their own “peculiar marriage customs,” even as American values seeped into their homes, and into their daughters‟ heads. “In this realm” more than any other, the Commission realized, the most expansive differences existed “between the parent‟s idea and the ideas expressed by American teachers, friends, writers and neighbors.”399

Adolescent curiosity about sex, coupled with a strong desire to fit in, led many girls to experiment with their sexuality. One Institute worker, Mrs. Nicholevsky, identified the double alienation of immigrant daughters as a spur for them to partake more readily in unsavory aspects of American life in the 1920s, as they overcompensated in their cultural appropriation of what they perceived to be Americanism. Nicholevsky argued, “the girl, looking for something to take the place of what she has lost, feels that dancing and makeup are very attractive things, indeed—and certainly are the easy things to do, so she does them.”400 This girl, living “between two different nations” then risked falling down a slippery slope towards loose morals in her efforts to fit in. Dancing and makeup signaled a sexualization of the girl‟s life outside the home.

Working class immigrant young women were at the forefront of the shift towards heterosocial behavior early in the twentieth century, when they ventured onto city streets, in to commercialized leisure activities, and into the workforce. These spaces, which drew

399 Report of Commission, p18, Box 9, Folder 107, IIB, IHRC. 400 “The Second Generation Girl,” p53, Box 16, Folder 171, IIB, IHRC.

206 girls from the private to the public sphere, usually featured the intermingling of the sexes.

So, well before the 1920s, earlier generations of immigrant daughters established heterosocial mixing and premarital sexual adventures as features in their lives outside of the home.

When these postwar second generation girls sought avenues of acceptance amongst their peers, sexual activity ranked highly among the available possibilities. Miss Ricci, a nationality secretary for Italian women, reported in 1927 that one young woman asked her to talk about “social diseases,” and for advice on whether or not to partake in “kissing games.” Ricci relayed the warning she gave the group, urging them to avoid crossing moral boundaries in order to better fit in. But one girl responded baldly, “I‟d rather kiss anybody than be called a „ginny.‟” These second generation girls willingly trespassed against their parents‟ values, and perhaps their own, rather than feel vulnerable for their

“foreignness.” To her fellow Institute workers, Ricci criticized the young woman, employing a harsh double standard. The girl willing to kiss lowered herself not only in the eyes of the Italian community but in the American community she desired to impress when she crossed her own moral boundary. “When any foreigner tries to imitate her

American sister, she becomes very, very cheap,” Ricci declared. “She doesn‟t look like even the ordinary American girl. She is much cheaper, and she is even looked down upon by the ones she tries to imitate.”401

Organizations catering to immigrant communities and to women in particular, historically viewed the budding sexuality of immigrant daughters within a framework of deviant sexuality, a framework informed by racial and class based ideologies. These

401 Ibid, p55.

207 young women of low social status lived lives outside the safety of the private realm.402

And, it seemed as though sex was everywhere in the public realm in the 1920s: in the movies, in dance halls, and on the streets. The fact that working class young people flocked to these places to socialize, dance, smoke, and drink marked them as trespassers against respectability. This issue sparked countless investigations during the Progressive

Era, as researchers joined parents in cringing at the thought of girls casually trading sexual favors for entry into the world of amusements.403 Caught out late at night, or flirting with men, a number of young working women found themselves charged with prostitution and sent to reformatories.404 During the war, communities around the country safeguarded the moral and physical well being of the nation‟s soldiers by detaining, examining and sometimes treating girls caught cavorting with soldiers in dark places. Even frustrated parents sent their rebellious daughters to the mercies of the juvenile court system in order to keep their sexualities in check, or in line with their old world traditions.405 Thus, beyond instances of actual prostitution, which did exist, for some time in the United States the girl problem included the disorderly sexuality of working class immigrant daughters. This “problem” spread to the ranks of middle class daughters by the 1920s, lending it new credence.

This vision of the girl problem drove the work of numerous other agencies in addition to the Institutes in the 1920s, agencies responding to the waves of nativism, antiradicalism and sex modernism. While Institute clubs and “friendly” visiting sought to

402 Ruth Alexander. The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p4. 403 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements, p108-113. 404 See Ruth Alexander, The “Girl Problem.”. 405 See Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters, Chapter 6, and pages 121-127.

208 help immigrant daughters adjust their behavior in the face of parental expectations, their own personal desires, and a world full of opportunities, these measures never explicitly taught young people about sex. Another organization, the United Neighborhood Houses of New York City, did.

The United Neighborhood Houses (UNH), encompassing over forty settlement houses, intervened directly in the lives of immigrants‟ children, Americanizing them through sex education. UNH leaders, including Mary K. Simhkovitch, wished to ameliorate adjustment problems in immigrant families just like most Americanizers.

After hearing the “young people of the settlements” talk about their views on ethical issues, settlement officials felt a “serious defect in training” was evident. And so, UNH leaders developed a “social education” program to educate young people in “the business of living.” In 1927 the UNH collaborated on a five session course serving all of the houses, and the course continued for at least two years afterwards. They hoped to foster debate, independence, and critical thinking through discussion of popular values and ideals.406 Young people told headworkers that they wished to discuss education, religion, moral standards, problems of behavior regarding the opposite sex, responsibility to their families, and the problems one might face when considering marriage.407 This list of their concerns mirrors the issues Institute workers thought to be most pressing in this type of work. Headworkers nominated older youths as delegates for the discussion course, between the ages of 18 and 22, including individuals who worked and those who attended

406 Conference on Social Education Under the Auspices of the UNH of New York, October 10, 1927, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 407 Letter from S. Max Nelson to Headworkers or Girl‟s Worker, November 23rd, 1926. Box Legal 65, Folder 28, UNH, SWHA.

209 school. While the course gave young people a wide array of options to cover, in most sessions, sexuality dominated discussion.

The UNH enjoyed a history of radicalism, making their cultivation of these social education courses unsurprising. In 1919, just after the group of houses came together as the UNH, they came under fire from the Lusk Committee for fostering “sedition” and

“anarchy” in their rooms, and for undertaking ineffective and dangerous Americanization work.408 These charges received attention in the press for years. In 1926, unfazed by a climate strongly averse to internationalism, the settlement group hosted a luncheon for

Jane Addams, where she criticized the United States‟ loss of “moral leadership” in the world, and urged Americans to work towards a “higher patriotism” based on

“internationalism.”409 The leaders took risks in an unforgiving climate to defend their own understanding of democracy and social justice. And, they took risks when choosing session leaders for these courses. Henry M. Busch, a sociologist and expert in group work, ran the forum in its first year, but Reverend and Dr. Charles C. Webber of Union

Theological Seminary, and psychologist Dr. Goodwin Watson of Teacher‟s College replaced him, heading up two separate groups in the second year. At the time of his appointment, Reverend Webber openly advocated against capitalism, and many linked him to communism throughout his life. Watson would openly celebrate social policies in

Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and anti-communists hounded both men in the 1940s.410

408 New York Times, May 15, 1921, p31. 409 New York Times, Feb 28, 1926, p8. 410 New York Times, March 22, 1982, pB10; Time Magazine, July 11, 1938; Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Dilling, The Red Network. (Kenilworth, IL: published by the author, 1934), p190, p192,and 204; Susan L. Brinson. The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941-1960, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), p96.

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Considering the antiradical tenor of the 1920s and the particular attention to protecting young people, Watson and Webber represented dangerous choices.

What at first glance seems like an effort to teach young people about morality and social issues also constituted an Americanization effort on behalf of the UNH. For decades, like International Institutes, settlements worked to “to save some of the children from demoralization,” in the words of one Americanization researcher.411 UNH record keeping demonstrated that the young people who attended the social education forum, at least in the first year, were indeed immigrants and native born children of immigrants.412

Raw assessments of one hundred and ninety eight attendees identified most as Russian

Jews, with a handful of Italian, Irish and “Christian Americans,” and an even smaller number of Germans. To settlement leaders, the very value of the group lay in the opportunity it created to gather “young people of different races, creeds…from different sections of the city.”413 Those attending came from twenty seven different houses, spanning the city‟s neighborhoods, with home addresses in all sections of New York and in New Jersey. There were slightly more young women than young men.

A quick glance over the reading list for the intensive group in 1928, focused solely on issues of sex and family life, demonstrated the course‟s immersion in contemporary and controversial discourses on sex. A list of suggested books on sex education for “children and young people” included works by Mary Ware Dennett and even Bertrand Russell,

411 Daniels, p178. Daniels argued that settlement work had to extend beyond the traditional model of helping women and children, to include men, because it is the father and the husband, “his is the deciding voice.” 412 The record keeper noted “this is not an absolutely accurate classification as it is based on the spelling of the last names and the knowledge of the general character of the nationalities frequenting a particular house.” 413 A Course in Social Education, 8-27, p1, Box Legal 65, Folder 28, UNH, SWHA.

211 pariah to American social conservatives and nervous parents. Covering “Pre-Marital

Adjustments,” leaders included controversial books by Maude Royden, Havelock Ellis and Walter Robie. Presumably Watson, as head of the intensive forum, titled the topic on marriage, “Marriage. Is it worth keeping? How is it changing?” He advised the young people to read hot button titles like Freda Kirchway‟s Our Changing Morality, Ellen

Key‟s Love and Marriage, and Judge Ben Lindsay‟s Companionate Marriage, which he described as a “conservative and popular discussion growing out of real experience.” On the “Family” topic he recommended popular titles by Ernest Groves and Miriam Van

Waters, on “Heredity and Eugenics” he recommended a range of titles including standards by Paul Popenoe, and on “Women‟s New Freedom” he suggested students read books by Dora Russell, Lorinne Pruett and Marie Stopes.

This collection of books advocated a critical view of sexuality by offering both moderate and radical titles. Watson‟s choices emphasized the many factors at stake in the cultural definitions people lived by. Viewpoints expressed by these authors demonstrated an historical understanding of sex, gender and marital practices, and a belief in cultural relativism. All in all this list of suggested titles read as a watch list of subversive books, ones, in the eyes of social conservatives, written by dangerous people working to overturn the social order.414

As well versed as these course leaders were in issues of sexuality, the backdrop of sex delinquency weighed heavily on their minds, particularly as youths revealed the array of sexual options available to them. Many felt it would be prudent to resist sexual

414 Suggested Readings for the Intensive Social Education Forum, January 24, 1928. Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA.

212 intercourse, but they felt social and intimate pressures, and wondered what to do instead.

Or, as one group leader put it, young people wanted to know the “best substitutes for marriage during the years from adolescence to the time when we can marry.”415 When pressed to answer this question themselves, participants evidenced the saturation of

American culture with all things sexual by offering a breathtaking range of possibilities they felt were available to them. Ideas earning more than ten votes from the group included platonic friendships, companionate marriage, free love, petting, homosexual crushes, and prostitution. Other less popular options included masturbation, continence, and promiscuous sex relations.416 In other words, settlement youths had their fair share of sex knowledge and sex experience, even of some alternative behaviors.

Yet, their understanding of the social pressures leading to marriage made some more conservative, particularly in regards to companionate marriage. Whether these opinions were shaped by course leaders is impossible to tell in most cases. While several participants recognized that the “new position of woman in society with her economic independence” might protect women from needing to enter marriage for her livelihood, others felt the tenuous, non-binding, companionate marriage might “be detrimental to a woman who could not be independent when the connection was severed.” Many participants revealed this fundamental awareness of the power of economic motivations,

415 Intensive Social Education Forum, Jan 23, 1928, list of sub-topics. UNH, Box 44, Folder 465; Minutes of the Social Education Course, Jan 15, 1928, p2, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 416 Minutes of the Extensive Social Education Forum, February 5th, 1928, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA.

213 acknowledging that changing economic conditions actually caused changes “in social institutions including the family.”417

Still, many young leaders within New York City‟s settlement houses maintained ethical and moral problems with the idea of companionate marriage. Companionate marriage assumed childlessness, at first, through a reliance on birth control, and thus allowed for easier divorce if the relationship soured. This scenario, some earnestly argued, might take “the beauty out of such a relationship.” Rather than embrace an ideal that enabled them to engage in sexual relations earlier, under the canopy of a wishy washy marriage commitment, participants advocated for a beautiful, loving relationship as a precedent for sexual relations, claiming that sex should encompass a “frame of mind,” not just a physical act.418 Whether through their social education discussions or from prior experience, many immigrant sons and daughters privileged the romantic aspect of marriage and sex over the base economic understanding of marriage as an institution, a development most reformers undoubtedly cheered.

Despite these romantically tinged notions of sexual intimacy, immigrant children struggled with the normative gender roles their parents inhabited. One young person asked outright if marriage could “be a relation of equals or is there bound to be a dominating and a dominated?” This provoked a “storm of argument,” according to the forum‟s secretary, who noted critically that many “European families take for granted the idea of one person dominating the other”—and so, apparently, did certain members of the course.

417 Ibid, and Social Education Course—Intensive Group, Minutes of third meeting, February 12, 1928, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 418 Ibid.

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The discussion unpacked second generation immigrants‟ assumptions about the roles of men and women in modern marriage. Some participants, much to settlement leaders‟ delight, argued vehemently in favor of the recognition of new standards for women.

They recognized with approval the markedly different position of the American woman from that of a European peasant “in her social, legal and professional status,” and in her ability and willingness to “demand more than the European wife.”419 These young people often came from homes where fathers dominated their mothers. Here, influenced by any number of American cultural trends, immigrants‟ children voiced their desire for different gender norms in marital relationships, a desire reinforced by group leaders.

Henry Busch told his group in no uncertain terms that by mid-1927 “woman demands new recognition.”420 Participants approved of birth control and sex education, tools to support woman‟s new demands.

