Appendix I: A Letter on John Reed's 'The Colorado War' Boulder, Colorado. December 5 1915 My dear Mr Sinclair:- I have your letter of Ist inst. I do not think the reporter always got me quite right, or as fully as he might have got me. I did, however, think at the time I testified that Reed's paper in The Metropolitan contained some exaggerations. I did not intend to say that he intentionally told any untruths, and doubtless he had investigated carefully and could produce witnesses to substantiate what he said. Some things are matters of opinion. Some others are almost incapable ofproof. The greater part of Reed's paper is true. But for example, p. 14 1st column July (1914) Metropolitan: 'And orders were that the Ludlow colony must be wiped out. It stood in the way ofMr. Rockefeller's profits.' I believe that a few brutes like Linderfelt probably did intend to wipe this colony out, but that orders were given to this effect by any responsible person­ either civil or military - is incapable of proof. So the statement that 'only seventeen of them [strikers] had guns', I believe from what Mrs Hollearn [post-mistress] tells me is not quite correct. On p. 16 Reed says the strikers 'eagerly turned over their guns to be delivered to the militia' - Now it is pretty clear from what happened later that many guns were retained: on Dec. 31 st I was at Ludlow when some 50 or so rifles - some new, some old - were found under the tents and there were more - not found. The boy beaten by Linderfelt (p. 16 - 3rd Column) could walk tho he was badly beaten. We could not find (see p. 66) 'Hundreds of strike-breakers [who] 187 188 American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 escaped at night over the hills in the snow' - tho, during the Congressional Investigation we found some. It is doubtful if Judge McHendrie p. 67 (Column l.) could properly be called 'an appointee of the C.F & I.' - tho he had been a partner of Northcutt. P. 69 'four militiamen ... slouched up to the men's diamond ... leveling their rifles insolently on the crowd' - I have tried to verify this and have failed, but may be it was so. I t is almost impossible to show definitely who fired the first shot on the morning of April 20th - but he puts it as ifit were established that, after the signal bombs were set off, (p. 69), 'suddenly, without warning, both machine guns pounded stab-stab-stab full on the tents.' P. 72 (Column 1) 'Children on the sidewalks were mowed down by the bullets' - (This at 7th St. in Walsenburg) - I may be misinformed as to this - but I'm told it was not so. Nevertheless - there was much more truth than error in Reed's paper, and I ought not to have left the impression that I thought it untrue as a whole. Of course, the absolute truth is bad enough - even the facts as admitted by the Operators' friends and by the Militia are enough to damn them in the eyes of civilized men. What I was trying to express in my testimony at this point was, I suppose, the fact that exaggerated, wild, statements had been made on both sides, but that the operators had been in this [indecipherable] the more guilty. The accounts of 'Ludlow' prepared by the hired writers of the operators - notably that called 'The Story of Ludlow' by one Paddock (an editor of this city) - are full of the grossest lies - far exceeding anything that I call exaggerations in Reed's paper. Sincerely Yours, James H. Brewster [Sinclair Mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Brewster (1856-1920) was a lawyer and later professor oflaw.] Appendix II: Some Versions of the Isadora Duncan Myth Duncan was herself an extravagant self-mythologizer.' In their turn, her audiences and admirers endowed Duncan's performances with many of their own preoccupations: cultural nationalism, the struggle for sexual freedom, and the urge to unrestrained self-expression are the major themes which appear in responses to her art. It has been less clearly understood that there were political dimensions to the Duncan cult, and that during the First World War, when she utterly committed herself to the Allies' cause, Duncan began to be seen with different eyes by the artists and writers in Greenwich Village who led the enthusiastic discovery of her genius. In]uly 1908 Isadora Duncan returned home to America. In the eight years since her departure for Europe she gained fame and notoriety. 'I had created an Art, a School, a Baby', Duncan wrote in her autobiography. 'Not so bad. But, as far as finances went, I was not much richer than before.' 