Greenwich Village radicals

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

   NY Times, July 21, 2002


   'Republic of Dreams': Village People

*By MORRIS DICKSTEIN*

*REPUBLIC OF DREAMS
Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960.
*By Ross Wetzsteon.
617 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $35.

P robably the most famous neighborhood in America, Greenwich Village
came to symbolize the bohemian life the way Paris's Left Bank stood for
postwar existentialism. For decades the Village legend served as a
beacon for bored adolescents who felt stifled by the constraints of
small-town America. What Harlem meant for many young blacks in the
1920's and 30's, what the Beats embodied for those growing up in the
50's, the Village represented for the restless generation of 1910. To
Midwestern Protestants, children of immigrant Jews, closeted gays,
clandestine readers, thwarted artists and gifted young women longing for
independence, it offered a tantalizing promise of creative and sexual
freedom to be found nowhere else on this continent.

The peak years of the Village came between 1912 and 1917, before
America's entry into the European war led to a crackdown on dissent. The
war killed off the high-spirited little magazine that best spoke for the
Village spirit, The Masses, an exuberant collaboration of radical
intellectuals like Max Eastman, Floyd Dell and John Reed with talented
young artists like John Sloan, Art Young and Stuart Davis. At the time
when the Armory Show of 1913 brought the shock of European modernism to
American art, Reed, Lincoln Steffens and Walter Lippmann held court in
Mabel Dodge's famous salon at 23 Fifth Avenue, where they brought in
speakers like Emma Goldman, the notorious anarchist, and Big Bill
Haywood, the Wobbly leader.

Ross Wetzsteon, a warmly admired editor of the Village Voice for more
than three decades until his death in 1998, is only the latest of many
writers and filmmakers who have been drawn to this period because of its
ferment of utopian ideas and colorful, unconventional personalities. At
least initially, their uninhibited sex lives and pioneering feminism
were part of a larger dream of political change. This was nonconformity
before it became a performance, a freewheeling American radicalism
before the commissars took it over.

Where Christine Stansell's ''American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the
Creation of a New Century'' highlights the social outlook of the Village
radicals, particularly the birth pangs of modernity and the role of the
New Women, Wetzsteon is drawn to the paradoxes of middle-class
bohemianism, including downward mobility, self-promotion, voluntary
poverty and sexual adventure. He seems to identify with the Villagers'
liberated relationships, which he describes in greater detail than their
books or their political work. But he also shows how the open marriage
of couples like Max Eastman and Ida Rauh (which did not last) or the
writers Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce (which somehow did) worked to
men's advantage. ''While women's right to sexual fulfillment was
acknowledged,'' Wetzsteon says, liberation simply made women more
available. He wonders, ''Aren't our goals of more autonomy and more
intimacy fundamentally irreconcilable? Is free love the basis for female
sexual emancipation or merely a way to legitimize male promiscuity?''

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/books/review/21DICKSTT.html

first chapter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/books/review/0721-1st-wetzs.html

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Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org