Still, course leaders reflected a wider cultural tendency to mediate any radical sexual inclinations among settlement youth in the late 1920s. Generally, by this time, marriage reformers and social scientists tempered the rising awareness of sex for its own sake by co-opting sexual radicalism. They offered up a model of heterosexuality that encompassed some changes and cut off others. The celebration of socially enlightened heterosexual unions, ones contained within the marital framework, packaged popular sexuality as exclusively heterosexual and monogamous by the late 1920s.421 The very

419 Ibid, p4. 420 Social Education Discussion, Number Seven, April 3rd, 1927, p1, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 421 See, for example, Christina Simmons. “Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Chapter 3. Also, see Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. (New York: Free Press, 1988). They note that companionate marriage grew out of progressive reform tendency for order.

215 existence of these social education forums reflects the pervasive impulse to regulate sexuality, in this case, in the interests of social adjustment and assimilation in American culture.

And so, despite the evidence of progressive views among forum leaders, these men implicitly and sometimes explicitly redirected the sexual values and ideals of the young people in their groups. Discussion leaders tried to dampen young people‟s enthusiasm for alternative behavior. In a discussion of sexual practices, carefully, Henry Busch broached the topic of “monogamy versus free love.” Awareness of these as apparently opposing practices permeated popular culture since the early 1920s, representing the

“good” ideology of Americanism versus the “bad” ideology of Bolshevism. Busch steered clear of this, avoiding mention of such ideological associations. Instead he cited the personal experiences of a friend, an anthropologist, someone who “thought and worked on polygamous theories for some time.” This friend concluded, ultimately, according to Busch, that non-monogamous relationships never endured. If a relationship was a “happy one,” he said, “it inevitably tends toward marriage, if unhappy toward speedy separation. Psychologically we are so constituted, that our emotional roots are definitely linked up with the roots of jealous feeling. If a man really loves a woman, his only desire is toward a monogamous existence.”422 Love and contentment constituted only monogamy, according to Busch, who in this moment might have exploded such assumptions, even a little bit. The strength and persuasiveness of the accommodation of sexual modernism and the celebration of heterosexuality shines through here in Busch‟s rationalization.

422 Social Education Discussion, Number Seven, April 3rd, 1927, p1, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA

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Even under pressure from his group participants, Busch overtly advocated for the desirability of chastity before marriage, and of monogamy within it, effectively acknowledging the power of sex while working to contain it. In a discussion of the “right and wrong” of petting Busch quoted psychologist Max Exler to inform participants that

“promiscuous petting before marriage” was a bad habit, one that could overwhelm emotionally and more significantly lead to “an unhappy marriage.” As he made this assertion, a group member interrupted, arguing that Busch‟s claim “implies that marriage as we have it now, is a good institution.” This, the participant claimed, was debatable.

Some of these young people felt that because marriage as they knew it operated as the dominant model they should all work to “uphold it,” mostly to protect any children produced by such unions. Others thought it difficult to devote their lives to just one person, regardless of the complications involved in disregarding traditional marriage.

Ultimately, while one could find happiness with any number of people, Busch conceded, after making a choice, “the greatest happiness and the best adjustment lies in sticking to that choice.” 423 He once again reinforced the heterosexual model, pushing permanency over young people‟s expressed interest in other alternatives.

The frankness with which these settlement youths discussed the real usefulness of marriage in their own lives, and of the naturalness of monogamy, demonstrates the modern tenor of the times they lived in. Yet, the fact that many believed marriage should be upheld simply because it was the “dominant model” clearly evidenced the power of efforts to shore up the marriage institution. These young supporters of the status quo were assimilating to an appropriately Americanized view of the marriage relation.

423 Ibid, p3-4.

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The young people participating in the social education forums dictated much of the substance of these discussions with candor, honesty and openness, embracing the genuine utility of the exercise. They enjoyed the opportunity, surely a rare one, to gather and discuss such delicate and challenging topics with a group of their peers, and with an able leader. One participant thanked Charles Webber, leader of the extensive group in 1928 and 1929, for his ability to promote an environment for listening and discussion, where all could “feel at our ease.” She enjoyed the discussion “immensely,” and particularly benefited from the sessions on “sex relationships” and “race problems.”424 Another respondent concurred that the subject she would most like to have continued studying was the “social relationships of both sexes.”425 Participants keenly felt the need for open discussion about sex. They concluded that the much discussed marriage crisis of their era stemmed from a general unfamiliarity with what Watson called “the workings of human nature,” a problem many felt would be rectified by sex education at home and in schools and other settings.426

For UNH leaders who problematized the sexuality of immigrant sons and daughters, sexual and moral order were at stake in their Americanization plans. Accounts of discussions at the social education forum meetings demonstrate an in depth and sweeping awareness of the issues and struggles surrounding modern sexuality and gender norms in the late 1920s. Forum leaders and the settlements that sponsored these discussions consciously worked to help confused young people, many of whom lived in homes with

424 Social Education Group Questionnaire, submitted by Ella Kuchnia [in extensive group 1928], Grace Chapel Settlement. Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 425 Social Education Committee, Questionnaire, submitted by Rose Cohen [year uncertain], Federation Settlement. Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA. 426 Social Education Course—Intensive Group, Minutes of third meeting, February 12, 1928, Box 44, Folder 465, UNH, SWHA.

218 unassimilated immigrant parents, adjust to the dizzying changes in sexual mores and gender norms. They hoped to educate participants on exactly how a good American young adult should approached sex and marriage.

Yet, these courses pushed immigrant sons and daughters to assimilate to American society through sexuality, a project inherently heterosexual and coercive by nature.

These forums inscribed regulatory notions of sexuality and of gender norms in the service of Americanization. The desire to assimilate these young people, to facilitate their impeded adjustment to American culture, spurred the development of the social education courses to begin with. Participants read modern, up to date books on the most radical of ideas, and could freely discuss all of them. However, ultimately, discussion leaders used the forums to set standards, and this setting of standards took on particular importance when unassimilated parents could not do so. This process allowed young people to forge a middle path between the old values of their families and the new ones of modern culture. So, while the thrust of the social education program exhibited an embrace by

UNH leaders of sexual modernism, like other groups working in the interests of national strength, their directives upheld the primacy of heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the privileged location for sexual activity.

Postwar Americanizers continued to privilege the home as an assimilative space, yet their work was informed by new discourses on the significance of culture, adolescence, nativism, antiradicalism, and sex modernism. Believing in the changeability of immigrants, and recognizing the powerful role the home life played in shaping behaviors and attitudes, progressive Americanization workers created programs designed to affect

219 intimate and personal transformations within the private sphere. Americanization through the family perpetuated assimilation to American life, but it also fixed popular standards and values on family life. Amidst a period of perceived family crisis, as urbanization, industrialization, and consumerism ravaged traditional family behaviors and hierarchies, in the immigrant communities they served, these social workers strongly asserted the power of the family as an institution of social control. By problematizing the behavior of immigrant daughters, building on concerns about sex delinquency and the pitfalls of adolescence, reformers bolstered the authority of their parents. Fundamentally these groups sought to avoid intervention by the state, and instead tried to re-invest the family with the power to facilitate adjustment, control and conformity.

Working class immigrant daughters experimented with heterosexuality outside the bounds of the private sphere since the turn of the century, but the sex modernism they helped to spawn only caught up with the middle class in the 1920s. Seeing through this new lens, informed by widespread popular discussion amongst intellectuals and reformers, settlement workers identified sexuality as a site of potential maladjustment, and a legitimate space for Americanization. Intimate discussions among group leaders and immigrants‟ children allowed those young people to confront the confusing array of sexual and gender expectations they faced, and to learn proper American behaviors.

The stability of the social order, once again in the antiradical decade of the 1920s, depended here on the successful Americanization of the family. This successful assimilation depended on the adjustment of disruptive immigrant daughters, and on the ability of unassimilated young people to understand and control their sexuality.

Americanization, even at the hands of liberal reformers in the settlement house tradition,

220 was at base a project of cultural conformity. Each of these organization pushed assimilation by urging understanding of, and conformity to, the values and standards necessary in the proper governance of families and the maintenance of heterosexual norms.

Chapter Five “The Perils Ahead Are Moral Not Economic”: Modern Culture, Modern Marriage, and the Evolution of Antiradicalism After 1924

In 1925 future president Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce and sponsor of the

Better Homes in America movement, marked a shift in national concerns when he penned an article for a right wing antiradical magazine. Considering the nation‟s prosperity after the war, with better living and work conditions and increased leisure time, Hoover believed Americans should be moving forward in civilization. But, “this great growth of national prosperity together with the loosening of moral and spiritual standards by the war,” gave him pause. He saw this conflict in “weakening moral fibre, in loosening family and home ties, in youthful criminality, in the easy breaking of law by adults, in growing intolerance, in a leaning upon the state without corresponding willingness to bear its burdens.” “Thus,” he insisted, “the perils ahead are moral, not economic.”427

Hoover suggested that Americans work to strengthen the country‟s moral fiber in the face of crumbling guards of morality like schools, the home, and religion, particularly in the face of materialism and its opposite, the “communist revolt.”428

By 1924 nervous capitalists and statesmen, champions of the old order of things, could rest more easily. The revolutionary spirit did not catch fire and engulf the capitalist world after Russian Bolshevists lit the spark. The United States settled into what one

427 “The Perils Ahead Are Moral, Not Economic,” Herbert Hoover, in National Republic, Vol 13, No 9, Dec 1925, p16. 428 Ibid, p57. 221

222 historian terms “the quiet of victory,” and the concerns and the interests of the lower classes faded from national prominence.429 Antiradical efforts coupled with economic hard times after the war kept most workers from joining radical labor organizations, and corporations kept unions at bay for much of the remainder of the decade.430 Emergency postwar legislation restricting immigration culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, and a range of programs existed to adjust, or coerce, immigrants already in the United

States to an American way of life. Alien radicals and communist workers, the two most prominent threats during the Red Scare years of 1919-1922, no longer jeopardized

American stability, prosperity, and social cohesion. As these threats faded into the background, concern over the moral values in America weighed on many people‟s minds.

Yet, despite this return to political and economic stability, reactions to the election of

1924 demonstrate that radicalism too, weighed heavily on Americans‟ minds. Towering liberal reformer from Wisconsin Robert La Follette ran for president with the Progressive

Party in 1924 as a third party candidate, against incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge and Democratic candidate John W. Davis. La Follette had the support of many organized women and the support of Socialists. La Follette‟s candidacy led some Americans to view the election as a referendum on radicalism despite the country‟s settling into the

429 Robert Wiebe, Self Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p134. Wiebe argues throughout this book that between 1914 and 1924 a new national order coalesced, with a national class, a local middle class, and a lower class. This process, he claims, undermined American democracy, diluted the nation‟s conception of the “people,” and siphoned expression from politics to personal life. 430 Kim Nielsen. Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001), p47-48

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“quiet of victory.” One Massachusetts man told his local newspaper frankly, “I prefer silence and success to socialism and bolshevism…I prefer Coolidge to chaos.”431

The election of 1924 is significant in part because La Follette, and the specter of chaos, lost, and Coolidge won, further cementing Americans‟ sense of political and social stability. This assurance of political stability gave patriots and social conservatives the room to shift their focus more fully to the moral problems in their midst. However, the election is also important because it revealed that links between radicalism and sex and gender disorder were embedded in political rhetoric. Anti-radicals made these political connections many times in the past, but in the “new era” of the 1920s they carried a little more sting. The Nation satirized this tendency in an editorial titled “Please Save the

Republic!” With tongue in cheek Nation editors informed readers that they printed, early, the “dispatches” Americans should expect to see in the coming weeks leading up to the election.

In these fake dispatches one can see the firmly established use of anxieties about family, sex and gender in political rhetoric in 1924, inspired by Bolshevism and used here to target Progressives. Editors prophesied that Democratic candidate John W. Davis would inform an Illinois audience that really, La Follette stood for “the destruction of the

American home.” Fictionally quoting Davis, editors wrote, “I have excellent grounds” to prove that if elected, La Follette will pass laws “compelling every woman to wear bobbed hair,” order the “rearing of all infants in public institutions, after the plan of the Russian

Communists.”432 And Coolidge, running for re-election as a Republican, would declare

431 “Gleanings from Political Arena in General.” The Fulton Patriot. October 31, 1923. 432 The Nation, October 1, 1924, Vol 119, No 3091, p326.

224 that “the Progressive effort to establish free love in America” would be “rebuked at the polls.”433 While Nation editors provoked laughter with these mocking phrases, they reveal that by the middle of the decade the Red Scare inspired rhetoric of antiradicals still held weight. Once again the sanctified private home, replete with monogamous marriage, stood as a twin pillar of civilization with a capitalist democratic government.

As these images suggest, antiradicals continued their work in the mid to late 1920s, relying on well developed assumptions about radical and sexual disorder to claim that radicalism weakened family life and the marriage relation in a decade when these two institutions seemed vulnerable. In the years after the war, even as the labor movement quieted and immigration restriction took effect, Americans on the whole experienced dizzying and unsettling changes. Shifts in women‟s status, the popularity of the automobile, Prohibition, the arrival of mass culture, the rise of psychoanalysis, the emergence of a youth culture and the increased visibility of sex represent but a few of the new features of an increasingly modern culture. The rippling effects of these forces led many to fear for the stability of family and marriage ties, a concern seemingly borne out in the doubling of the divorce rate between 1910 and 1928.434

While some Americans embraced these changes, many social conservatives interpreted them as products of radicalism, and they feared the crumbling of families might serve as a vehicle for the complete overthrow of the capitalist democratic system.

Fearing that social disorder would translate into political disorder, antiradicals identified a wide range of disruptive individuals and groups in the mid to late 1920s. Targeted

433 Ibid. 434 Ronald Allen Goldberg. America in the Twenties. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), see Chapter 5, statistic on p94.

