Monday, February 18, 2013
Dudley Field Malone, 2: From Croton to Paris to Hollywood
CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Internationally famous lawyer Dudley
Field Malone played a prominent role in spectacular human rights causes early
in the 20th century.
When women whowere lawfully picketing the White House and Capitol were arrested and jailed for obstructing the sidewalk, he defended them in court. And when the administration of Woodrow Wilson continued to harass and jail peaceful women pickets, he quit a lucrative and highly visible government post to protest the President's failure to act on women's suffrage.
To replace Malone as Collector of thePort of New York , Wilson Newton had watched the Wright Brothers' first experimental
flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. He is today
remembered for a biting verse he wrote about New York City
When women whowere lawfully picketing the White House and Capitol were arrested and jailed for obstructing the sidewalk, he defended them in court. And when the administration of Woodrow Wilson continued to harass and jail peaceful women pickets, he quit a lucrative and highly visible government post to protest the President's failure to act on women's suffrage.
To replace Malone as Collector of the
Vulgar
of manner, overfed,
Overdressed and underbred;
Heartless, Godless, Hell's delight,
Rude by day and lewd by night,
Bedwarfed the man and large the brute,
Ruled by Jew and prostitute,
Purple robed and pauper clad,
Rotten, raving, money-mad;
A squirming herd in money's mesh,
A wilderness of human flesh;
Crazed by avarice, lust and rum --
"New York" thy name's Delirium.
Overdressed and underbred;
Heartless, Godless, Hell's delight,
Rude by day and lewd by night,
Bedwarfed the man and large the brute,
Ruled by Jew and prostitute,
Purple robed and pauper clad,
Rotten, raving, money-mad;
A squirming herd in money's mesh,
A wilderness of human flesh;
Crazed by avarice, lust and rum --
"New York" thy name's Delirium.
Dutifully, Newton
Following his
widely publicized resignation as collector of customs and free to aid the cause
of women's suffrage, Malone threw himself into legal activity on the movement's
behalf. He masterfully proved to a Virginia
jurist that the warden of the District of Columbia Jail had no authority to
transfer the women prisoners to a workhouse in Virginia
and forced their return to Washington
Faced with
Malone's formidable adversarial talents, the Wilson Administration capitulated
and unconditionally freed all women prisoners in November.
He was
identified with many liberal movements, helping to defend Max Eastman, Floyd
Dell and the other Masses defendants. Outspoken in his defense of five
Socialist lawmakers in Albany Bell County , Kentucky
 |
| A handsome Dudley Field Malone in 1913 when he entered government service. |
Many Marriages
In 1908, Dudley
Field Malone married Mary Patricia O'Gorman, daughter of Judge and U.S. Senator
James A. O'Gorman [D-N.Y.] Their marriage would end in a Paris
Malone and his
second wife, Doris Stevens, drove to Peekskill
During the
Twenties, Malone became a successful international divorce lawyer. So many
wealthy Americans were traveling to Paris to Paris
His conciliatory
skills were of no avail to save his marriage to Doris Stevens, however. She
obtained a Paris Doris
retained the Croton house at the corner of North Highland Place Mt. Airy Road
Malone married
his third wife, Minnesota-born actress Edna Louise Johnson, in London Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital on January 1, 1931, the first
arrival of the new year in New York
Gloria Swanson,
who had been Malone's neighbor when she lived at Longue Vue Farm on Mt. Airy Road California asking him to
speed up her divorce so she and Farmer could be married on their arrival in New York
In her 1980
autobiography, Swanson on Swanson,
she wrote, "I don't know how he arranged it, but we drove to Elmsford,
gave him our passports, and were married by the mayor there in Dudley Malone's
parlor on August 6, 1931."
It was a secret
marriage, and the couple traveled back to Hollywood Yuma , Arizona
Malone had an
earlier association with Gloria Swanson and the movie industry as corporate
secretary of her movie production company called Gloria Productions. The company
had been organized and bankrolled by her longtime lover Joseph P. Kennedy,
whose trysts with her in Croton had been conveniently timed to coincide with
periods when the Marquis was away.
Proposed as a
wartime grain-saving measure in 1917, the 18th Amendment prohibiting the
manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages did not go into effect until 1920,
long after the war had ended. During the so-called Roaring Twenties, the
country was divided into “Drys” (supporters of Prohibition) and “Wets” (for repeal).