2 Her manager tried to put Duncan in a Broadway theatre with a small orchestra, but the temperature in the city was in the nineties, the critics were hostile, and the booking was an outright failure. Despite her legendary performances in Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Paris and London, New Yorkers seemed impervious to the Duncan phenomenon. A tour of smaller American cities was an even more emphatic flop. Without sufficient funds to return to Europe, Duncan took a studio in the Beaux Arts Building in N ew York, where she danced for select audiences of poets and artists. Greenwich Village warmed to her. Painters and writers, including Robert Henri, George Bellows, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ridgely Torrence and William Vaughn Moody attended Duncan's evenings. Max Eastman became a devotee, as did Mitchell Kennerley, Percy MacKaye and Arnold Genthe. Word soon reached the New York press that there was a 'Duncan cult' in 189 190 American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 the Village. Duncan was described in the New York Sun as 'a dancing sprite, an amber figurine offering you wine from an uplifted cup, throwing roses at Athene's shrine, swimming on the crest of the purple waves of the Aegean Sea'. 3 When Walter Damrosch persuaded her to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House accompanied by a full orchestra, a successful tour followed which culminated in a triumphant performance before President Roosevelt. The younger generation of writers and artists saw in her the promise ofa new, liberated life devoted to self-expression, high art and progressive social ideals. To William Carlos Williams, when he saw Duncan dance at her studio in October 1908, she seemed an inspiration for the artistic life. He wrote to his brother Edgar that her dance 'doubly strengthened my desire and my determination to accomplish my part in our wonderful future'. He devoted a poem to her: Isadora when I saw you dance the interrupting years fell back, It seemed with far intenser leave than lack Of your deft steps hath e'er conferred no flaw ...4 (This was very early Williams indeed.) The painter Robert Henri saw in Duncan 'one of the prophets who open to our vision the pos­ sibility of a life where full natural expression will be the aim of all people'.5 Leonard D. Abbott, a leading figure in the Ferrer School in New York, saw Duncan as 'a natural-born anarchist,.6 Despite the classical ambition behind her dance, Americans saw Duncan as the embodiment of the Whitman legacy. The sculptor George Grey Barnard asked her to model the figure of 'America Dancing' for a Whitmanesque sculptural project. 7 To Max Eastman she was a 'winged apostle to the whole world of Walt Whitman's vision ofa poised and free-bodied and free-souled humanity,.8 Duncan sought to revive the ideals of classical Greek dance, abandoning the traditional flared tulle skirt and tights of classical ballet for a loosely-draped tunic. She danced barefoot, on a stage empty of decoration. Duncan was convinced that she had discovered the true austerity of classical art, a primitive, archaic expressiveness which could be conjured out of twentieth-century consciousness. But according to Lewis Mumford, 'what mattered in Isadora's Hellenic dances and dramatic presentations was not the Greek themes or the gauzy costumes but the uninhibited Appendix II: The Isadora Duncan Myth 191 vitality, the sense of a glorious nakedness about to be affirmed, not only in the rituals oflovers but in every part oflife'.9 Hart Crane admiringly described Duncan, standing before a hostile and incomprehending audience in Cleveland, with right breast and nipple exposed, telling everyone to go home and read Walt Whitman's 'Calamus'. 'Glorious to see her there ... telling the audience that truth was not pretty .. .' 10 Duncan made a religion ofimpulse, and became a symbol of the 'new paganism'." Floyd Dell, who saw Duncan and her young dancers in her loft on lower Fifth Avenue, wrote a poem, 'On Seeing Isadora Duncan's School', which he published in the New York Tribune of 4- February 1915: I t is a poem and a prophecy - A glimpse across the forward gulf of time To show our dazzled souls what life shall be Upon the sunlit heights toward which we climb: A flaming challenger to a world benighted A lamp of daring in our darkness lighted. Abraham Walkowitz, a painter in Alfred Stieglitz's circle, saw Duncan dance at Rodin's studio: 'Her body was music. It was a body electric like Walt Whitman.' Walkowitz did more than 5000 drawings of Isadora Duncan in motion. '2 A profligate life and unashamed sexual liberation made her an outlaw, a renegade, pursued by police, hounded by detectives, condemned by clergymen. There was little tradition or admiration of aristocratic libertinism in America.