225 groups included social welfare activists, progressive educators, leftist writers on sex, and marriage reformers.

The Red Scare defined the ways that social conservatives shaped and perceived

Americanism throughout the 1920s, particularly as Americans began to fear nefarious changes to the social fabric. As Captain George L Darte, head of a patriotic veteran‟s group, acknowledged at the DAR‟s National Conference in 1927, “I have no fear of a

Red Army taking possession of our country by force of arms. It doesn‟t have to be done that way!” “The same results can be accomplished,” he warned, through “Social

Revolution.”435 Witnessing the overturn of traditional sex codes and the marriage tie,

Darte easily connected these changes to a larger threat against private property, democracy and the capitalist system. And so, faced with changing manners and morals in the mid and late 1920s, conservative groups continued to frame healthy citizenship versus pathological citizenship with references to Bolshevism, even when they did not refer to the Russian system by name.

Thus, the impulse to shore up and defend the private middle class family ideal guided the development of antiradicalism in the 1920s. Maternalist reformers working to construct a social welfare state, many of whom lent their energies to the thriving movement for peace, found themselves and their work disparaged. Concern over the work of these reformers led antiradical conservatives to identify young people as a group particularly endangered by radicalism. The disorderly youth culture emerging in the

1920s existed in part, according to antiradicals, because of the influence of radical ideas

435 Capt George L Darte. Address on Subversive Influences, at DAR Congress, Washington, D.C. April 21, 1927, p14. Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter referred to as SCPC), Records of Women‟s International League for Peace and Freedom (hereafter referred to as WILPF), Series I, 1, Box 2.

226 in schools and in colleges. Radical sex writers on the left further stoked the flames of conservatives‟ anxiety. And yet, antiradicals engaged directly only with the more modest marriage reformers. Social and political conservatives believed that these groups, through their practical efforts to reshape sexuality and marriage norms, truly paved the way for radicalism to take root in America. Through the lens of their Red Scare anti-

Bolshevism, these groups upped the ante and joined the larger chorus of reformers and reactionaries enforcing heterosexuality by the late 1920s.

“Miss Bolsheviki”: Social Welfare Reform and the Threat to Patriarchal Authority

Back in the height of the Red Scare, antifeminists and antiradicals identified women flirting with radical doctrines as problematic, and they condemned those women for entertaining revolution in their parlors. Ralph Easley, fiercely anti-radical head of the

National Civic Federation, mentioned several times in late 1919 that the Department of

Justice was spying on a “score of wealthy New York women” for aiding convicted criminals and radicals, and for financially supporting radical presses and pamphlet publications intended to spark the overthrow of the government. These “educated and criminally sentimental, notoriety seeking women,” Easley argued, belonged “if not in jails at least in psychopathic wards,” for they were “infinitely more dangerous and more guilty than are these poor, ignorant foreigners who are bearing the brunt of all the prosecutions.”436 Accusations like these appeared frequently during the Scare.

436 Address of Ralph M. Easley at Metropolitan Club, NYC, October 20, 1919. p2-3. New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series XV, A, Box 490, Folder 38, on Microfilm Reel 419.

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The association between middle class and upper class female activists and radicalism continued to develop in the 1920s, as antiradicals broadly accused all women reformers of weakening the patriarchal private family and thus making way for more political radicalism to develop. Antiradical groups, also mostly made up of women, attacked these reformers relentlessly.437 These reformers, or “pinks,” as they were often called, signifying their status as slightly less menacing than reds, were women‟s rights advocates, pacifists, and bearers of the maternalist tradition established during the

Progressive era.

The actions of pacifist women in particular spawned the War Department‟s infamous spider web chart, which then maligned all women reformers in the 1920s. Lucia

Maxwell, librarian of the Chemical Warfare Service, a branch of the War Department, created the chart in 1923. Hoping to smear pacifist women calling for reductions in military appropriations, Maxwell created a chart to visually demonstrate the “interlocking directorates” of women‟s organizations working to undermine national security. The chart included seventeen women‟s organizations and twenty one individual women, representing pacifism, social welfare, politics, education, and religion. A poem, written by Maxwell, appeared at the bottom of the page, including lines like “Miss Bolsheviki has come to town with a Russian cap and a German gown.” Records from the branch indicate that groups like the American Defense Society received copies, along with J.

Edgar Hoover, before Henry Ford‟s Dearborn Independent published the chart along with a series of articles attacking women‟s alleged radicalism, bringing it public in March

437 Nielsen, p48. Nielsen argues that the blend of Red Scare antiradicalism and antifeminism fueled by these motives fostered the rise of right wing women‟s groups, led to the failure of progressive social welfare legislation, and demonized progressive women throughout the 1920s.

228 of 1924.438 An outcry by women‟s groups exploded in the aftermath of the Dearborn

Independent articles, and ultimately Secretary of War John Weeks apologized and ordered all charts destroyed, but the information found in those charts formed the foundation for countless antiradical lectures and pamphlets smearing activist women in the years to come.439

Social welfare reformers earned even more conservative wrath because they challenged antiradicals‟ desire for strong, patriarchal, private families removed from the prying eyes and meddling hands of the government. Social conservatives, antiradicals, and critics of big government feared that social welfare reformers would bring about

“paternalism.” While progressive women activists envisioned their work as an extension of their maternal instinct, a form of social housekeeping in the Progressive tradition, conservatives viewed these same efforts in light of the loss of authority of the male head of household.440 Radicals used the term paternalism to malign social welfare legislation because it installed the government as the collective father and husband, metaphorically, or in some cases actually, stripping individual fathers and husbands of their control.

Fears of paternalism existed before antiradicals used the term in this context, but to them and to their 1920s audience, the term had meaning particularly in the context of

Bolshevik Soviet family policies, well known to many Americans.

In an effort to solidify and protect individual men‟s power over that of the

438 Joan Jensen. “All Pink Sisters: The War Department and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s,” in Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen eds, Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920-1940. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), p212. 439 See Elizabeth McCausland, “The Blue Menace.” Springfield, MA: The Springfield Republican, 1928; Nielsen, p76. Carrie Chapman Catt defended women activists of all kinds in a series of rebuttal articles in the Woman Citizen, in April, May, September, October and November of 1924, and then in January of 1926. 440 For example, see Molly Ladd Taylor. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

229 government, determined and well organized right wing groups effectively attacked progressive women, and some men, squelching their social welfare activism. The conservative front consisted of a few primary organizations, including the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Public Interest League, the American

Defense Society, the American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, the

National Security League, the Woman Patriot, the Sentinels of the Republic and Fred

Marvin, a professional writer and super patriot.441 By the late 1920s liberal observers began referring to attacks by these groups as the “blue menace,” a reference to the aristocratic leanings of many DAR women, and a tongue in cheek counterpoint to the much decried red menace. 442 In the interests of limited government and strong national defense, in addition to their genuine desire to nullify the effects of feminism in the United

States, these groups waged war on the agenda of new women in the post-suffrage decade.

On the most basic of levels, social welfare reformers troubled conservatives and antiradicals because they troubled the traditional gender order. In an in depth analysis,

John Spargo examined the characteristics of women interested in radical, or even merely progressive, politics. Spargo, a former socialist, criticized Bolshevism as fraudulent system from the start, and he sought to understand and discourage the radical leanings of

Americans sympathetic with the Bolshevist system. Focusing on upper and middle class women, a group commonly referred to as parlor Bolsheviks, Spargo drew on popular

441 This list, which is just a few representative groups, comes from my own research and from the work of Kim Nielsen in Un-American Womanhood, p74. This point about antiradicals limiting progressive women‟s effectiveness is at the heart of Nielsen‟s Un-American Womanhood and Joan Jensen‟s article, “All Pink Sisters.” 442 See McCausland, “The Blue Menace.”; Oswald Garrison Villard, “What the Blue Menace Means,” Harpers Magazine, October 1928, Vol 157, p529-540; The Nation, April 18, 1928, Vol 126, No 3276, p422.

230 understandings of psychological jargon in his analysis, claiming that he found evidence of sexual and gender dysfunction. According to his findings, women with radical leanings suffered from “hyperesthesia,” and their “sexual life” was “arrested” or

“abnormal.” He went on, “They have been thwarted in love and remained unmarried, their normal desires being starved, or if married they are sterile.” This life devoid of heterosexuality and motherhood rendered them “remorselessly analytical and they find constant exercise in the dissection of social institutions, laws and customs, in exposing the multitudinous imperfections of these.”443 By way of contrast, explained in part by his own past, Spargo found radicalism among working men to be masculine and reasonable.

His characterization of the non-laboring female radical sounded a lot like the post war

New Woman in general, the feminist, or the spinster who dared to ponder social ills;

Spargo was not alone when he portrayed these women as deficient, mentally and sexually. Spargo‟s descriptions also implied a hint of awareness of lesbianism when he categorized parlor Bolsheviks as uninterested in men. In a period where many cultural forces worked to de-legitimize women‟s separatist activism, in some instances by calling it sexually perverse, Spargo‟s descriptions did much of the same work. Years later, when editors of the right wing Woman Patriot bitterly fought to prevent the renewal of the

Sheppard Towner Act, they quoted an angry Grange leader who, in denouncing the Child

Labor Amendment for the way it would affect his children‟s ability to work on his own farm, angrily declared that pinks hoped to install a “congressional mother,” who was

443John Spargo, “The Psychology of Parlor Bolsheviki,” Worlds Work, January, 1920, p.130. See also John Spargo. The Psychology of Bolshevism, 1919.

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“probably a spinster,” in place of rightful heterosexually successful mothers. 444 Again, conservatives used pinks‟ sexuality as fodder against them.

While cries of sexual maladjustment among female reformers came easily to antiradicals, their attacks on the substance of women‟s work revealed the full measure of their concerns about radicalism and family life. These groups denigrated social welfare measures as communist measures, exploiting Americans‟ growing concerns about men‟s authority and privacy in the family unit. Realizing the utility of attacking women‟s groups as Bolshevik, and thus marking them as dangerous, conservative and patriotic groups used this strategy to purposefully scuttle what they saw as a paternalistic social welfare agenda. By crying “bolshevism” these groups attacked and rather successfully blocked national legislation benefiting women and children, measures advanced by the

“female dominion,” to borrow Robyn Muncy‟s phrase.445 One prominent group declared opposition to social welfare to be good Americanism, calling the task of informing women of radicalism‟s hidden dangers the “Need of Americanization among American

Women.”446

When a group of women, mostly from Massachusetts, put forward Herculean efforts to stop the ratification of the Child Labor Amendment in late 1924, they used this

444 The board of directors of the Woman Patriot Publishing Company sent in a lengthy petition to block the renewal of the “Maternity Act,” with Senator Thomas Bayard read in to the Congressional Record. Congressional Record, Sixty Ninth Congress, First Session, Maternity and Infancy Act, Remarks of Hon. Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, in the Senate of the United States, p34. Papers of the National Women‟s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders (hereafter referred to as WTUL), Library of Congress, Microfilm Edition. Mary Anderson Papers, Reel 4, Correspondence and Papers on Special Topics: Accusations of Radicalism. 445 See Robyn Muncy. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 446 Massachusetts Public Interests League, Inc. “The Need of Americanization Among American Women,” Massachusetts Public Interests League Records (hereafter referred to as MPIL) Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter referred to as MHS), Microfilm Reel 1.

232 strategy. A committee calling itself the Citizens‟ Committee to Protect Our Homes and

Children acknowledged the basic need to prevent children from foundering in factories, but still railed against giving “the power to Congress to take away the rights of parents and to bring about the nationalization of their children.”447 Devoid of patriarchal power, families might fall apart, they argued. Other Americans agreed. Popular news magazine

The Literary Digest sounded a similar note in early 1925, reprinting a snippet from the

Detroit News pointing out that, “What this country could do with nicely is a little bit less paternalism in government and a little more in homes.”448

By using similar tactics, a broad coalition of patriotic and conservative groups prevented the renewal of the Sheppard Towner Act in 1927. The Act, passed in 1921, provided federal funding for maternity, child health and welfare programs, and was the first piece of federal social welfare legislation. Created and administered by progressive women, the Act worked to reduce infant and maternal mortality rates through education and preventative health care. Board members and editors of the Woman Patriot newspaper announced before Congress, in efforts to prevent the Amendment‟s renewal, that radical social welfare reformers sought to “open the Constitution to nationalized, standardized, centralized control of children, youth, and women by Mrs. Kelley and Miss

Abbott,” two directors of the federal Children‟s Bureau.449

The national apparatus of the “maternity bill,” as they called it, appeared to antiradicals as a communist inspired attempt to supplant patriarchal authority with

447 Vote NO on Referendum 7, Citizen‟s Committee to Protect Our Homes and Children, MPIL, MHS, Microfilm Reel 1. 448 Literary Digest, January 31, 1925, p15. 449 Congressional Record, Sixty Ninth Congress, First Session, Maternity and Infancy Act, Remarks of Hon. Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, in the Senate of the United States, p12.

233 government authority. Complaining about the tentacles of government influence the Act created, a judge warned Americans of the “abyss of communism,” claiming that the

“parlor Bolsheviki want to regulate our birth, supervise our schooling…limit the hours of our work and our play, and approve our burial.”450 Social welfare measures knocked marriage and sexual values off their foundations, patriots and social conservatives felt, giving credence to the notion that capitalism and the private middle class family mutually reinforced one another. Ultimately, these groups claimed, social welfare measures would make “women and children the wards of the state,” which would then “remove the

„economic foundations‟ of marriage and or morality.”451

Antiradicals and social conservatives targeted maternalist reformers in the 1920s because their work strengthened the government‟s regulatory power and authority over private family life. Americans harbored suspicions of paternalism, of government overreach, since the country‟s inception, but this particular criticism of paternalism came from staunchly anti-Bolshevik and antifeminist groups seeking to reinforce the gender order. Social welfare reformers, they believed, only served to weaken the power of the patriarchal family unit, endangering not only men‟s authority but the morality and well being of women and children too. The changes afoot in American society and culture in the 1920s only amplified their fears.

