American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

Today the word bohemian is often used to describe some ragtag and footloose individual who believes in art and principle, who is pro-choice but not political, who believes in one big over-soul but is not religious, someone who believes he may be able to cure the world by holding hands with his neighbor singing coom-ba-ya. But the word bohemia is actually more than just a derisive remark to describe an artist.

A Kingdom of Bohemia once existed in what is today the Czech Republic. It was known for its deluge of Gypsies, for its shiftlessness, for its antibourgeois resolve. Following the success of Henri Muger’s 1849 melodrama La Vie de BohÃ?¨me, Bohemia connoted an enclave brimming with anarchist rebels and impoverished artists.

By the last decade of the 19th Century the zeitgeist of modernism that swept through Europe finally made its way to America: a generation of free thinkers, reformers, artists, and dreamers infiltrated New York City’s Greenwich Village, full of revolutionary certainty, fighting for cultural ascendancy, progressive political change, and sexual freedom. In short, they transformed New York into the beacon of a New Age.

Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century is a historical narrative, an in-depth testimony to the young libertines who embraced the summer dawn of a new era, revolutionaries whose “new temper of mind,” helped make New York and the Nation what it is today – a mecca for free speech, free love, and free will. “Against images of the metropolis as the chaotic site of a harsh and undisciplined modernity, the bohemians promoted notions of the city as infinitely knowable and nourishing.”

Greenwich Village is known for its eclectic and eccentric atmosphere, for the many students who attend NYU, and for a variety burgeoning independent film companies. Twentieth Century Bohemian Greenwich Village, however, extended all the way uptown to the precincts of Wall Street, where money and power ruled, where shrewd, business-minded publishers sought novel material; the Jewish Lower East Side could be found twenty blocks to the south; the plebian hullabaloo of Union Square hovered to the north.

There had been other cities ripe with political activity and intellectual prowess – San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, but provinciality soon befell them. Suddenly New York City became more than just a place of cheep rents and cafÃ?© society.

Between 1890 and 1910, Greenwich Village became a network of small communities that banded together to parlay and publish information on feminism, naturalism, Comstockery, free speech, and political repression. It was a place where New Women could postpone or renounce getting married; New Men postpone or renounce making a living. This confluence of Harvard Graduates, Jewish Intellectuals, feisty women, and radical unionists seemed to live without frill and in direct animadversion to conservatives and other debunkers all for a cause – be it anarchism or art.

American Moderns traces the move of bohemians from the periphery to the center and back again. It is a well written account of Bohemia’s brilliant rise and tragic crack-up. It has all the mellifluous prose and conflicts of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It also happens to be incredibly well-researched, a narrative, and not polemical report of early 20th Century history.

The first two chapters of Stansell’s book discuss the afferent move of young radicals from their native towns to New York. While the word modernism has always conveyed, “machines, electricity, speed, the autonomy of language the autonomy of paint, the death of God, the divided self,” Stansell extends the definition to include, “the pressure of democracy and the claims of women.” Why such an extension? Stansell’s assertion restores the word “radical” to prewar politics and makes women, heretofore bound and gagged by Victorian ideal, individuals of moral ambiguity, individuals who longed to live and wanted to matter.

By the last decade of the 19th Century, a group of writers had transformed Greenwich Village from a shabby neighborhood full of ribald men into a contemporary haven where handfuls of passionate young arrivistes, loathing bourgeois respectability and material success, lead fervent demonstrations for the change of the times.

But their actions were not only verbal; the influx of written material that was produced during this period is astonishing. In broaching subject of the spoken and written word in fittingly titled chapters “Talking” and “Writing,” Stansell makes an acute distinction between those European authors who were committed to the mastery of language and literature, authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, and American Bohemians whose writing was steeped primarily in political agenda and confrontational realism.

The young New York activists fought for such political issues as higher pay, better working conditions, female independence, women’s suffrage, the use of birth control, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech.

In delineating such strife, Stansell provides mini-bios of male and female bohemians — from Neith Boyce and Mabel Dodge, Max Eastman and Floyd Dell –all of whom worked to make a difference. What makes Stansell’s argument unique, however, is that individual actions are subsumed by traits the figures hold in common, allowing for the work to move beyond a particular person to encompass actual social changes.

Emma Goldman, for example, who came from Russia to escape a duty-bound marriage, had always been a faithful reader of Chernyshevsky. The Haymarket deaths of 1866 and her own experiences working in a factory pushed her “vague radical sympathies” into “full-blown anarchist fulminations.”

Hutchins Hapgood — a mid-western manufacturer’s son who had gone to Harvard, and Mary Heaton Vorse from Amherst, Massachusetts, too stumbled into Bohemia, fast becoming anarchists turned labor sympathizers turned journalists. What is missing, though, is an account of Willa Cather. Her novel Song of the Lark is briefly addressed, but how can one discuss 20th Century artists without including her to the mix. Ditto Georgia O’Keefe.

Fittingly, the book climaxes with “The Human Sex,” a section that details the origins of feminism and the desire of female equality – something many women are still seeking today. “The mingling of men and women in conversation came to seem the very essence, the condition of modernity,” Stansell writes.

In fact, the bohemians actually advocated more space, or, perhaps better said, a different kind of space for the sexes, “where metaphorical sisters and brothers might carry on ‘life without a father,’ a phrase of Gertrude Stein that could stand as an epitaph for a generation”. And while both sexes may have espoused the same beliefs for open, equal relationships, men and women practiced them unequally.

More often than not, women remained monogamous, finding it incredibly difficult to integrate sexual modernism into the domestic sphere when bogged down with children.

For those women who were lucky enough to receive an education, college became a launching pad of self invention, landing many graduates into the heart of Greenwich Village. There the New Woman abounded. She was no longer seen in the Victorian light as paramour and courtesan, schemer and spinster; rather this New Woman pervaded literary fiction and magazine articles. She was the Gibson Girl, the Bachelor Girl, the Female Rebel, the Female Jewish Intellectual.

But all good things must come to an end. Or as Fitzgerald once wrote, “Pull your chair up close to this precipice and I’ll tell you a story.” During the early years of the First World War, the bohemian cause slowly dissipated as public tolerance for free speech, socialism, and sexual promiscuity ferociously abated. The old moral censorship was compounded and heightened by new political censorship.

The Espionage Act indefatigably prosecuted all political literature; the Comstock Laws censoring what some considered obscene, offensive, or quisling art. Thus by 1920, Bohemia and the bohemian lifestyle disappeared as quickly as it arose. The war had ousted the American Moderns, robbing them of their cultural ascendance and rendering them has-beens. Perhaps more importantly, American civilization had changed: the culture was no longer concerned about production; it was much more interested in consumption. It seems that the Hoover Vacuum and the Frigidaire trumps free speech and birth control.

Though the fall of America’s Moderns is less extensively detailed than its rise, Stansell is equally passionate about both. American Moderns illustrates the complex portrait of a crucial historical moment: full of self-aggrandizement and self-dramatization, bohemians were unique to all other figures that had hitherto graced the pages of American History.

Through plays, stories, essays, reportage and lecture tours, they established the first real alternative to an established cultural elite, “a milieu that brought outsiders and their energies into the very heart of American intelligentsia.”

Bohemians were born into a Victorian world they grew to detest and became determined to change. Add to this, their rather acidulous thumb of the nose at the established elite, and there’s clearly a great story to tell. Stansell rescues bohemians from their debunkers, restores the historical context to our terse and irreverent connotation of the word, and vividly re-colors the civilization of Bohemia as well as its discontents.