In June of 1924,
the Ku Klux Klan and Drys under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan had
made religion an issue in the Democratic convention at New
York City 's Madison
Square Garden Bryan
Always a
political nonconformist, Malone made many unpredictable choices in his career.
He supported Smith for re-election as governor in New York Wisconsin and Burton K. Wheeler of
Montana
He not only
opposed the investigation into the Tammany Hall machine's participation in
municipal corruption conducted by retired Judge Samuel Seabury but helped his
friend, the popular bon vivant mayor Jimmy Walker, prepare his defense to the
charges. Malone and comedian George Jessel had campaigned with Walker
Seabury, who had
presidential ambitions, had dumped the report of his investigations in the lap
of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt called a hearing in Albany to look into Seabury's charges against Walker
Actor
With his divorce
practice in decline during the Depression, Malone was forced to declare
bankruptcy in 1935. Turning his attention to Broadway, he appeared in several
plays, mostly in bit parts. In 1941, he left New York
for California
His physical resemblance to Winston Churchill
earned him a role as the British prime minister in the 1943 Warner Brothers film
Mission to Moscow Russia
He also supplied
Churchill’s voice in the film Edge of
Darkness about the Norwegian underground and played Churchill again in An American in Paris
Epilogue
Troubled with a
heart condition for about a dozen years, he was admitted to Culver City Hospital
Of all his
public actions, Dudley Field Malone was proudest of having sacrificed a
prestigious appointment on the altar of principle. His selfless gesture was a
significant milestone in the bitter struggle that finally won the vote for
American women.
His son, also
named Dudley Field Malone, had a long career as a theatrical talent agent and
manager. Among his clients were singer Jane Froman and actor and screenwriter
Emlyn Williams. He died of lung cancer in Bellport, Long
Island , on January 1, 1990, his 59th birthday. There were no
immediate survivors.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Doris Stevens: Jailed for Freedom
CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Doris managed to make headlines by getting herself arrested at the gate of the home of French president, Gaston Doumergue in Rambouillet. Members of theNWP carried a banner reading, "We demand a treaty giving women their rights." French police arrested ten demonstrators, including Doris , for refusing to leave the area and for not having identity cards.
A militant feminist and leader in the women's suffrage movement, Doris Stevens was a keen eyewitness to the historic events that led up to the passage of the 19th Amendment. While the experiences were still fresh in her mind, she recorded them.
Her 1920 book, Jailed for Freedom, captures in minute detail the cruelties suffragists endured during the fight to achieve the vote. More than 500 women were arrested during the demonstrations. Her book performs an invaluable service by recording in an appendix the names of the 168 women who actually served prison sentences, with a brief biography of each. Their names deserve to be remembered.
Doris Stevens was born in Omaha , Neb. Oberlin College in Ohio United States
Activist
Doris Stevens joined with Doris Paul, Lucy Burns, Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, forerunner of the National Woman's Party (NWP), in 1913. She began to work as an organizer in Newport , R.I. , Denver and California San Francisco 's Golden Gate Park
Women's suffrage was gaining momentum. By 1915, a dozen states, all in the West, had given women the right to vote. The reason for this tilt toward equality was understandable: Western states had fewer women than men. Any state in which women had the right to vote would attract women to settle there and rectify the imbalance.
During the 1916 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson, running for a second term as president, promised peace but not suffrage. Charles Evans Hughes, his Republican challenger, promised suffrage but not peace. Doris was the California
Active in demonstrating for women's suffrage, she was arrested in Washington , D.C.
She was among the protesters arrested in New York City Peekskill Highland Place Wilson
In 1918, Malone’s appeal had won the release of a group of suffrage demonstrators who had been jailed for “obstructing the sidewalk” in front of the White House.
Later, Malone was invited to be co-counsel, with Clarence Darrow, in the defense of John T. Scopes, in the famous 1925 Tennessee
Second Marriage
Doris was divorced from Malone in Paris Portland , Maine , she married Jonathan Mitchell, a writer on the staff of the magazine The New Republic
Always a firebrand and a fighter, after helping to win the battle for women's suffrage in the United States , Doris turned her attention to the widespread discrimination against women in other countries.
In 1928, Doris and members of the NWP asked to be allowed to present a proposed Equal Rights Treaty at an international conference in France
Exhibiting bruises on her arms and wrists, she told reporters later, "It was a splendid battle, and we are proud of it."
Denying that they had planned to disrupt the conference, she explained that women were amateurs in diplomatic affairs.