450 Honorable Floyd E. Thompson. The Abyss of Communism, Address reprinted by the MPIL. MPIL, MHS, Microfilm Reel 1. 451 Congressional Record, Sixty Ninth Congress, First Session, Maternity and Infancy Act, Remarks of Hon. Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, in the Senate of the United States, p24.

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Seeing the “Revolt of Youth” through Antiradical Eyes

“A first class revolt” took place in the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only

Yesterday, his acclaimed “informal history” of the decade, but it was one “with which

Nikolai Lenin had nothing whatever to do.” Instead, Allen pointed out, “the shock troops of the rebellion were not alien agitators but the sons and daughters of well-to-do

American families, who knew little about Bolshevism and cared distinctly less.”452 Yet, anxious social conservatives surveying the behaviors of these rebellious young people were less certain. The cultural impact of Bolshevism, they felt, was changing social values in America, wearing down moral restraint amongst the young. After all, as Allen himself acknowledged, Americans “were still shivering at the Red Menace when they awoke to the no less alarming Problem of the Younger Generation.” Even if these

Americans were unsure about whether their democratic government was in danger, most felt sure that “the moral code of the country certainly was.”453

Antiradicals honed in on the “problem of the younger generation” as a primary site to hash out their differences with progressive and radical American activists and intellectuals, connecting the breakdown of moral codes to the influence of radicalism.

Traditionalists and conservatives logically focused on young people as the whole country keened over changing “manners and morals.” One historian of young people in America

452 Frederick Lewis Allen. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties. (New York: Bantam Books, 1946), p106. Allen‟s account was originally published just after the decade came crashing to a close, in 1931. 453 Ibid.

235 explains, “youth suddenly became a social problem in the 1920s.”454 While a range of social and economic conditions led to rebellion among young people, antiradicals interpreted these changes firmly in the context of their antiradicalism. As the DAR‟s

National Chairman explained in an article on radicalism, the “revolt of youth” constituted the “most sinister feature of communism, anarchism and revolution.”455

Exposure to radical doctrines like Bolshevism and Socialism weakened the morals of young people, and would ultimately weaken the resolve of the nation to battle radicalism.

Americans wrung their hands over youth culture in the postwar decade for a number of reasons, ones that existed before the war‟s end. Falling birth rates, especially among women in urban, white collar homes, meant that there were fewer children in the United

States than in previous decades. This allowed middle class families to focus on their children more, financially and emotionally.456 These children found spaces where they could identify themselves in relation to their peers in expanding educational opportunities. General prosperity kept more and more children in high schools and out of the work force, and the increasing need for educated workers in an increasingly corporate economic environment helped to dramatically increase attendance in high schools and in secondary schools between 1900 and 1930. The gathering of young people in greater numbers in schools, together with a spreading national media culture of movies, magazines, and advertisements, helped to increase the sheer visibility of young people as

454 Paula Fass. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p13-16 (quote is from p13). 455 Mrs. William S. Walker. “Keep Yourself Informed About Radicalism.” The National Republic, Vol 13, no 4, (1927), p25. 456 Joshua Zeitz. The Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), p44-46.

236 a group.457 For many, this group came to represent modernity itself, for better or worse.458

Antiradicals had a difficult time accepting the arrival of modernity in American culture, for they understood it as an advance of radicalism. These groups decried the influence of pinks on college campuses, claiming that radical professors had an agenda: to convert college students in to communists and socialists. Young people represented a vulnerability in American society, to them, a group in desperate need of protection.

Prolific antiradical writer and National Security League member Joseph Cashman argued in 1927 before a group of women that “college-trained men and women constituted the most dangerous element in the Communist movement,” and that at this time, these

“renegade Americans” preached radical doctrines instead of those “foreigners who formerly upheld them.”459

Conservatives of all stripes, in a variety of roles, conceptualized American youth as a viable and significant battleground in the fight against radicalism. Professional patriot

Fred Marvin warned that pacifists “poisoned students‟ minds,” fostering the love of internationalism over patriotism.460 Mrs. William Sherman Walker, a nationally prominent DAR leader, warned a woman‟s Republican club in 1927 that radicals supported Bolshevism, Communism and Socialism, all three the same, through “a well defined children‟s movement,” never missing an opportunity to “slip into the schools,

457 Fass, p124; Zeitz, p44-46. 458 Fass, p128. 459 New York Times, January 28, 1927, p19. 460Army and Navy Journal, May 22, 1926, p908, SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 3. See also Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, p248.

237 colleges and universities.”461 Young people, they reasoned, future middle and upper class pillars of capitalism, were uniquely poised to reject or embrace the moral tenets of the old order.

An obsession with the values transmitted through the educational system emerged most prominently in regard to colleges and universities, where the costs of moral breakdown resulting from radicalism would be most dear. Antiradicals found a wealth of subversive elements on campuses. Patriotic groups produced a number of pamphlets warning parents of the dangers of radicalism in colleges in the postwar decade.

Organizations like the National Civic Federation and the American Defense Society strenuously objected to alleged radical college professors, to socialist clubs, and to a seemingly consistent rotation of speakers addressing issues like socialism, modernism in

American culture, pacifism, feminism, and social welfare.462 Writing for the Better

America Federation of California, a well funded and highly visible antiradical organization on the west coast, Woodworth Clum declared no need to fear the “bomb- throwing, bullet-shooting anarchist,” but he warned of the “subtle, highly intellectual, pink variety that is boring into the very heart of America” in the class rooms of colleges and universities.463 Clum spun a tale of “pink professors” striving to convert students to socialism through courses in sociology, political science, and economics. He urged

461 Seattle Times, August 1927, clipping from Luce‟s Press Clipping Bureau. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 2. 462 Easley received letters of support for his work exposing the radicalism of the youth movement in 1923 from the Massachusetts Public Interest League, Iowa State Teachers College, and The Woman Patriot. He also received an acknowledgement and a promise to share information on subversion in youth programs from head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series XV, A, Box 491, Folders 17, on Microfilm Reel 420. 463Woodworth Clum. Making Socialists Out of College Students. A Story of Professors and Other Collegians Who Hobnob with Radicals. Los Angeles: Better American Federation, 1920. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society Records, Tamiment 048; Film R-7124, Reel 28, Frame XII:27, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU

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American parents to shake themselves out of their complacency, to recognize the danger of the “pink variety” of radicals.464

These groups feared the social implications of radicalism would generate political consequences. The National Association for Constitutional Government announced that the “movement” in American colleges, carried by groups like the Intercollegiate Socialist

Society and the National Student Forum, to study alternatives to capitalism and democracy amounted to nothing more than “socialists and Bolshevists” working to attack

“religion, morality, patriotism and all authority in general.”465 Woodward Clum warned that radicalism on campuses would create “social revolution” in the classroom. 466 The

American Defense Society, in their own pamphlet on youth and radicalism authored by

R.M. Whitney, condemned what he saw as the common goal of unruly youth and the

“Liberalists, Socialists, Pacifists, Internationalists, Intelligentzia and Communists alike:”

“„the new social order.‟”467

Parents also harbored fears about their children‟s exposure to radicalism outside of the protection of home. A mother and father, familiar with “Socialism and Bolshevism,” wrote to National Civic Federation head Ralph Easley for advice on how best to protect their five college aged children. Clearly the potential power of radicalism weighed heavily on their minds; they felt fairly certain that “doctrines of economic determinism”

464 Ibid, Frame XII: 23. 465 What is the Youth Movement in Our Colleges? Washington DC: National Association for Constitutional Government, nd, p2. The pamphlet was written after 1923 according to references in the text. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 1. 466 Clum, Frame XII: 23. 467 R.M. Whitney. The Youth Movement in America. New York: American Defense Society, nd, p3. While there is no date of publication, the pamphlet was definitely written post-1923.

239 led to “atheism and the destruction of the family.”468 Another father wrote directly to the president of his daughter‟s school, Smith College, in outrage after receiving a letter from her reporting that Harry Laidler, head of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, addressed the student body. The Honorable Sanford W. Smith, of Albany, New York, excoriated

President Neilson for allowing Laidler to speak, writing “I bitterly resent her being subjected” to such “surreptitious propaganda,” noting that other parents would wholeheartedly resent it as well.469 When Nielsen defended the College‟s desire to expose young women to all sides of every issue, another parent responded, asking what might prevent the school from justifying “similar audiences for apostles of polygamy, free love, birth control, anti-church, anti-marriage, Bolshevism and anarchy.”470

The concerns of parents, conservatives, capitalists, and patriots, as this letter demonstrates, extended beyond the political or economic consequences of youth‟s exposure to radicalism to include sexual and moral consequences. These nervous groups made the leap that Frederick Lewis Allen, in retrospect, denied, between Bolshevism and changing manners and morals. In popular culture, young people symbolized the rapidity and totality of change in America. The well worn connections between Bolshevism,

Socialism and Communism on the one hand, and free love, nationalization of women, and the disintegration of the family on the other, substantially shaped the way nervous groups articulated their concerns about young people because these tropes reflected the actual concerns of many parents at this moment.

468 Pamphlets on Socialism, Communism, Bolshevism, etc. Microfilm at Library of Congress. Reel 3, Vol 7, No 34. 469 Socialism, Schools, and Colleges, [Printer‟s Proofs], 1920, p9169…3 New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series XV, A, Box 490, Folder 41, on Microfilm Reel 419. 470 Ibid, p9169…4.

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Changes in actual sexual behavior constituted the most unsettling element of this youth culture. Middle class young people embraced dating rituals popularized by the working class, removing courtship from the influence of parents and accentuating the role sex played in their lives. Their cultivation of these new sexual norms fundamentally challenged Victorian codes of conduct, for young women in particular. This “sexualized youth culture,” as one historian calls them, celebrated their right to freedom and individuality, desires both spurred and fulfilled by consumer culture rather than by any overt political inclinations.471 In studies and surveys young people freely admitted to sexual experimentation before marriage. Progressives cheered their social advances, and traditionalists found their worst fears confirmed.472

Evidence of youth out of control pervaded popular culture in the 1920s. Countless newspaper and magazine articles warned young people, and young women in particular, to steer clear of petting parties. A Board of Education investigation in Chicago condemned the effect of the automobile, claiming, “these are loaded with girls and boys and then begins a round of cabarets, jazz reports, tea shops and roadhouses.”473 A well to do preacher‟s wife lamented that “ten years ago a girl‟s reputation would be utterly gone if it were known that she had been in a man‟s hotel room…Now her obvious reason for going there is „to get a drink.‟”474 In 1927 a group of seventy five university, college and high school deans met to discuss the problems of the “modern girl,” noting her tendency to challenge the authority of the church, the school, and the home. Making matters

471 Christina Simmons. Making Marriage Modern. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p110. 472 Zeitz, p44-46. 473 New York Times, January 18, 1922, p8. 474 New York Times, January 23, 1921, p41.

241 worse, they cried, was “this matter of sex.”475 Jane Addams recalled the frustrations of parents over the “wildness of their sons,” and the horror of a college president who discovered that “many young girls were freely discussing the theory that every woman was entitled to sexual experience, aside from marriage.”476 The new “social order” antiradicals feared, one where young people shrugged off parental guidance and broke free of moral restraints, seemed frighteningly close to reality.

Concerned and conservative parents and other observers saw the roots of these changes in campus life. A parent wrote to Smith College President Nielsen to complain about the use of a book by Bertrand Russell, calling his writing a vehicle for “free love” and sex perversion, issues he felt had no place in a women‟s college.477 A prominent antiradical crusader and head of the Massachusetts Public Interest League condemned the use of Russell‟s book at Smith College, and in “176 other schools and colleges,” claiming that it “condoned both sex perversion and adultery.”478 Ralph Easley, of the National

Civic Federation, sang much the same tune when addressing a group of bankers in New

York City in September of 1928, explaining why his concerns about radicalism now extended well beyond basic labor troubles. Easley read aloud a letter from a Club member:

One of the most serious, though not apparent, efforts of the Soviet Government at this moment is a systematized, organized movement, emanating directly from Soviet Russia, to undermine the morale of the boys and girls in colleges all over the country. Nothing is a more serious menace to our civilization than the attempts to break down

475 Chicago Daily Tribune, October 22, 1927, p15. 476 New York Times, June 30 1926, p12. 477 Dangerous Doctrines Being Suggested to Youth. Pamphlet reprinted from “National Bulletin” of the Military Order of the World War, Dec, 1925, p4. Helen Tufts Bailie Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. , p4. 478 Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1927, p2.

