Floyd
Dell was born on 28th June, 1887 in Pike County, Missouri. His father,
Anthony Dell, found it difficult to find regular work and the family
experienced a great deal of poverty.
At school Dell developed a love of reading. He later claimed that
it was books by William Morris and Frank
Norris helped convert him to socialism.
At sixteen, he joined the Socialist Party
and gave speeches on street-corners about his political beliefs. He
also produced material for a small Socialist monthly, Tri-City
Workers' Magazine.
After a spell as an apprentice candy-maker Dell worked as a cub-reporter
for the Davenport Times. He later
moved to the Chicago Evening Post and by 1911 was editor of
the newspaper's Friday Literary Review.
Over the next few years Dell promoted the work of writers such as
Frank Norris, Jack
London, Charles Edward Russell,
David Graham Phillips, Upton
Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen
Crane. Dell believed that the everyday life of the middle and
working classes provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment.
Dell valued authenticity and accuracy of detail and welcomed those
like Russell and Phillips who wanted to use literature to bring about
social reform.
While editor of the Friday Literary Review
Dell also promoted the work of writers such as George
Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell, Arnold
Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Hillaire
Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.
In 1914 Dell moved to New York and joined Max
Eastman in helping edit the radical journal, The
Masses. Dell wrote articles on several issues including support
for Margaret Sanger and her birth control
campaign. He also recruited promising writers such as Sherwood
Anderson, Dorothy Day and Carl
Sandburg to write for the journal.
In 1916 Dell became involved in the Provincetown
Theatre Group. Dell's King Arthur's Socks
was the first play to be performed by the group. Others who wrote
or acted for the group included Eugene O'Neill,
George Gig Cook, Susan
Glaspell, John Reed, Louise
Bryant and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Dell, like most of the people working with The
Masses, was opposed to USA involvement in the First
World War. After the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, The Masses
came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused
to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.
In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by
Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art
Young, Boardman Robinson and H.
J. Glintenkamp had violated the Espionage
Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that
undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918, after three days
of deliberation, the jury failed to agree on the guilt of Dell and
his fellow defendants.
The second trial was held in January 1919. John
Reed, who had recently returned from Russia, was also arrested
and charged with the original defendants. This time eight of the twelve
jurors voted for acquittal. As the war was now over, it was decided
not to take them to court for a third time.
In 1918 the same people who produced The
Masses, including Dell, Max Eastman,
John Reed, Art Young,
Robert Minor and Boardman
Robinson went on the publish a very similar journal, The
Liberator (1918-24).
After the war Dell published the best-selling autobiographical novel,
Moon-Calf (1920). Other novels
such as The Briary-Bush (1921),
Janet Marsh (1923) and Runaway
(1925), were less successful.
As well as writing for the left-wing magazines such as the New
Masses (1924-39) Dell produced several non-fictional works
including Upton Sinclair (1927),
Love in the Machine Age (1930)
and an autobiography, Homecoming
(1933). Floyd Dell died in 1969.
(1)
In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd Dell recalled how he
discovered he was poor.
I didn't go back to school that fall. My mother said it was because
I was sick. I stayed cooped up in the house, without companionship.
That year my father and mother didn't say a word about Christmas.
And once, when I spoke of it, there was a strange, embarrassed silence;
so I didn't say anything more about it.
I knew why I hadn't gone to school that fall - why I hadn't any new
shoes - why we had been living on potato soup all winter. All these
things, and others, many others, fitted themselves together in my
mind, and meant something.
Then the words came into my mind and I whispered them into the darkness:
"We're poor!" That was it. I was one of those poor children
I had been sorry for, when I heard about them in Sunday school. My
mother hadn't told me. My father was out of work, and we hadn't any
money. That was why there wasn't going to be any Christmas at our
house.
(2) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)
There was a little boy whose father worked in the bank; I liked him
until he asked me distastefully, "Why do you smell the way you
do?" I answered, "I guess it's because I eat potato soup
so often" - and after that I avoided him.
There was a nice little girl, with whom I walked to school every day
for a week or so - a dark-eyed, quiet little girl. But when I was
gently teased about my 'little sweetheart', I stopped. Having a sweetheart
meant, I knew, buying candy for her; and I had no money to buy candy
with.
