Revolutionary lives: Anna Strunsky & William English Walling

691 Pages·1998·2.48 MB·English

by  James R. Boylan

Revolutionary Lives : Anna Strunsky &
title:
William English Walling
author: Boylan, James R.
publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin: 1558491643
print isbn13: 9781558491649
ebook isbn13: 9780585083179
language: English
Walling, Anna Strunsky,--1879- , Walling,
subject William English,--1877-1936, Socialists--
United States--Biography.
publication date: 1998
lcc: HX84.W26B69 1998eb
ddc: 335/.0092/273
Walling, Anna Strunsky,--1879- , Walling,
subject: William English,--1877-1936, Socialists--
United States--Biography.
Page iii
Revolutionary Lives
Anna Strunsky & William English Walling
James Boylan
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS · Amherst
Page iv
Copyright © 1998 by
The University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Mary Mendell
Set in Trump Medieval with Kolloss display type
by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed and bound by BookCrafters
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boylan, James R.
Revolutionary lives: Anna Strunsky and William
English Walling
James Boylan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN I558491643 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Walling, Anna Strunsky, 1879 .2. Walling, William English,
18771936.3. SocialistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
HX84.W26B69 1999
335.'.0092'273-dc21
[B] 9826696 CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
Page v
CONTENTS
Introduction: "This Aspiring and Questing World" 1
One
Anna: Love and Work, 18771905
1. "Miss Annie" 5
2. "Comrades!" 12
3. "Dane Kempton" 18
4. "Sahib Is Dead" 22
5. "Girl Away from Home" 27
6. "How My Life Spirals!" 33
7. "Breathless from the Race" 40
Two
English: Searching for a Calling, 18771905
8. "Gentleman of the Higher Type" 47
9. "My Life among the Lowly" 55
10. "Some Public Attention" 60
11. "More Red and Yellow" 65
12. "Dined and Wined" 70
Three
Converging on the Revolution, 19051908
13. "Geneva Is Your Fate" 79
14. "The Rush of Literary Spirits to the Scene" 86
15. "Grateful to Fate" 92
16. "Objective Journalist" 98
17. "Surprised and Anxious" 103
18. "Never to Have a Home" 107
19. "A Regular Paris Day" 112
Four
Achievement and Sorrow, 19061908
20. "Something Has Happened to My Freedom" 119
21. "Scorns the Name of a Wife" 124
22. "Where Do You Hide Your Revolvers and 130
Dynamite?"
23. "A Grief for All Our Life" 137
24. "Simply a Socialistic Pronouncement" 144
Page vi
Five
Springfield and After, 19081911
25. "Springfield Had No Shame" 151
26. "I Am Southern Born Myself" 155
27. "Inexperienced and Impractical" 161
28. "Sociology, Not Love" 165
29. "A Devil of Perversity" 170
30. "Burn Walling Up" 175
Six
At the Apex of Socialism, 19111914
31. "The Writer Is Sometimes Wrong" 183
32. "The Publicist, as Opposed to the Mere Journalist" 188
33. "Honeycombed with Socialists" 194
34. "That Distressing Person" 200
Seven
The Great War at Home, 19141920
35. "The World Is at War with Itself" 209
36. "We Talk of War Day and Night" 216
37. "Face to Face with the Opposition" 221
38. "I Am Not a Junker" 227
39. "Chemistry of the 'Inside'" 231
40. "To Fight Treason" 235
41. "Such a Shifting and Shaking Down" 242
42. "First Year of the New World" 246
43. "My Aid Has Been Repeatedly Sought" 251
Eight
Divergence, 19201964
44. "Seeing Yourself in My Place" 259
45. "A State of Coma" 263
46. "Do Not Be Afraid to Die Away from Home" 267
47. "Poor, Dear English" 269
48. "Dreams Assail Me" 271
Acknowledgments 275
Notes 277
Index 327
Illustrations follow page 160
Page 1
INTRODUCTION
"THIS ASPIRING AND QUESTING WORLD"
In the years before the Great War, William English Walling and Anna
Strunsky were among the most glorious of the American left's
Beautiful People: "millionaire Socialists," rivaled only by the
Lincolnesque James Graham Phelps Stokes and his immigrant
journalist bride, Rose Pastor.
1 English and Anna were striking individualson the platform, under
bylines, or as (frequently) reported in the Sunday supplements. As
seen in the press, they were almost caricatures: he slim and imperious,
the Southern aristocrat; she warm, passionate, voluble, a touch of
something foreign in her voice.
They were seen, and saw themselves, as destiny's couple, plunging
always toward the heart of their timesrevolution, pogrom, labor war,
racial violence, radical controversy. Freed by affluence to choose his
roles, he played the controversialist, the journalist engagé, the
publicist in the old sense of that term: the writer who minds the
world's business. She was a novelist by aspiration, a reluctant but
moving orator, and ever the idealist. Their influence on their era was
not inconsiderable: They fed American sympathy for the Russian
revolution of 1905, struck the initial spark for the founding of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and
rode the tide of prewar American socialism when it seemed capable of
transforming American politics and society.
Yet their names are today known chiefly to specialists, and the world
of radicalism that they inhabited can seem more remote than, say, the
first Elizabethan era. Their present obscurity is to a degree deserved,
for they never fully won the conventional attributes of fame:
achievement, enduring reputation, or power. By the time other
members of their generation were rising to eminence with the New
Deal, they had all but vanished from public view. The coin in which
they traded before the war had become all but worthless.
The title Revolutionary Livestaken from that of an unpublished book
by Anna Strunskyis to a degree ironic; Anna and English Walling
were self-styled revolutionaries whose radicalism was ultimately
played out in bourgeois settings. Yet for forty years they did lead
revolutionary lives, in the sense that they continually discarded old
identities for new, old issues for