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the reticence, modesty, reserve and all of those feminine inhibitions which are the saving factor in protecting girls from unclean thoughts and unworthy activities.479

Conservatives feared the consequences of sex perversion and unworthy activities within a distinctly sexualized youth culture specifically because it threatened the institution of marriage. An angry mother reproached a speaker at her son‟s school,

Dartmouth College, for “tabooing all family ties.” “Free love was being administered by these young men,” she claimed.480 In their National Bulletin, Captain Darte‟s Military

Order of the World War bemoaned the ideals of the “Youth Movement” in America, including “revolt against home restraint,” and “what is worse, its idea regarding marriage.”481 Young people understood the nature of antiradical concerns about them, as well. The New Student, a leading voice for members of college liberal and socialist clubs in the 1920s, listed the most pressing fears articulated by the DAR with regards to radicalism on campuses: atheism, an end to patriotism, and “loosening the sacred marriage ties.”482

Antiradicals understood the rising problem of youth within the context of Bolshevism and its affects on American culture. These social conservatives identified a general resistance to authority and a rise in awareness about sex as logical products of cultural and psychological pressures unleashed into public discourse and popular consciousness by the spread of radical ideas. While certainly not alone in condemning the seemingly

479 Ralph Easley, Luncheon Conference, The Bankers Club, September 20, 1928, p29-30. New York Public Library, National Civic Federation Papers, Series IV, U, Box 254, Folder 9, on Microfilm Reel 240. 480 Margaret C. Robinson. “VI—The Youth Movement; What Is It?” Iron Trade Review, p16. Helen Tufts Bailie Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 481 Dangerous Doctrines Being Suggested to Youth, p1. 482 The New Student, April 25, 1928, Vol 7, No 30. Helen Tufts Bailie Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

243 abrupt and frightening changes among middle class young people, these groups of antiradicals and social conservatives felt that even more was at stake than most

Americans realized. Disobedient young citizens, concerned more about pleasures of the flesh than anything else, were ripe targets for pinks seeking to spread their radical doctrines in the ultimate hope of bringing communism to America. The achievement of this goal seemed perilously close as the nation awoke to a growing problem with marriage.

The “Bankruptcy of Marriage” and the Russian Ideal

The concern of antiradicals and patriotic groups over social changes borne of radicalism coalesced by the mid 1920s with a host of other voices all bemoaning a

“marriage crisis” in America. Most Americans recognized the arrival of sex modernism, with very visible shifts in sexual practices and ideas about marriage. As sociologist and prominent family writer Ernest Groves noted when analyzing the various “social influences affecting home life” in 1925, conceptions of marriage and parenthood were

“feeling the influences of our modern culture.”483 The shock of the war, urbanization and industrialization, automobiles, and increasing access to birth control information eroded the older Victorian value system. The visible and unruly youth culture contributed to national concerns over the future of marriage. The increasing economic independence of women coupled with their relatively newfound political independence diminished the

483 Ernest R. Groves. “Social Influences Affecting Home Life,” in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol 31, No. 2 (Sept, 1925), p227-240.

244 most pressing and obvious social necessities of marriage for women. Sex radicals in

Greenwich Village, including Hutchins Hapgood, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, and

Margaret Sanger, discarded social conventions.484 And, sex saturated American life, removing the intimate act from the privacy of the marriage bed, placing it in clear public view.

Generally, pervasive concerns about the state of the marriage relation sparked a flurry of newspaper articles, attention from social workers and psychologists, and a flood of books. Overwhelmingly these musings and studies of marriage acknowledged, with varying degrees of approval and disapproval, the arrival of a new sexual era, the existence of the New Woman, the primacy of emotional ties between sex and marriage partners and, lastly, the importance of sexual pleasure to both men and women.

While traditionalists, including antiradicals and social conservatives, wished to block changing marriage ideals, liberal reformers worked to accommodate social changes within the confines of marriage. Calling for companionate marriage, a legally sanctioned union between young people, including legal access to birth control and the ability to divorce without alimony if childless, these marriage reformers sought to allow for the sexual and emotional shifts amongst young people while still directing their life energies towards a permanent, heterosexual, monogamous marital relation. Prominent intellectuals and activists, men like Judge Ben Lindsey and Ernest Groves, explained that the old economic foundations of marriage were falling away, and that Americans needed to invest marriage with new meaning. Floyd Dell, a reformed Greenwich Village sex radical, struck many of the same notes as other marriage modernizers, claiming that the

484 Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, p63-63.

245 patriarchal family model was no longer relevant to a modern society. Calling for monogamy, children, and an elusive equality between partners, this reformed free lover joined the marriage crisis chorus on the side of those reforming marriage in order to save it.485

But not all Americans talking and writing about changes in sexual codes and marital ties wanted to save marriage. In fact, by the late 1920s, a vocal and visible group of writers, many of whom were socialists steeped in an Americanized version of Freudian psychology, busily confirmed the fears of antiradicals, documenting changes in morality while simultaneously celebrating them. In the late 1920s V.F. Calverton announced the

“bankruptcy of marriage,” and hailed the “new morality” emerging in the United States.

Calverton, editor of the influential journal Modern Quarterly, attributed changes in the

“old morality” to a range of influences, from reaction to the war to, most significantly, the increase in women‟s economic independence. He, along with his co-conspirator and co-editor Samuel Schmalhausen, devoted his work to the arts, psychology, radical politics, and sex modernism. The New Republic referred to the two men as the “sex boys,” but there were many others.486 Calverton and Schmalhausen lauded their contemporaries who approached sex with “sweet and clean courageous candor,” listing figures such as Ellen Key, Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, Phyllis Blanchard and

Margaret Mead.487 Social change, Calverton and his peers argued, caused the old

485 See Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, p82-83, Freedman and D‟Emilio, Intimate Matters, p265- 267, Jennifer Terry. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1999), p125. 486 Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and its Discontents. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998,) p93-99; Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, p65, 81.. 487 Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” Sex in Civilization. (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co, 1929), p371.

246 morality to crumble and spawned the beginnings of what was, to him in 1928, a new moral order, one represented by “the growth of freer sexual relations on the part of youth.”488 Here were antiradicals greatest fears confirmed.

In fact, Calverton‟s editorial partner Samuel Schmalhausen claimed with confidence a year later in 1929 that “we are in the midst of what may legitimately be called the Sexual

Revolution.”489 Writing in his and Calverton‟s co-edited essay collection, Sex in

Civilization, Schmalhausen celebrated that by the late 1920s, “for the first time in the history of life is the idea generally accepted among civilized men and women, accepted as if it were already axiomatic, that the sex relation is not to be dedicated primarily to procreation but quite naturally to recreation.”490 While this notion likely received less widespread acceptance than Schmalhausen hoped, the fact that a large number of

Americans conceived of sexuality as something removed from the intention to bring children in to the world transformed the very foundation of heterosexuality.

Heterosexuality emerged in this period as a social system, a way of organizing society and culture based on normative actions and behaviors. Schmalhausen‟s own celebration of the primacy of recreation in sex relations served only to further canonize heterosexuality as a way of life.491

Yet, changes in sexual morality harbored revolutionary implications according to writers like Calverton and Schmalhausen. Monogamy, they felt, grew out of certain

488 V.F. Calverton. The Bankruptcy of Marriage. (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1928), p118. Calverton‟s books as well as a number of others drew heavily from Lindsey‟s approach and evidence in The Companionate Marriage, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927) and The Revolt of Modern Youth, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). Larsen, p219. 489 Samuel Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” in Sex in Civilization, p354. 490 Samuel Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” in Sex in Civilization, p355. 491 See Jonathan Ned Katz. The Invention of Heterosexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Chapter 5, The Heterosexual Comes Out.

247 economic and social conditions—particularly those supporting the rise of capitalism. In that vein, Calverton felt that changes in sexual life would not create economic or social change, an effect conservatives feared, but rather he argued that changing economic and social conditions caused changes in sexual ethics. To put it another way, drastic economic and social changes were afoot, Calverton felt, which slowly eroded the old moral order to allow the rise of the new.492 Sexual change in this estimation took place as a byproduct of larger changes, not, as conservatives feared, the other way around. Yet, even so, Calverton‟s rhetoric undoubtedly frightened social conservatives when he wrote,

“The change of economic system and social environment alone have rendered monogamy a struggling fiction. It is part of an old age. It cannot be the marital basis of the new.

The direction of economic life, and the drive of sexual impulse, are in revolt against it.”493

Socialism, the direction to which Calverton referred, represented a more favorable model in his eyes, in terms of economic and social relations. The latter half of his

Bankruptcy of Marriage compared American and western European ideals of sex and morality with those of Soviet Russia. Through these comparisons Calverton argued that monogamy operated essentially on the concept of private property, echoing the analysis of Alexandra Kollontai in “Communism and the Family.” In the postwar decade men like Calverton saw the world with a wider lens, seeking out internationalism and the possibility of collective social and economic ideals. With this very motivation Samuel

492 Calverton, “Sex and Social Struggle,” in Sex in Civilization, p250. 493 Calverton, Bankruptcy, p302.

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Schmalhausen blasted the concept of private family life and nationalism when he wrote, in typically colorful language:

Just as citizens of a modern state (who in daily life manifest not one pulse of genuine affection for each other‟s welfare) can be gotten to assume the aspect and manner of brotherhood in the presence of an enemy whom they are taught to hate with a concerted malevolence—the pretense being that said citizens now love one another because of a nation in peril, when in sober truth they have learned to cooperate beautifully in the great work of hate, a harmonized hate, a symphony of lust, of the common enemy—so the typical little bourgeois household apparently symbolizes love‟s coming of age, but actually represents a small coalition, practicing a provincial hate of fellow-men, breathing in the exhilarating poison of self-love.”494 Calverton and Schmalhausen hopefully envisioned the ebbing of this individualistic, capitalist inspired embrace of monogamy and the private family life.

Further fanning the flames of conservative anxieties, Calverton applauded Soviet

Russia‟s social and economic structures outright as admirable models, as a better way. In fact, Russia was the only nation used as a comparison in the collections of essays edited by Calverton and Schmalhausen. The two men even dared to include controversial

“queen of Bolshevism”, Alexandra Kollontai, on the list of women they dedicated their collection of essays to. Sex in Civilization, published in 1929, honored women “who have led in the struggle for sex emancipation and a finer civilization.”

Calverton revealed the stark differences between values in the United States and in

Russia specifically by analyzing American thinking on illegitimacy. Wrapped up in the status of children considered illegitimate was the power and strength of the influence of property and capitalism on American social life. Calverton argued, “Life acquires value not because of its life, but because it is connected with the matter of property and its transmission. The illegitimate child is scorned, and the unmarried mother stigmatized,

494 Samuel Schmalhausen, “Family Life: A Study in Pathology,” in Calverton and Schmalhausen eds., The New Generation. (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1930), p282.

249 because they are a menace to our social order. They strike at the economic foundation of our whole system of morals and marriage.”495 The needs of the economic order shaped the sexual and social order, a point Calverton emphasized clearly here. He went a step further, pointing out that this problem did not exist in Soviet Russia, “the only nation in the world to afford protection to motherhood upon the simple and altogether natural basis of human values…There are no illegitimate children in Soviet Russia.”496

The fact that Calverton believed that the needs of the economic order shaped the sexual and social order in some fundamental ways undermined antiradicals position, that the sexual changes Americans were experiencing were merely the harbingers of larger political and economic changes to come. Yet, the subtlety of his reasoning likely mattered very little. Calverton and Schmalhausen both announced the arrival of a sexual revolution, and both looked favorably toward social and economic systems in Soviet

Russia.

Most significantly, with the establishment of heterosexuality as a social system,

Calverton, Schmalhausen, and their peers firmly believed that “moral revolt” had taken root in the United States by the late 1920s, and all saw this as a marker of larger changes.

Developments including “the revolt of youth, the rise of the new woman and the new morality, and the decay of marriage,” wrote Calverton, “are but a few of its early manifestations.” As these radical writers cheered such developments, believing that the success of this moral revolt in changing social relations was “dependent merely upon the speed of time and circumstance,” horrified antiradicals desperately threw up roadblocks

495 Calverton, “Illegitimacy,” in The New Generation, p189. 496 Ibid, p205.

250 to try to stem the tide of change that might lead the country towards political and economic revolution.497 In doing so, antiradicals engaged not with the radical “sex boys,” but with a more moderate, far more popular representative of sex modernism.

The Bolshevism of Ben Lindsey

The context of persistent anti-radicalism must be accounted for when analyzing the fact that by the mid to late 1920s, experts and popular writers convinced many Americans that the future of the institution of marriage was in trouble. While a host of circumstances contributed to this sense of crisis, thanks in no small part to writers like

Calverton and Schmalhausen, many Americans saw the presence of radical doctrines as a causative factor. Yet antiradicals did not engage with these writers on the left in any sustained way, in popular discourse. Instead, they attacked the marriage reformers seeking to contain changes in sexuality and gender norms within the marital bond. These individuals, definitely more visible targets, received the lion‟s share of social conservatives‟ and antiradicals‟ anger.

No marriage reformer drew the fire of antiradicals quite like Judge Ben Lindsey, who came to symbolize Americans‟ anxiety over the seeming lack of permanence in marital unions and the new obsession with sex. This figurehead of modernizing marriage trends, covered in countless histories of sexuality and marriage, made his career in Denver, where he worked as a Juvenile Court Judge in a system he helped create. Through his years of personal experience with young people Lindsey felt himself to be uniquely

497 Calverton, Bankruptcy of Marriage, p302.

251 situated to discuss changes in morals. Working with Wainwright Evans, a professional writer recommended to Lindsey, the two men participated in a series of interviews from which Evans crafted together first a series of articles and then, collected, The Revolt of

Modern Youth, published by Boni and Liveright in 1925. They duo followed this up with

The Companionate Marriage, in 1927. In The Revolt, Lindsey demonstrated that young people were not abiding by Victorian bourgeois sex standards, and he blamed this on parents and on American society. Not inherently immoral or rebellious, young people simply needed better preparation for the realities of changing social and economic circumstances.498 In Companionate Marriage, he proposed a plan to change marriage codes as Americans knew them. In this book Lindsey again provided numerous examples from his work in Denver, demonstrating the fact that the nation‟s vaunted middle class moral codes, to many of his young charges, were unworkable.499

For these ideas, Lindsey‟s detractors smeared him as a Bolshevik. The way his critics attacked him, the words they used and the inferences they made, furthered connections in the popular mind about changing sexual and marital relations and radicalism. For example, in November of 1927 a rabbi in New York told his congregation that

“„companionate marriage‟ advocated by Judge Lindsey was actually a trial marriage, although its originator had denied this.” The same day, the reverend of St. Andrew‟s

498 Charles Larsen. The Good Fight: The Remarkable Life and Times of Judge Ben Lindsey, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), p152. 499 Rebecca L. Davis. “‟Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry‟: The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” The Journal of American History, Volume 94, Issue 4, p1140. As historian Rebecca Davis points out, Lindsey in many ways prescribed companionate marriage as a cure for a broken society and broken marriage system—he did not necessarily celebrate what she refers to as a “an emergent norm.” Most American young people, not to mention an appalled older generation, did not openly advocate companionate marriage as a model they would choose for themselves in the 1920s, and this must be remembered. Davis argues, as I do here, that historians can learn more about American culture and society by examining the public reaction to Lindsey‟s companionate marriage scheme than by accepting it as normative behavior at the time.