There was a little boy that year who bought some candy and shared
it with me as we were walking to school; a few days later, he asked
me when I was going to 'treat back'. I went to my mother in shame,
hating to ask her for money, and resolved never to get into that trap
again. With her nickel I bought some candy, gave the other boy half,
and grimly ate my own half. Next time I would know better.
I had no real friends, no chums, no one I trusted or let myself care
for.
(3) Floyd Dell, Homecoming
(1933)
My mother was always particular about whom I played with, and I sought
to understand her discriminations. Politeness, neatness and lack of
profanity seemed to be the chief points in her social decisions. But
one Sunday I found a nice little coloured boy out in front of the
house, who was very polite, and quite neat, and used no bad words;
moreover, he had a pocket full of coloured chalks with which pictures
could be drawn on the sidewalk. Nevertheless, my mother called me
back into the house. I could not understand why, and demanded fretfully,
"He's a nice boy, isn't he Mamma?" My mother looked embarrassed
and ashamed, and did not reply.
This ashamed silence of hers somehow threatened the moral fabric of
my universe. From the window I could see the little coloured boy,
after waiting a while, gather up his chalks, turn his back on the
house, and slowly walk away. "Why, Mamma? Why can't I play with
him? No answer. at least, she had the grace to be ashamed.
She did not know that at school I had kept the laws of her Ideal Universe
which she was playing fast and loose with. There, at a double desk,
I had sat with a little coloured boy, whom the other boys didn't want
to sit with. How did my teacher know that I did not regard girls or
Negro boys as my inferiors? Anyway, she was right. I took seriously
the story about my father having fought and suffered in the war to
set free the slaves.
(4) Floyd
Dell, Homecoming (1933)
Frank Norris's novel, The Octopus
stirred my mind. And that spring, down in a small park near my home,
I heard a man make a Socialist speech to a small and indifferent crowd.
Afterwards I talked to him; he was a street-sweeper. I believe William
Morris has a street-sweeper Socialist in News from Nowhere;
but this was not a literary echo, this Socialist street-sweeper in
Quincy - he was real. And my long-slumbering Socialism woke up. I
went to a meeting of the Socialist local, a group of only seven or
eight who met in the back room of, if I remember rightly, a jewelry
store. And between that and the next meeting I converted my friend
- conversion is a task which friendship makes extraordinary easy -
and brought him in triumph to the back room. We both joined the local
and paid our dues; this was irregular, because eighteen was the lowest
age for membership in the Party, and I was barely sixteen now, and
my friend but a year older.
(5) Floyd Dell wrote about discovering the
work of Sherwood Anderson, Carl
Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser while
the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post.
I met Carl Sandburg, and he read some of his poems from manuscript.
They were all impressionistic, misty, soft-outlined, delicate; I remember
liking particularly the one about the fog that "comes on little
cat feet". Carl Sandburg had not struck yet the note he was soon
to strike in Chicago Poems.
I saw something of Theodore Dreiser, who was in Chicago for a while;
he said I was the best critic in America; but I had said he was a
great novelist, so it was only natural for him to think well of my
critical powers.
A new, hitherto unknown novelist swam into my ken, Sherwood Anderson,
with the manuscript of a novel, Windy MacPherson's Son, which
I immediately admired; it had things in it about the Middle West which
had never got into fiction. Sherwood Anderson worked in an advertising
agency, and loathed it.
(6) In
his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd Dell wrote about joining
The Masses in 1914.
I was paid twenty-five dollars a week for helping Max Eastman get
out the magazine. My job on The Masses was to read manuscripts,
bring the best of them to editorial meetings to be voted on, send
back what we couldn't use, read proof, and 'make up' the magazine
- all duties with which I was familiar; and also to help plan political
cartoons and persuade the artists to draw them. I could submit my
stories and poems anonymously to the editorial meetings, hear them
discussed, and print them if they were accepted.
At the monthly editorial meetings, where the literary editors were
usually ranged on one side of all questions and the artists on the
other. The squabbles between literary and art editors were usually
over the question of intelligibility and propaganda versus artistic
freedom; some of the artists held a smoldering grudge against the
literary editors, and believed that Max Eastman and I were infringing
the true freedom of art by putting jokes or titles under their pictures.