"We see only the forthright, common-sense way to proceed," she added. "That, I think, is often an asset."
The next month in London
The Kellogg-Briand Treaty was eventually ratified by the U.S. Senate with only one dissenting vote. As it turned out, the pact never made a meaningful contribution to international order in the face of several undeclared wars of the 1930s--the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the German occupation of Austria
When the 6th Pan American Congress met in Havana in 1928, Doris was there. She succeeded in getting six Western Hemisphere countries to sponsor the inclusion of an Equal Rights Treaty on the agenda of the 7th Pan American Congress to be held in 1933 at Montevideo , Uruguay
An even more significant accomplishment was the 7th Congress's creation of an Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) to study the status of women, with Doris as its head. She would continue in this role until 1939.
Her efforts in directing the IACW resulted in the adoption of two equality treaties. Nineteen republics signed the Equal Nationality Convention, and four signed an Equal Rights Treaty--the first international agreements in history to equalize the status of men and women.
Like suffrage, the international equal rights movement was fraught with squabbles. In 1939, the NWP's rival, the League of Women Voters, succeeded in getting Doris ousted from the IACW. Instrumental in accomplishing this was Mollie Dewson, of the Democratic National Committee, who had influence with the State Department. A Democratic administration was in power, and Doris was a registered Republican. She was also accused of having been too cozy with some of the Latin American delegates.
In her place, the State Department announced the appointment to the ICAW of Mary Winslow, of the Women's Trade Union League. The excuse was that Stevens had not been chosen by the United States
League of Women Voters president Marguerite Wells was also instrumental in getting the IACW reorganized in 1940, with a Latin American woman appointed as chairman.
Doris Stevens was a member of the national council of the NWP from 1924 to 1948.
In addition to having written Jailed for Freedom, she designed the book, Paintings and Drawings of Jeannette Scott, 1863-1937. She also wrote a biographical sketch for this limited edition of 500 copies, privately printed in New Rochelle Syracuse University
The Mitchells continued to live in Croton, where she also pursued song writing. Five of her songs were premiered on New York radio station WINS, and introduced in concerts at Constitution Hall in Washington Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City McCook , Neb. , she is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland ,Maine Fairfield , Conn.
Doris Stevens’ papers were deposited in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College Princeton University
Monday, January 28, 2013
Crystal Eastman, 1: Brains and Beauty
CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Crystal found strong support for her latent feminism in her father. “When I insisted that the boys must make their beds if I had to make mine, my father stood by me. When I said that if there was dishwashing to be done they should take their turn, he stood by me. And when I declared that there was no such thing in our family as boys’ work and girls’ work, and that I must be allowed to do my share of wood-chopping and outdoor chores, he took me seriously and let me try.”
Crystal was almost six feet tall, athletic and vigorous. One of the first women in the country to bob her hair, she wore short skirts at work, pointing out that this style was not only “comfortable, hygienic, and becoming, but a step in the direction of freedom, for it gave women freer use of their legs than they had known for hundreds of years. Incidentally, it gave them back use of the left-hand which in the days of trailing skirts have always been used for holding the ugly things up out of the dust and dirt.”
Labor Lawyer
After graduating fromVassar College in 1903, Crystal earned a Master's degree in sociology from Columbia University and was second in the class of 1907 at New York University 's School of Law
In 1907, Paul U. Kellogg, editor of social work magazine Charities and the Commons, hired her to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. She moved toPittsburgh and over the next year conducted the first comprehensive sociological investigation of industrial accidents ever undertaken. Her pioneering 1910 report on worker safety in Pittsburgh , Work Accidents and the Law, caused New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes to name her the first and only woman among the 14 members of the Commission on Employer's Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents.
On this commission, Crystal Eastman drafted the state’s (and the nation's) first workers' compensation law.Existing industrial safety legislation--called “protective” legislation by male legislators responding to what they saw as the “special” needs of women--regulated working conditions, but only for women.
“Feminism has entered upon a new phase,”Crystal wrote. “No longer content with asking for their rights, women have begun to question their privileges. They have begun to examine, with some shrewdness, the whole body of more or less benevolent legislation which has been gradually built up during the last half-century for the ’protection’ of women in industry.”
Instead, she advocated the objectives of British feminist groups, which was legislation for the protection of the worker based not upon sex but upon the nature of the work.
Marriage
Less than a month before her 30th birthday, in May of 1911,Crystal surprised her friends by marrying Wallace Benedict, a good-looking insurance agent, and moving to Milwaukee , even though it meant letting her husband’s career choice take precedence in the relationship.