252

Methodist Church, also in New York, called Lindsey and others preachers of “free love and companionate marriage, enemies to the home, wreckers of the very foundation of decent society.”500 In January of 1928, an Episcopal reverend also called Lindsey out by name, claiming “companionate marriage is only another name for legalized free love.”501

Cardinal Hays called companionate marriage “the latest abomination” at high mass in St

Patrick‟s Cathedral, and then warned his parishioners that without Christ there would be chaos, urging them to look to the “radical social disorders of Russia and the unspeakable horrors of Mexico” for frightening examples of revolution and communism.502 The St.

Louis Star ran a headline that read, “Lindsey‟s Trial Marriage Idea Bolshevistic, Says

Judge.”503

By likening companionate marriage to free love, antiradicals drew on a wealth of assumptions about radicalism and disorderly sexuality in America. The practice of engaging in sexual relations unimpeded by marriage appeared first in antebellum utopian communities, but really only gained notoriety in the late nineteenth century when it became associated with anarchism. Proponents like Victoria Woodhull, most famously, believed sexual relations should stem from genuine love between two partners, and not from a state sanctified union between two people. They supported sex education and birth control, celebrating sexuality as healthy and natural rather than shameful. These early free lovers based their beliefs on their right to individual freedom, unimpeded by the church or the state. This tinge of anarchist thought, particularly after the Haymarket

500 New York Times, November 28, 1927, p24. Similar comments are reported in the New York Times on January 30, 1928, p24; March 12, 1928 501 New York Times, January 18, 1928, p26. 502 New York Times, January 9, 1928, p24. 503 Larsen, p174.

253

Riot soured public opinion of anarchists in 1886, solidified Americans‟ disapproval of a practice many believed undermined the traditional family unit.504 The fact that sex radicals like V.F. Calverton supported free love in the 1920s, with his Marxist critique of sex relations, only heightened general disapproval.505

With his articulation of trial marriage, Havelock Ellis offered an updated version of the free love idea at the turn of the century; the charges of Bolshevism and free love hurled at Lindsey grew in part from the erroneous association between companionate marriage and trial marriage. Trial marriage worked on the assumption that the state had no viable interest in unions between individuals who did not have children. The need for a legal connection between parents seemed sensible to Ellis, but he could not see why the state should have any involvement in sexual relationships between adult men and women who did not reproduce. The lack of state involvement would of course allow those men and women to terminate their relationships whenever the attraction came to an end.

Soviet Russian marriage law echoed Ellis‟s ideas, which made the association tenable.

Lindsey‟s plan, with a seeming lack of a binding, permanent connection, and the intent to limit reproduction, reminded many people of trial marriage, and thus, of Soviet marriage law. When Lindsey protested this, claiming the intention in a companionate marriage would be to undertake a permanent relationship, not a temporary one, his protests fell largely on deaf ears.506

Essentially Lindsey proposed a conservative reform plan—he hoped to reinforce the institution of marriage. Young people, often economically unprepared to begin a family

504 Freedman and D‟Emilio, p161-166. 505 Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, p81-82. 506 Davis, p1142.

254 or buy a home, could still engage in sexual relations sanctioned by marriage. The very real problem, in his view, of sex before marriage, and the unwanted pregnancies that resulted, could be eliminated under the model of companionate marriage. His calls for the eradication of laws banning the dissemination of birth control information, and his appeal for easy divorce of the childless, struck social conservatives, and even many social moderates, as beyond the line of acceptable values. Yet he called for these changes in a genuine move to shore up the morals of American youth and the integrity of the modern marriage relation. He intervened in a larger discussion about marriage at a moment when

Americans readily made accommodations to change the values that ordered their lives in order to maintain the institution of marriage, and his proposals were merely attempts to further those efforts. So, while Lindsey‟s ideas may have harkened back to the theories of free love advocates who came decades before him, he advocated much more modest behaviors.

Nonetheless, Americans reacted powerfully to Lindsey‟s ideas and the scope of that reaction pervaded popular discourse. Companionate Marriage quickly emerged as the definitive symbol of the sexual revolution in the minds of most Americans in the late

1920s. Lindsey toured the country, taking on his critics in well publicized and well attended debates. Many of these debates were then printed and sold as pamphlets, often by religious groups hoping to stop the march of modernism in their own cities and towns.507 Debates of companionate marriage moved beyond Lindsey himself, where

507 See for example “Debate Between Judge Ben Lindsey and G.C. Brewer on „Companionate Marriage‟,” Auditorium, City of Memphis, April 2, 1928. (Cincinnati, OH: The Christian Leader Corporation, 1928)

255 local speakers in cities came together to argue the merits and drawbacks of such as system, and groups gathered to vote their approval or disapproval.508

Even Samuel Saloman, author of Red War on the Family, who largely kept out of the public eye in the later 1920s, weighed in on companionate marriage in one of these public debates. In 1927 he spoke out against companionate marriage at a meeting of the Secular

League in Washington, D.C., claiming it would surely lead to “unbridled license.” And in 1928 he debated at the Typographical Temple in Washington, D.C. Linn A.E. Gale argued for companionate marriage, finding that contemporary, permanent marriage structures took their form from the “property concept of woman.” Saloman, still believing that marriage protected women from the whims of men‟s worst nature, argued that women lost more than anyone in companionate marriage, and that only the “lunatic fringe” of the female sex supported it.509

Bishop William T. Manning, one of Lindsey‟s most prominent critics, staunchly defended heterosexual monogamous marriage back as far as the Red Scare, in line with his view of strong Americanism as a bulwark against radical social disorders. An

American Defense Society member, eulogist of Theodore Roosevelt in 1919, and now

Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York, Manning took aim at Judge Lindsey for his ideas on companionate marriage in late 1927 and 1928. Critical of radicalism generally as well as modernizing sexual relations, Manning cast a wide net. He condemned college professors who taught students that “morality is only a matter of geography,” swatting

508 New York Times, May 30, 1928. At this Civic Club debate between Ruth Hale and Fulton Oursler, the poll afterwards showed “twenty four persons voting for „old-fashioned‟ marriage, thirteen for companionate marriage for others, thirteen for companionate marriage for themselves, six for free love, and ten against marriage of any kind”; see also, McCausland, “The Blue Menace.” 509 The Washington Post, December 5, 1927, p5; The Washington Post, February 13, 1928, p2.

256 away cultural relativism. He blasted youth leaders who told young people sex before marriage was anything but a sin. Manning wondered outright how men like Lindsey could “advocate, defend and practice” things like free love and companionate marriage and “still be respectable members of society.”510 The personal attacks Manning made against Lindsey ultimately came to a head in a shouting match between the two men in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in the middle of Sunday morning mass.511

Manning‟s extreme anger and outrage at the general acceptance of Lindsey‟s ideas, or really his anger over the fact that Lindsey‟s ideas only reflected the real behavior of many, represented the violence with which antiradicals and social conservatives greeted changing moral and sexual practices.

Critics who overtly linked Lindsey‟s companionate marriage model with Bolshevism and free love revealed many unexamined connections between gender, capitalism and

American democracy.512 The response of Lindsey‟s critics, and their willingness to cry

Bolshevism and free love, demonstrate the way social conservatives conflated sexual modernism and radicalism in the late 1920s. Lindsey himself entertained no connections to Bolshevism whatsoever. As in the immediate response to the Russian Revolution, back in 1919 and in the very early 1920s, social conservatives relied on the old trope of

Bolshevism as sexual disorder to paint him with the Bolshevist brush. This allowed men and women who disagreed with Lindsey‟s plan to imply, or claim outright, that companionate marriage would overthrow the government and open the door to communism. Furthermore, by positioning deviance from strict monogamous marriage as

510 New York Times, November 8, 1927, p26; New York Times, April 4, 1928, p26. 511 Davis, p1152-3; Larsen, p219-221. This argument took place in December of 1930. 512 Davis, p1140.

257 akin to free love, and thus to bolshevism, antiradicals helped to shore up the apparent crumbling walls of the institution of marriage. Engaging in premarital sex, or obtaining a divorce, made one a Bolshevik.

In reality, the marriage crisis bemoaned by so many, and celebrated by a few, simply represented a progression of American social values underway for some time. Count

Hermann Keyserling, prominent writer on marriage in the first quarter of the twentieth century, recognized this when he pointed out in the Saturday Magazine of the New York

Times in December of 1927 that American ideas on marriage and divorce differed rather little from those much denounced “Bolshevist practices.”513 Keyserling wanted

Americans to recognize their own hypocrisy, to realize the changes that existed all around them. He saw little difference “between Bolshevist practice and the habits of American girls as described by Judge Lindsey.” Serial monogamy through acceptance of divorce,

Keyserling argued, “is no less dangerous to [Americans‟] idea of morality than is the

Bolshevist practice, which recognizes as legal marriage that endures for an hour.”514

As Keyserling shrewdly revealed, changes in Americans‟ sex lives and in their approaches to marriage were natural developments of a culture and a society in flux in the early twentieth century. No Bolshevik influence was necessary to provoke those changes. Yet, as the groundless attacks on Lindsey make clear, even when social changes had no connection to radicalism at all, antiradicals and frightened social conservatives propped up their favorite bogeyman. They did so, however, due to

513 The New York Times, December 18, 1927, pSM3, 28. 514 Ibid.

258 seemingly genuine fears about the impact changing manners and morals might have on young people and on the country.

The “Deadly Parallel”: Political Consequences of Youth‟s Crumbling Morals

By the late 1920s, pressing concerns about the viability of the institution of marriage led crusading super patriots and social conservatives to focus their attention, quite logically, on the impact of sex radicalism in women‟s colleges. Uncomfortable with the advances of feminism, patriotic and anti-radical leaders made a good deal of noise about radicalism in women‟s colleges in general throughout the decade. Even Vice President

Coolidge jumped on the bandwagon with his Delineator articles in 1922. But two happenings at Smith College, specifically, spurred conservative organizations to create a public stir over the radical implications of sex in the summer and fall of 1927.

Reflecting the prevalence of discussions of marriage, sex and morality, a sociology class at Smith College formulated and circulated a sex and marriage questionnaire in the spring of 1925. The group of girls, interested in the way larger societal and industrial changes affected beliefs on sex and marriage, created a set of questions and administered them within the class itself. Questions included:

Which do you prefer for yourself: a. Companionate without marriage? b. Companionate with marriage? c. Marriage with children? d. Children without marriage?

Do you think women who are able to support themselves should be permitted to have children without marriage?

259

Would you, under favorable circumstances, indulge in extramarital sex relations after marriage? Would you approve the same for your husband?

Do you think it an advantage or a disadvantage for a woman to have sex experience before marriage?

Should girls have more freedom to see sex experience before marriage than is now generally approved? a. Would you use this freedom under favorable circumstances? b. Have you had such experience? Once? Occasionally? Frequently?515 The last question garnered the most opprobrium from conservatives, and liberal defenders took care to note that the instructor, Professor Frank H. Hankins, suggested that the young women leave it out because it referred to “actual sex experience.” Yet, the story went, his students insisted the question remain. Almost eighty class members, Smith seniors, answered the questions anonymously, and examined the responses scientifically, transmitting the results only to the class itself and to the administration.

At the very same moment as Ben Lindsey‟s companionate marriage ideas exploded into the popular imagination, antiradicals created a scandal around this questionnaire.

While it received no attention back in 1925, when Professor Hankins‟ class actually took their survey and analyzed their results, in the spring of 1927 an alumna and mother of a

Smith College student learned of the questionnaire and passed it along to patriotic organizations, who gave it wide publicity. Professional patriot and anti-radical writer

Fred Marvin focused one of his Daily Data Sheets, a conservative information service of sorts, on the questionnaire in April of 1927. This permissive and frank discussion of sex relations, the outright challenge it encouraged with established practices, was, according

515 Sampling of questions printed in Harry Elmer Barnes, “Sex in Education,” Sex in Civilization, p298. Kim Nielsen discusses the questionnaire in Un-American Womanhood, p33; see also Davis, p1146; see also McCausland, “The Blue Menace,” p15-16.

260 to Marvin, “part of a plan to inculcate into minds of students a belief that our whole social structure is wrong.”

