It’s romantic to think of the idealist as a solitary champion of right, the bold soul who keeps fighting in spite of all obstacles. It’s less romantic, but more realistic, to picture the idealist as one who worries about the office rent, or frets about the payroll. Where is the glory in the electric bill, the glamour in keeping the pencils sharp?
These are some of the special burdens borne by Alice Paul and Max Eastman. When the president begins his preparedness push in late 1915, they are not just young radicals but young leaders: She is thirty; he is thirty-two.
They share more than a fervent belief in women’s equality and affection for Max’s sister, Crystal. Both of them are on the shy side; both might look right at home in a lecture hall, for they have genuine academic credentials: Paul earned a Ph.D. from Penn just before leading her suffrage parade; Eastman completed all the requirements for the same degree at Columbia, but didn’t collect it. (He would have needed to submit a printed copy of his thesis, which would have cost $40—as he put it, “$39.70 more than the best Ph.D. ever granted is intrinsically worth.”)1
They could always return to the academy. They could write and teach and take the summers off. Instead, with the threat of war growing, they go on navigating the paradoxes of leading a radical cause. They abandoned campus life because of a personal commitment to an individual vision, but leadership means being responsive to everybody else’s vision, too. They take their responsibilities seriously, and want to lead effectively—and sometimes that means they need to quit.
Paul claims victory in her western campaign against the Democrats, but the Democrats do not act vanquished. In 1915, the suffrage amendment makes it to the floor of the House, where it is soundly defeated.
Once again it’s time to try something new.
She begins to think that in order to push those intransigent men as hard as they need to be pushed, the tiny Congressional Union needs to apply pressure in their home states—all forty-eight of them. That will require an astonishing amount of new money. Since Paul is the group’s most effective fundraiser, she offers to quit and focus her energy on that.
Her advisers do not like this idea. Dora Lewis, the one with whom she has the closest relationship, suspects that Alice feels overwhelmed, and that if she felt stronger, she would persist. The two of them spend a night together, as they often do. The question of Alice Paul’s private life is as fascinating as it is impenetrable. (Later in life, she would do a remarkably thorough job of scrubbing the intimate details out of her papers. It’s not even entirely clear how she divided her affections between men and women.)2 Her most important relationship, then and always, is with the fight for women’s rights.
Whatever Dora Lewis says or does, it persuades Paul to take back her resignation. She goes on running the Congressional Union. It means that she continues to be the primary target of the organization’s growing list of enemies.
When Paul’s new state offices begin to open, the NAWSA leaders, feeling threatened, attack her for “autocratic leadership and a philosophic irresponsibility to the suffrage movement.”3
When she continues to insist, even amid Wilson’s preparedness campaign, that suffrage is the most important issue in the country, she gets lectured by the editorial board of The New York Times: “It is no time for theatricals in Washington.”4
And when she appears before the House Judiciary Committee, trying to steer the amendment back to the floor, the Democrats treat the hearing as a shooting gallery, relishing the chance to attack the impudent young woman who had campaigned against them.
“The women who have the vote in the West are not worrying about what women are doing in the East,” says a Democrat from Kansas. “You will have to get more states before you try this nationally.”
“We think that this repeated advice to go back to the states proves beyond all cavil that we are on the right track,” she replies, standing her ground.
“Have your services been bespoken by the Republican committee of Kansas for the next campaign?” he demands.
“We are greatly gratified by this tribute to our value.”5
Paul believes deeply in her cause and is willing to go on leading it, but she is no masochist: The abuse takes a toll.
Eastman tries to quit, too—though it’s not entirely his idea.
“You’re a dictator and you’ve got to be overthrown,” Floyd Dell tells him when he arrives at the office one day. “You’re going to be overthrown in the name of Art with a capital A.”
There are factions within the staff of The Masses, as there are within any republic. On one side stand some committed socialists, mainly writers, who tolerate the apolitical parts of the magazine, mainly the pictures; on the other side stand the artists who draw those pictures, who just want to publish their images without a lot of words.