Her friends felt that Benedict was a poor choice as a husband: He had the wrong occupation, lacked a social conscience and his home was far fromNew York . Crystal made up for these shortcomings the following year by managing the unsuccessful fight for women's suffrage in Wisconsin , which was defeated by the big breweries and liquor interests.
The marriage lasted only two unhappy years beforeCrystal returned to New York and filed for divorce--but refused alimony, scorning the practice as a woman's admission that she could not take care of herself.For two years after divorcing Benedict, Crystal led the suffrage movement in New York , but she had no illusion that gaining the vote for women would bring true equality.
“Today when there is no longer a single, simple aim and a solidarity barrier to break down,” she wrote, “there are a hundred difficult questions of civil law, problems of education, of moral and social custom to be solved before women can come wholly into their inheritance of freedom.”
Much work still lay ahead for Crystal Eastman before women would achieve a measure of equality.
Crystal Eastman was a pioneering feminist, an influential labor lawyer, a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party and the American Civil Liberties Union, a co-founder and co-editor of The Liberator, and one of the most beloved women of her generation.
Ironically, despite her distinguished record of accomplishments, Crystal Eastman is mostly remembered as Max Eastman’s older sister.
She was born in Marlborough , Mass.
At a time when women’s place was in the home, Annis Ford had defied her father and had gone to Oberlin College in Ohio to study theology, where she met her husband. When illness caused her husband to give up his profession in Elmira , N.Y.
Role Models
Crystal Eastman found role models in both her mother and father. "When my mother preached we hated to miss it. There was never a moment of anxiety or concern; she had that secret of perfect platform ease which takes all strain out of the audience. Her voice was music; she spoke simply, without effort, almost without gestures, standing very still. And what she said seemed to come straight from her heart to yours.”
“Once when I was twelve and very tall, a deputation of ladies from her church called on my mother and gently suggested that my skirts ought to be longer. My mother, who was not without consciousness of the neighbors' opinions, thought she must do something. But my father said, ‘No, let her wear them short. She likes to run, and she can't run so well in long skirts.’”
“A few years later it was a question of bathing suits. In our summer community I was a ringleader in the rebellion against skirts and stockings for swimming. On one hot Sunday morning the other fathers waited on my father and asked him to use his influence with me. I don't know what he said to them but he never said a word to me. He was, I know, startled and embarrassed to see his only daughter in a man's bathing suit with bare brown legs for all the world to see. I think it shocked him to his dying day. But he himself had been a swimmer; he knew he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?”
Her mother started a series of summer “symposiums” at their home in Elmira . Once a week, neighborhood mothers and children “and any fathers who happened to be around” would gather on the Eastman’s front porch to listen to a paper and then discuss it. Crystal ’s contribution was titled “Woman.”
“The trouble with women,” Crystal wrote, “is that they have no impersonal interests. They must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up, and, second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows her husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster.”
The author of these words was 15 years old at the time.
“The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman,” said Claude McKay, black poet and seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, in his autobiography. “I think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of her features but in her magnificent presence.”
She added, “Surely the best thing about bobbed hair is the new sense of freedom it brings to the wearer. What the short skirt has done for women’s legs, short hair is doing for their heads. And outside of musical comedy, a woman’s head is ever more important than her legs.”
Labor Lawyer
After graduating from
In 1907, Paul U. Kellogg, editor of social work magazine Charities and the Commons, hired her to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. She moved to
On this commission, Crystal Eastman drafted the state’s (and the nation's) first workers' compensation law.Existing industrial safety legislation--called “protective” legislation by male legislators responding to what they saw as the “special” needs of women--regulated working conditions, but only for women.
“Feminism has entered upon a new phase,”
Instead, she advocated the objectives of British feminist groups, which was legislation for the protection of the worker based not upon sex but upon the nature of the work.
Marriage
Less than a month before her 30th birthday, in May of 1911,
Her friends felt that Benedict was a poor choice as a husband: He had the wrong occupation, lacked a social conscience and his home was far from
The marriage lasted only two unhappy years before
“Today when there is no longer a single, simple aim and a solidarity barrier to break down,” she wrote, “there are a hundred difficult questions of civil law, problems of education, of moral and social custom to be solved before women can come wholly into their inheritance of freedom.”
Much work still lay ahead for Crystal Eastman before women would achieve a measure of equality.