In his formulation, views on sex, marriage and parenthood acted as fundamental pillars of current civilization and American democracy. By encouraging young women to challenge established views, insidiously, radicals promoted a larger political and economic agenda. Marvin sounded the warning:

There is a direct connection between the brazen submission of such questions to groups of girls in our colleges and the machinations of the more dangerous radicals. Such discussions are designed to promote the disintegration of the family by bringing shamelessly into the open consideration of illegitimate childbirth, and the abolition of the family relation is one of the cardinal objects of Communism…They are helping to prepare the way for the social upheaval of which the Communists dream, and, far worse, are a distinct menace to the morals of young womanhood.”516 Marvin had little difficulty establishing the link between companionate marriage and communism, and his readers, patriots themselves, likely agreed. He saw shifting sex and marriage practices as a step towards demoralization, which would pave the way for radical political and economic changes. Others prominent anti-radicals, like Margaret

Robinson of the MPIL and Joseph Cashman of the NSL, concurred. Both further publicized the questionnaire, questioning the morals of students and faculty at Smith while relying on the fear of sexual disorder to carry disapproval of communism. Reports and rumors suggested publicly that the majority of the student body was immoral, and one report claimed the questionnaire was required of all entering freshmen.517

Liberal and even radical intellectuals, aware of the “blue menace” and similarly motivated attacks, defended Smith and the questionnaire itself in the months that followed by portraying alarm over sex as unwarranted, and by challenging the notion that

516 Fred R. Marvin. The Daily Data Sheet of the Key Men of America Dealing with Radical and Subversive Movements. Serial No. 70, April 23, 1927. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 3. 517McCausland, “The Blue Menace,” p 16 ; New York Times, May 22, 1927, pE4.

261 a questionnaire could result in strengthening communism. In a letter to Smith alumnae, intended to tamp down the rush of negative publicity over the “shocking questionnaire,” the Smith Alumnae Association explained the facts of the matter. Officers stated that the college president did not approve of the questionnaire beforehand, “the professor concerned regretted having permitted it, and assurance was given that it would not be repeated.” Furthermore, the Association denied that the college “is a hotbed of

„radicalism, atheism and immorality.‟”518 Smith College Professor Harry Elmer Barnes also defended Professor Hankins and the integrity of the questionnaire. The results, he noted, demonstrated to anyone who cared to notice that a slight percentage of the students in Hankins‟ class engaged in pre-marital sex. The findings hardly warranted the scandal, in his opinion.519

But Barnes realized that the questionnaire demonstrated looser attitudes towards sex outside of marriage, which undeniably weakened the traditional marriage institution. The results were not the issue, nor was the suggestion that Hankins derived the survey for any sinister ulterior motive aside from the sociological one. Rather, he argued, objections

“were based upon the assumption that these fourscore of college girls, ranging in age from twenty to twenty-four, were completely unconscious of the existence of sex or of their possession of the psychic attributes and physical equipment of female sexuality” until they read this questionnaire. Even more shocking, Barnes joked, was their realization that “such a thing as sexual intercourse exists in the world.”520 While antiradicals refused to recognize it, on their own, modern youths saw morality with

518 New York Times, February 7, 1928, p17. 519 Harry Elmer Barnes. “Sex in Education,” in Sex and Civilization, p300. Barnes criticized the lack of frank and scientific discussion of sex, and the lack of sex education, in higher education. 520 Barnes, p300.

262 different eyes, and they considered sex and marriage with a frankness previously unimagined.

Barnes denied the plausibility of the blue menace‟s argument, that changed attitudes toward sex and marriage bred radicalism. To him this leap of logic was laughable. But to those who spent the better part of the decade worrying about radicals under their beds, or in them, the shifts they were experiencing seemed beyond their control, alien, and frightening. To DAR members and to Fred Marvin‟s readers, changes in sexual norms, the breakdown of monogamy, and the embrace of birth control symbolized the breakdown of society and made the nation susceptible to revolution.

These organizations stirred up another scandal just a few months later, castigating the commencement speech at Smith that year, given by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in New York City. In a likely, if misguided, attempt to “smooth the waters” in the aftermath of the questionnaire debacle, Fosdick spoke about morality and behavior among young people. In his speech he called for a “new conception of morality conceived in terms of good taste,” according to Smith Professor

Barnes.521 Fosdick frankly acknowledged what most Americans could see by 1927, that the morals and ethics of his and older generations had given way. “You are going out into a generation which is witnessing the breaking down of the old well-defined codes of right and wrong,” he lamented.522 Fosdick urged those young women to develop moral standards internally, to cultivate individual integrity, for they could not count on the pressures of external forces and codes in these tumultuous times. In short, Fosdick

521 Barnes, p301. 522 New York Times, June 21, 1927, p17.

263 lauded the graduates‟ ability to choose right over wrong, to remain moral in a world where moral codes were no longer certain.

Social conservatives reacted to Fosdick‟s speech, Smith already shining brightly on their antiradical radar, by calling Fosdick an apologist for free love and by connecting sexual immorality with larger radical doctrines. Immediately after Fosdick‟s speech

Lindsey detractor Bishop Manning stepped into the fray. In a public statement he accused “a prominent preacher in this city,” who all knew to be Fosdick, of telling

“young people that the old ideas of „right‟ and „wrong‟ have been dropped.” Manning lamented, “if this is true…we need not wonder if our young people adopt „companionate marriage‟ or any other suggestion.”523 Fosdick publicly denied the charges, claiming that

Manning paraphrased his speech and thus misinterpreted him. Fosdick would continue to disavow alternative marriage arrangements in the coming years.524

In typical fashion, one patriotic group tied Fosdick‟s views on the social and moral order directly to Soviet Russia. In November of 1927 the Massachusetts Public Interest

League published their monthly “Items of Interest” with the headline “Deadly Parallel.”

In two parallel columns the MPIL printed a quote by Lenin about the death of the old, bourgeois morality and a quote taken from Fosdick‟s speech at Smith. They printed his thoughts on the end of “old codes” and “traditions,” and on the prevalence of discussions about sex amongst the younger generation. Condemning his moral uncertainty, they

523 New York Times, June 26, 1927, p18. 524 “Dr. Fosdick on Trial Marriage,” The Literary Digest, October 27, 1928, p33-34. A year later he published a prominent article stating that “conditions have changed and there is a revolt against old- fashioned family life.” He stressed that Americans needed to come around to see the revolt was happening, it was inevitable, and even was “desirable,” because the sooner the old order gave way perhaps the less messy it would be. However he did not see that the revolt away from old fashioned marriage necessarily lead to an acceptance of trial marriage. Trial marriage and other varieties of changes in conceptions of marriage were a bad idea, because “the attitudes and actions involved in trial marriage are first, psychologically disruptive to the individual and, second, socially ruinous to the nation.”

264 criticized him for questioning “what is right in family life, in sex relationships, in personal habits, in economic practices, in international dealings” even as many

Americans wondered the very same things, albeit in private. 525 Massachusetts journalist

Elizabeth McCausland defended Fosdick publicly in a collection of articles condemning the blue menace. She printed the text of his actual speech and shrewdly noted that the

MPIL editors “curiously mutilated” it, taking one line from one paragraph and connecting it to random lines in other paragraphs to misrepresent his true emphasis.526 Barnes defended him too, complaining that “Dr. Fosdick was thus made to appear the apostle of free love and a protagonist of the alleged Bolshevik communism in women.”527

The deadly parallel represented more than a similarity between Lenin‟s words and

Fosdick‟s, however. Fosdick rightly claimed in no uncertain terms in his speech that young people were actively questioning the old order of things, reiterating Professor

Barnes‟ contention. The MPIL printed text written by the Communist League of Youth, a Russian youth organization, calling for good communist to do the very same thing, to loosen their attitudes towards the old marriage conventions, to experiment with new sex codes. This nefarious connection, however thin, between young people in the United

States and a communist youth organization in Russia, established a causal link in the eyes of the MPIL. Brushing aside the notion that the dissatisfactions of American young people might be home grown, MPIL editors confidently stated, “The assumption by Mr.

Fosdick, Judge Lindsey, and other defenders of lowered standards that the attitude of

Radical Youth is spontaneous in youth itself, has no foundation in fact.” Rather, they

525 Massachusetts Public Interests League. Items of Interest, November 1927. SCPC, WILPF, Section I, 1, Box 1. 526 McCausland, “The Blue Menace,” p17. 527 Barnes, p301.

265 claimed, communist plotters encouraged young people to develop new, immoral standards, and clamored for these new standards to be christened as respectable. This same logic motivated the antiradical prognostications on sex and morals throughout the late 1920s, even if other writers had no specific example to point to in the same way. In their view, Communist inspired sexual immorality pointed towards the end of civilization.

The deadly parallel represented the similarity between Russia‟s altered moral standards and the shifts in sexual standards amongst American youth. The MPIL made this connection clearly, insisting that “anyone who gives even a superficial study to the subject must recognize that the free love propaganda now given such prominence by the radicals is nothing but an echo of the Socialist-Communist teachings in Soviet Russia.

The combination of free love propaganda and instruction in birth control is bringing about conditions appalling to contemplate.”528 The MPIL believed that sex and moral changes in America were being promoted by radicalism in Russia and by radicalism at home. These seemingly solid connections reinforced their long held convictions that social changes both stemmed from, and advanced, radical political and economic doctrines. As Fred Marvin argued, changes in moral values created “social upheaval of which the Communists dream.”529

Clearly, antiradical efforts lasted well beyond the intense postwar Red Scare years, framing American understandings of politics and culture. In the immediate postwar

528 Massachusetts Public Interest League, Items of Interest, p2. 529 Fred R. Marvin. The Daily Data Sheet of the Key Men of America Dealing with Radical and Subversive Movements. Serial No. 70, April 23, 1927. SCPC, WILPF, Series I, 1, Box 3.

266 period, super patriots, capitalists, and social conservatives made much of the sexual disorder of Bolshevik Russia, using it to enforce a rigid definition of citizenship. Even then these groups articulated patriotism and Americanism as the antithesis of Bolshevism, calling on Americans to practice good morals, to shore up their family ties, and to accept

Victorian gender norms in the service of their nation. But the national scene looked remarkably different then. The possibility of sex disorder competed with bomb blasts, battles over immigration, and spectacular labor strikes. When these radical threats faded, and Americans got on with the business of living in the postwar period, the Red Scare continued to define morality and citizenship.

These patriotic and socially conservative groups shaped and became shaped by a rapidly changing culture, by the postwar political environment, by the advance of women‟s rights, by economic and housing needs, and by the social pressures of immigration. Time after time these arbiters of Americanism honed in on the threat presented by Soviet sex and marriage codes, and in response they tried to cultivate a defensive nationalism based on strong families, anchored by patriarchal male power.

From this perspective, the work of social welfare reformers undermined individual families and the security of the nation. And from this perspective, the revolt of youth was political. Antiradicals understood social welfare attempts and the work of progressive educators as purposeful assaults on the institution of the family in efforts to bring communism to America.

As revealed in the examination of Red Scare discourse on women, home ownership propaganda, and Americanization efforts, proprietors of social order relied on the monogamous, heterosexual family as the cornerstone of patriarchy and capitalism. It was

267 this reliance that indelibly marked the unfolding discussion of sex modernism among young people in this decade. The ease with which detractors linked Ben Lindsey with

Bolshevism plagued his admittedly bumbling and imprecise efforts to reform marriage standards, to bring them into line with the practices he witnessed daily in his Denver courtroom. Whether or not companionate marriage appealed to Americans generally, the nature of the uproar over Lindsey‟s model speaks volumes about the political nature of

Americans‟ fears of changing sexual and gender norms.

Once antiradicals identified sex modernism as a catalyst for political radicalism, they helped to shape the emerging sexual order of the late 1920s. As the long term shift from homosociality to heterosociality culminated in these years, through their vocal and persistent protests these groups enjoyed real influence even though many of them shouted from the margins of society. By taking part in publicizing the marriage “crisis,” they lent it credence and raised their own profiles.

Furthermore, antiradical efforts to enshrine heterosexual monogamous marriage as a political imperative contributed to the rise of the “heterosexual counterrevolution.” This phenomenon, in place by the late 1920s, imposed rigidly defined models of proper sexual and gendered behavior while stigmatizing all other types of sexuality.530 In truth, all participants in the discussion of marriage in the late 1920s reinforced the social system of heterosexuality. Even celebrants of sex modernism who looked to Russian social ethics as an ideal, cheering the deadly parallel and thus denigrating marriage itself, strengthened heterosexuality by privileging it to the exclusion of alternate types of sexual expression.

530 George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p118.

268

But more was at stake for antiradicals, perhaps, than for other participants. The sexual mores emerging from the trappings of modern culture seemed to them to be untenable, inhospitable to strong patriarchal family life, and therefore unable to ward off the insidious threat of radicalism in America.

Conclusion

In 1929, students graduating from Smith College once again found their commencement address captured by the conflict between modern culture and antiradicalism. Apparently unfazed by the critics of Harry Emerson Fosdick‟s 1927 speech, the College invited his brother, Raymond Fosdick, to campus. This renowned progressive reformer framed his commencement address in reaction to the publication of

Robert and Helen Lynd‟s Middletown some months earlier. The two researchers immersed themselves in a small town in the mid-1920s, one populated by native born

Americans living decidedly common lives, to study average people. The “devastating” results of this study confirmed, according to Fosdick, a trend towards standardization, a celebration of those who sit “in the middle of the boat,” rampant materialism, and outright “dullness” in American life. As he summoned Smith College graduates to live what he called an “adventurous life,” Fosdick revealed his frustration at the end of a decade marked by the struggle between Americanism and Bolshevism.531

Fosdick presented an intellectual environment where those who feared change ruled over those who dared to embrace it. At the end of an era of rampant consumerism, escapism in mass culture, and most importantly here, antiradicalism, Fosdick made his bid for a renewed liberal spirit. His particular concern, he told his young audience, was not for the possibility of their “rebellion” or “dissent,” but rather their “conformity,” their

531 New York Times, June 23, 1929, pXX1. 269

270

“acquiescence,” and their “complacency.” For, by the late 1920s, these characteristics seemed paramount among Americans. To blame for this were those hiding their heads in the sand, and those trying to prevent change. Fosdick criticized persistent super patriots, calling out the “daughters of the American Revolution who are repeating hysterical catch- words about patriotism,” and he condemned the tendency to hide “in fear at the mention of the names of Lenin or Judge Lindsey.”