Eastman knows that a staff full of rebels is bound to rebel. It’s only natural that a hothead young artist such as Stuart Davis would make a fuss. This “strike,” as they’re calling it, doesn’t sound very interesting.
“It is,” says Dell, “because they’ve got Sloan on their side.”6
That is interesting.
John Sloan is one of the original stalwarts of The Masses. More than just the art editor, he is a pillar of the whole operation. When Max promised, in his first editor’s note, to “tune our reading matter up to the key of our pictures as fast as we can,” he meant Sloan if he meant anybody.7
If Sloan is involved, it’s not a strike anymore—it’s a coup.
At the next meeting, Sloan speaks first, reading from a prepared text.
“The Masses is no longer the resultant of the ideas and art of a number of personalities,” he says. “We propose to get back to the idea of producing a magazine which will be of more interest to the contributors than to anyone else.”
He wants to eliminate all traces of an editorial policy, socialist or otherwise. No more raucous monthly meetings. Writers will choose the stories, artists will choose the pictures, and a makeup committee will stitch them together. There will be no more editors—not even to raise money. Volunteers could take care of that.
This all strikes Eastman as insane, absurd, impractical. But he doesn’t say that. Instead, he reads from his own prepared text.
“With every year since The Masses started, I have grown more skeptical of the principle of cooperative editing, and at the present time I am completely disillusioned. I do not believe in it any longer, and I do not want to take part in it any longer.”
Since nobody seems to agree about anything anymore, it’s a pretense to speak of cooperation. “The strain of the situation would be too difficult for me, even if I believed in the principle.” So he offers to resign.
This is not going the way that Sloan and the other dissidents had expected. They ignore Eastman’s resignation and vote to fire him.
The tally is 5–5, which settles nothing. They’re short of a quorum. It means they have to get together and do this all again in a few days.8
To the outside observer, it looks like Eastman is about to get the freedom he has wanted. E. W. Scripps, the press magnate who has been supporting the magazine in spite of his distaste for its politics, likes Eastman but thinks he’s ill-suited for the job. He has a nervous system that “should not and cannot safely be submitted to the strains inevitably attendant on such a business as the publication of The Masses.”9
Scripps fails to understand something about Eastman’s connection to The Masses. It’s the same thing people miss about Paul and the Congressional Union: The organization is so much a reflection of its leader that it makes no sense to speak of them separately. The fight between the committed socialists and the apolitical artists on the magazine’s staff is the outward manifestation of the split in Eastman’s soul, between the agitator and the poet. He cannot reconcile the two in his own life, because in choosing one he will be false to the other. All he can do is try to maintain a kind of equilibrium—in his life and in his magazine.
Alice Paul gets a second chance to make her burden lighter.
In December 1915, NAWSA holds its annual convention. On its sidelines, Paul and four other members of the Congressional Union have a closed-door meeting with five delegates from NAWSA. It’s billed as an “efficiency” meeting. Really it’s a summit.
In spite of the bad blood, there are good reasons to combine forces. The month before, suffrage measures had been voted down in four big eastern states—a major setback for NAWSA, which had led those fights. (President Wilson had voted “yes” in the New Jersey referendum, but said he was only doing it as a private citizen, which didn’t change his view on federal suffrage. Paul is unimpressed.) Also the convention is going to install new leaders for the organization: Anna Howard Shaw, the longtime president, is stepping aside.
Alice Paul hadn’t wanted to leave NAWSA in the first place; maybe something is possible. But any reconciliation is complicated by the fact that the woman sitting across from her is the one who initiated her exile.
