560 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
This issue of The Masses, a leading Socialist magazine, featured a
cover by Ashcan artist John Sloan, as well as articles by Max Eastman
and John Reed. Sloan depicted the conflagration that took the lives
of women and children who lived in a tent city erected by miners
who were striking near Ludlow, Colorado. The state militia, seeking
to crush the strike, burned down the tent city.
Source: ©2011 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Mi
lwaukeeR.MenomoneeR.aLekMichigaMilwaukee n
embraces
Socialism,
1916German
predominant
Polish
predominantWards giving
Socialist candidate,
Daniel Hoan, 50%
or more of votes
in mayoral electionUrban SocialismBy 1912, Socialists had been elected mayor of
dozens of cities, including Milwaukee. This map shows that Dan
Hoan, the Socialist mayor, received strong support from the
predominantly Polish and German wards. Opponents used such
results to argue that socialism was a “foreign” concept.to discourse impressively about the significance of
slips of the tongue, sublimation, and infant sexuality.
Some saw in Freud’s ideas reason to effect a “revo-
lution of manners and morals” that would have
shocked (or at least embarrassed) Freud, who was
personally quite conventional. They advocated easy
divorce, trial marriage, and doing away with the double
standard in all matters relating to sex. They rejected
Victorian reticence and what they incorrectly identified
as “puritan” morality out of hand, and they called for
programs of sex education, especially the dissemination
of information about methods of birth control.
Most large cities boasted groups of these
“bohemian” thinkers, by far the most famous being
the one centered in New York City’s Greenwich
Village. The dancer Isadora Duncan, the photogra-
pher Alfred Stieglitz, the novelist Floyd Dell, several
of the Ashcan artists, and the playwright Eugene
O’Neill rubbed shoulders with Big Bill Haywood of
the IWW, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the psycho-
analyst A. A. Brill, the militant feminist advocate of
birth control Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman (editor
of their organ, The Masses), and John Reed, a young
Harvard graduate who was soon to become famous
for his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution,
Ten Days That Shook the World.
Goldman, Haywood, Sanger, and a few others in
this group were genuine radicals who sought basic
changes in bourgeois society, but most of the
Greenwich Village intellectuals were as much con-
cerned with aesthetic as social issues. The Masses
described itself as “a revolutionary and not a reform
magazine...amagazine whose final policy is to do
as it pleases.” Nearly all of them came from middle-
class backgrounds. They found the far-different
world of the Italian and Jewish immigrants of the
Village and its surrounding neighborhoods charm-
ing. But they did not become involved in the immi-
grants’ lives the way the settlement house workers
did. Their influence on their own times, therefore,
was limited. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not an
effective way to change minds. They are historically
important, however, because many of them were
genuinely creative people and because many of the
ideas and practices they advocated were adopted by
later generations.
The creative writers of the era, applying the spirit of
progressivism to the realism they had inherited from
Howells and the naturalists, tended to adopt an opti-
mistic tone. The poet Ezra Pound, for example, at this
time talked grandly of an American renaissance and
fashioned a new kind of poetry called imagism, which,
while not appearing to be realistic, rejected all abstract
generalizations and concentrated on concrete word pic-
tures to convey meaning. “Little” magazines and exper-
imental theatrical companies sprang to life by the dozen,
each convinced that it would revolutionize its art. The
poet Carl Sandburg, the best-known representative of