Fosdick and his listeners, and the readers of the New York Times, understood that in

1929, Judge Lindsey‟s name reflected fears of radicalism just as much as Lenin‟s; popular understandings of Americanism and Bolshevism created and maintained this connection. Through the myriad newspaper and magazine articles on women and radicalism, the push for home ownership, Americanization efforts, attempts to chasten youth, and the crisis over shifts in marital values, Americans came to see an intimate and nefarious connection between changing sex and gender norms and the threat of political radicalism. The tendency to see social disorder through the lens of antiradicalism framed political discourse by the decade‟s end.

Social conservatives, the kind Fosdick railed against, believed enemies of the state existed everywhere, yet they focused heavily on those who might unsettle traditional gender and sex norms. In 1928 a conservative manufacturing journal ran a review of an edited collection by Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots. Hapgood, a well known journalist and editor, gathered evidence to reveal the vocal and organized antiradical movement engaging in what he called “the fight against freedom which masquerades

271 under the name of patriotism.”532 Hapgood printed a list of those who endorsed his views at the front of the book, including Harry Elmer Barnes, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Judge

Ben Lindsey, Raymond Robins, and President William A. Neilsen of Smith College. The reviewer, C.F. Miller, castigated the whole group, but he characterized them as:

“pink-eye professors…the leading de-Christianized clergy shaking hands with marriage abolitionists, the heavenly set opposed to marrying and giving in marriage; companionate marriage advocates and judges, birth controllists and passion uncontrollists; spinulose spinsters…bootleggers of internationalism, balsamy Bolshevists…with a sprinkling of the sanctified Senators who intrigued to dump and de-Americanize us into the League, the bottomless pit of damnations.”533 In his colorful language and whimsically articulated insults, in reference to anti-

Americanists and radicals, reviewer C.F. Miller easily connected social and political radicalism, and he spit more vitriol at those tinkering with the ideals of marriage and sex than at anyone else. These shortcuts in thinking functioned successfully by the late 1920s because of the nature of Americanism.

The circumstances of the immediate postwar period prompted a few vocal but marginal radicals and intellectuals on the left to support the emerging communist state in

Soviet Russia, just as those same circumstances prompted an opposing group of conservative Americans to parlay their wartime patriotism into a staunch antiradical

Americanism. Discussions about nationalism, engendered through campaigns to enforce

American ideals and values, reflected conservatives‟ concerns about broader social and cultural changes.

The Red Scare exposed anxieties deeply woven into the fabric of American culture in the postwar decade, providing social conservatives and even some liberal reformers with

532 Norman Hapgood. Professional Patriots (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1927), p2. 533C.F. Miller, Patriotism Pilloried. Pennsylvania Manufactures’ Journal, Scranton, PA: 1928. p10-11 This is a book review of Norman Hapgood‟s book Professional Patriots, where he criticized self-declared patriots who make a living slandering liberals and progressive reformers in the 1920s.

272 a script of Americanism through which they could express their concerns about changes in the sexual and gender order. This loosely constructed but coherent ideology developed in opposition to Bolshevism, and these two ideological systems constituted the sum of

Americans anxieties and insecurities. Social conservatives, capitalists, and super patriots, some genuinely alarmed by the specter of communism and some acting out of self interest, reinforced the patriarchal family as a symbol of capitalist Americanism, a producer of conservative gender norms, and as a tool of social control in the effort contain sex modernism.

Women became symbols of the crisis in Americanism in the 1920s as cultural commentators sought ways to articulate the intangibles, the potential threat to the social order and to Victorian morality. In an axiomatic way, when people encountered discussion of approvable sex customs, marriage, and morality, they heard a discussion about women. Historically, sexual propriety and moral order have been imagined as protective webs for women, as systems set up and abided by in honor of women. Thus, seeking to demonstrate the Bolshevik menace to values and behavioral norms, writers conveniently placed women‟s respectability at stake.

The image of woman utilized by Red Scare writers and politicians held to no single form. Some drew woman as a damsel in distress, a blushing bastion of sexual purity. Or, as one who eschewed the advances modernity held out for her sex, in favor of a role as matriarch to a husband and children. Sometimes, she was a victim of the barbarism associated with Bolshevism and sometimes she advanced radicalism.

Any and all of these images provoked pangs of fear and, whether consciously or unconsciously, conservative writers hoped to instigate a desire in the breasts of men to

273 protect. As they sought articulate and persuasive ways to explain why Americans should be frightened of Bolshevism, and to clearly elucidate what was at stake in that struggle, writers drew on images of women and the family in general as embodiments or reflections of what was most valued in the nation.

By prioritizing the significance of the family within Americanism, social conservatives helped to facilitate a restrictive gender role for women in American society, one removed from the many alternative possibilities proffered at the time by feminism and social activism. Anti-Bolsheviks positioned American women on the side of monogamous marriage, current U.S. divorce laws, and thus, nineteenth century notions of gender roles. Despite a host of potential catalysts for women to consider their lives outside the confines of marriage and family, many popular writers assumed women would rise up to defend those nineteenth century notions. Their image of woman would surely reject Bolshevik cultural and social transformations, which would lead her to reject

Bolshevism. “As long as divorce is made so easy” in Soviet Russia, one Washington

Post editor reasoned, Americans could safely assume that women would never support

Bolshevism.534

Social conservatives used the family as a site to hash out the larger ideological struggle between social conservatism and social radicalism, or in the language they used, between Americanism and Bolshevism. Like Samuel Saloman in The Red War on the

Family, these writers, politicians and activists vested women with the responsibility and specially suited ability to defend capitalism, the family, and the nation from Bolshevism.

Time honored and cherished family roles for women provided a compelling and

534 The Washington Post, March 2, 1919, p3.

274 endearing connection to Americanism, to home, to nation. The family happily seated around the hearth in this vision, however, was a white family, most likely middle to upper class. Thus, only white women were afforded any agency in the fight against

Bolshevism. And the context in which this agency was granted ensured that women‟s power would be bounded by the growing social system known as heterosexuality.

The heterosexual social system enshrined in American culture by the end of the 1920s developed with the overwhelming support of conservatives battling radicalism. Seeing culture as politics, identifying aberrant gender norms and illicit sexuality as dangerous to the nation, conservatives called on good citizens to embrace heterosexual, monogamous marriage in order to gird capitalism and ward off Bolshevism. Here concerns about women melded with anxiety over the arrival of sex modernism in the middle class mainstream. Progressive female reformers with the potential to undermine patriarchal authority through their social welfare work and unruly young people, particularly those on college campuses, became primary targets of conservatives hoping to stem the tide of gender and sex disorder.

The collection of these values and ideas under the banner of Americanism in the

1920s enabled conservatives and liberals alike to draw on the significance and power of the patriarchal family as a unit of social control, regulating sexuality and gender in the name of economic recovery, Americanization, and political stability more generally. A movement to bolster home ownership in the postwar period played upon an established male citizenship model for working men based on home owning, breadwinning and on women‟s dependency. Hoping to spur the economy and deter the spread of radicalism, home ownership boosters told American men and women that the man who owned his

275 home was a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man than any man who rented.

This citizenship model privileged men‟s agency at the expense of women‟s and it combated the culture of dependency associated with communism at the time. In another example, liberal Americanizers worked with immigrant women and immigrants‟ children in order to teach or impose proper family values and sexual codes. Understanding the normative behavior inherent to good Americanism, reformers hoped, these groups might adjust more fully to an American way of life. Normative gender and sex ideals facilitated their assimilation.

These developments of Americanism fostered the extension of radical fears beyond the realm of politics and the economy to include the intimate matters of sexuality and gender. The stress on the heterosexual, monogamous family ideal was in fact buttressed by the concurrent stigmatization of its opposite, homosexuality. The 1920s witnessed a rise in fears of a lesbian menace, which did the work of defining the positive norm of heterosexuality. This study reveals how integral the normative heterosexual monogamous marriage and family became to constructions of nationalism after World

War I, particularly in the face of international challenges. Ultimately my work demonstrates how the reinforcement of heterosexuality really facilitated the maintenance of a wide variety of social and political conventions that seem distant from discussions about sex and gender, like capitalism, militarism, homeownership, social control of immigrants, and a male dominated political system.

Antiradicals continued their efforts to uncover a communist conspiracy in America through the Great Depression, yet the vastly different social and political environment

276 changed the nature of the movement against communism. The financial crisis sapped the ability of some wealthy elites to continue sponsoring antiradical work, and many non- elites simply could no longer claim complete confidence in the American capitalist system.535 The despair of the depression led growing numbers of Americans to genuinely question whether Democrats or Republicans could provide the necessary leadership to save the country from ruin. In what one scholar termed “the red decade,” the Communist popular front reached many new converts. However, these converts got closer to the reality of communism in Soviet Russia than ever before, and many came to reject that reality, focusing the effort to stop communism more sharply. In addition, as the New

Deal aligned the government with the working classes, antiradicals targeted politicians and the state itself. In short, antiradicalism continued in the 1930s, but as a movement it was motivated by different things entirely.536 And ultimately, the fervor of the antiradical backlash in the depression did not measure up to the bluster of 1919, or of the late 1940s and 1950s.

Yet the intellectual links made during the 1920s, as Americans girded themselves against the radicalism of the Russian Revolution, continued to hold currency during the depression, and would even more so in the 1950s. In the 1920s conservatives worried about the loss of male power and authority in the context of the social and economic program of communism. In this iteration of the politicized family unit, anxious antiradicals worked to ensure women‟s dependency on men as breadwinners rather than

535 M.J. Heale. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970. (Baltimore: John‟s Hopkins University Press, 1990), p99-105. 536 Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), see p90-93, and Chapters 4, Tangled in Red Webs and 5, A School for Anticommunists.

277 on a paternalistic state as they tried to keep women tied to the private sphere. In the

1930s, during a far more pressing and tangible crisis of masculinity, where the depression decimated men‟s status as breadwinners, the New Deal enshrined economic citizenship for male workers, while containing women‟s relationship to the state within their family roles. Women depended on men, who in turn, in times of crisis, depended on the state.

This system girded masculinity despite the blow to men‟s authority and status. And, in the 1950s, Americans responded to the rise in consumerism, sexuality and the Cold War by developing a type of domestic containment not unlike the one crafted by anti- communist foreign policy advisors. Anxious Americans channeled changing sex and marriage norms into a patriotic model of home and family life, one propped up by consumer culture. This strategy emerged earlier, in the postwar decade, as Americans worked to contain the impact of a modernizing culture in the context of the realities of the

Russian Revolution.537

In the glare of the Russian Revolution, then, notions of sexual and gendered order upheld social and political conventions critical to Americanism. The fact that events abroad fundamentally shaped American nationalism and patriotism in this period is not necessarily surprising. One‟s sense of belonging and national pride rises and falls depending on the position of the nation in the world. Yet, as sociologist Robert

Wuthnow states, “A population‟s place in the larger world order is likely to influence how it defines its major problems…and therefore to affect the form or content of its

537 May‟s Homeward Bound covers this phenomenon in the 1950s. Stephanie Coontz observed that perhaps containment began in the 1920s rather than in the 1950s in her synthesis of the history of marriage in the United States and the evidence presented here confirms her suspicions. See Stephanie Coontz. Marriage, A History. (New York: Viking, 2005), p211-212.

278 ideological movements.”538 Russian communism, or the way Americans imagined it anyway, fundamentally framed the political and social problems of the 1920s. The ideology of Americanism existed as it did because communism existed in Russia. The fact that the Russian Revolution reinforced heterosexuality in the United States in the decade after the war signals a need to pay greater attention to the effect of international developments on domestic sex and gender norms.

And, we must continue to scrutinize the utilization of the American family for political ends. Conservatives and liberals alike used the structure of the family to impose appropriate sexual and gendered behavior upon potentially unruly citizens, with hopes of achieving an orderly society. Understandings of Russian social policy encouraged

Americans to see communism more for its family policy than anything else. By associating it with a disregard for the cherished roles of wife and husband, mother and father, social conservatives created a uniquely powerful tool for proponents of

Americanism to wield in their work. These groups made strong family ties a hallmark of good nationalism for liberal women, workers, immigrants, and young people. Scholars have demonstrated the sometimes surprising uses of the family as a political tool throughout the twentieth century.539 Because the family offers a unique and potentially very powerful way of transmitting social and political ideals, sustained attention to its use is important.

538 Robert Wuthnow. Meaning and Moral Order. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p232. 539 See for example, Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); on the Cold War, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. (New York: Basic Books, 1988); on the 1970s see Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

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This analysis traces the voices of those pushing back against change, in part because one must understand the motivations and strategies of these groups in order to uncover the often subtle and veiled ways that political and social needs capture and rely upon sexual and gender norms to operate. These conservative normalcy seekers framed national discourse. Yet, throughout the 1920s, however diminished, the spirit of radicals and reformers endured. These men and women never successfully established new roles for women, or attained truly equal partnerships between men and women, or found full freedom of sexual expression. Perhaps deep down, not all could truly embrace such momentous changes, however “red” they might have been. The possibilities for sexual expression and for stretching the boundaries of traditional gender roles narrowed so very much by 1929, but, as Raymond Fosdick revealed in the close of his commencement address, it is vital to see that people did break through what he called the “contagion of fear” holding sway in the 1920s. To those willing to strive for the adventurous life, he acknowledged, “the citizens of Middletown are concerned about ballast for the boat, but we are concerned about sails,” he said, “and we are unafraid as we stretch them to the tall masts where they will collect the winds of space.”540

540 New York Times, June 23, 1929, p5.