At fifty-six, Carrie Chapman Catt has spent half her life trying to secure votes for women. She has lit the lamps and swept the floors. She has written and argued and raised funds and traveled. She nursed a husband, then buried him. In December 1915, she leads NAWSA’s New York State affiliate, and she doesn’t do it timidly. After the suffragists lost in New York the month before, she upbraided them at their state convention: “You women of New York must put the bric-a-brac out of your lives and your homes. It must be ‘suffrage first’ with you now. You are making history, and little things must not interfere.”10
Catt and Paul have a lot in common, which is one reason they dislike each other. The Congressional Union is “exceedingly distasteful,” Catt once told Jane Addams, accusing Alice Paul of “stupendous stupidity.” Still, Catt knows what Paul has achieved. “The Congressional Union has pushed the Federal Amendment to the front, no matter what anybody says about it,” she tells a fellow suffragist—though only privately.11
Catt also knows she isn’t the first suffragist to watch a strong-willed upstart at work. “There never was a young woman yet who had just been converted, who did not know that if she had had the management of the work from the beginning, the cause would have been carried long ago,” Susan B. Anthony said twenty years earlier, when a brisk junior suffragist took steps to hurry the movement along—the upstart being Carrie Chapman Catt.12
On this morning in 1915, at the New Willard Hotel, Catt lays out the NAWSA election policy for the benefit of Paul and her militant sisters. The organization does not support or oppose political parties, regardless of their positions on suffrage. It regards each candidate individually. NAWSA cannot accept an affiliate group that defies such a policy.
Could the Congressional Union abide by it?
There would be clear advantages for Alice Paul. The money. The organizational reach. The dispersal of abuse.
But she just reiterates what she told her tormentors on the Judiciary Committee: The Congressional Union has no election policy. Its actions depend entirely on what the Democrats do.
This is too coy for Catt, too tricky. It’s the same kind of cleverness that had made her declare that she was “razzle-dazzled” by Paul’s independence back in 1913.
“All I wish to say is, I will fight you to the last ditch,” says Catt.
Then she walks out.13
Eastman is in the chair when the staff of The Masses reconvenes to decide his fate—and maybe the magazine’s. It’s a Thursday afternoon in early 1916.
When Sloan’s impractical plan for a leaderless magazine is put to a vote, the final tally is 8 in favor and 10 against. It seems that the storm has passed. And since Eastman no longer feels like resigning, they can all go back to work.
Except that now Dell is rising to his feet—and Max doesn’t know why.
Dell moves that John Sloan and the four dissident artists be expunged from the list of contributing editors—a proposal even more hostile than Sloan’s coup.
A bigger shock comes when Dell’s motion is seconded by the best-loved member of the staff: the jolly, genial Art Young.
While Young isn’t on the editorial side of the magazine, he has no patience for mere aesthetes, the artists with no project more politically committed than a desire “to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street.”14
“To me this magazine exists for socialism,” says Young. “That’s why I give my drawings to it, and anybody who doesn’t believe in a socialist policy, so far as I go, can get the hell out!”15
Dell’s motion loses, but the sight of Young losing his cool shocks everybody out of their belligerent moods. In typically topsy-turvy fashion, they decide that instead of expelling the rebels, they’ll promote them. John Sloan is named vice president.16
The meeting breaks up on a note of puzzled détente.
There’s an irony to the challenges that Paul and Eastman face—another paradox of leading a radical organization.
Paul’s 1914 campaign had been based on a promise of solidarity. Western women would vote against Democrats to stand with their disenfranchised sisters in the east. But her own movement has reached the limits of solidarity. She and Catt cannot find common ground, and now the potential ally is going to be a formidable foe. A few hours after the failed summit, Paul and her lieutenants learn that Catt has been elected the new president of NAWSA.
Eastman likes to trumpet the democratic character of The Masses. Yet the standoff between the writers and artists revealed the limits of collaboration among people who don’t share exactly the same ideals—and even people who do. Later that night, Sloan sends Eastman a letter of resignation, depriving the magazine of one of its best minds.
A reporter asks Sloan what it means.
“It just proves that real democracy doesn’t work—yet,” he says.
These questions are more complicated than they appeared at Columbia and Penn.