John Sloan and Art Young were the only ones of the artists who were
verbally quite articulate; but fat, genial Art Young sided with the
literary editors usually; and John Sloan, a very vigorous and combative
personality, spoke up strongly for the artists.
Nobody gained a penny out of the things published in the magazine;
it was an honour to get into its pages, an honour conferred by vote
at the meetings. Max Eastman and I did get salaries for editorial
work; but that was regarded as dirty work, which ought to be paid
for. We were actually a little republic in which, as artists, we worked
for the approval of our fellows, not for money.
(7) As editor of The
Masses Floyd Dell gave Margaret
Sanger support in her campaign in favour of birth control.
Margaret Sanger had begun her work on behalf on women's freedom
from unwanted pregnancies; she renamed the prevention of conception
'birth control', and under that name it began to get attention in
the newspapers. The propaganda went on under the threatening shadow
of a federal statute, passed under the influence of that strange moral
monstrosity, Anthony Comstock, which classed such information as 'obscene'.
In New York City a woman police spy, pretending to be a wife desperately
in need of birth control information, got a pamphlet from William
Sanger, as he was arrested. The Masses published articles in
defence of him and of Margaret Sanger, and the magazine was immediately
flooded with thousands of letters from women, asking for information
about the methods of birth control, and giving the best as well as
the most heart-breaking reasons for needing such information.
(8) Floyd
Dell, like most of the people working for The
Masses, was totally opposed to the United States
becoming involved in the First World War.
In 1917 Allied propaganda was dragging
the United States into the war, in spite of the re-election of Wilson
on the promise contained in the slogan, 'He kept us out of the war!"
Nearly all the American Socialist leaders, from Upton Sinclair down,
had joined in the pro-war hysteria. Socialism seemed a broken reed;
but the Pacifist movement looked stronger and more courageous than
had been expected. I had to consider whether I was a Pacifist or not;
I wasn't sure - if there were hope of Revolution, I wasn't. But the
masses of Europe seemed to be going like sheep to the slaughter; Revolution
seemed a vain hope.
(9) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)
The Masses harassed by the post-office authorities, was
suppressed in October, 1917, by the Government, and its editors were
indicted, myself among them, under the so-called Espionage Act, which
was being used not against German spies but against American Socialists,
Pacifists, and anti-war radicals. Sentences of twenty years were being
served out to all who dared say this was not a war to end war, or
that the Allied loans would never be paid. But the courts would probably
not get around to us until next year; and we immediately made plans
to start another magazine, The Liberator, and tell more truth;
we would stand on the pre-war Wilsonian program, and call for a negotiated
peace.
(10) Floyd
Dell, speech in court when charged with breaking the Espionage
Act (1918)
There are some laws that the individual
feels he cannot obey, and he will suffer any punishment, even that
of death, rather than recognize them as having authority over him.
This fundamental stubbornness of the free soul, against which all
the powers of the state are helpless, constitutes a conscious objection,
whatever its sources may be in political or social opinion.
(11) In his autobiography, Homecoming,
Floyd Dell explained his thoughts on being charged with breaking the
Espionage
Act.
While we waited, I began to ponder for myself the question which
the jury had retired to decide. Were we innocent or guilty? We certainly
hadn't 'conspired' to do anything. But what had we tried to do? Defiantly
tell the truth. For what purpose? To keep some truth alive in a world
full of lies. And what was the good of that? I don't know. But I was
glad I had taken part in that act of defiant truth-telling.
Rumours began to perculate. "Six to six." Next morning the
debate in the jury-room grew fiercer, noisier. At noon the jury came
in, hot, weary, angry, limp, and exhausted. They had fought the case
amongst themselves for eleven vehement hours. And they could not agree
upon a verdict.
But the judge refused to discharge them; and they went back, after
further instructions, with grim determination on their faces.
At eleven o'clock the jurors reported continued disagreement, but
were sent back. The next noon, hopelessly deadlocked, the jury was
discharged, with all our thanks. And so we were free.
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