PART FOUR

'GENE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE'

Agnes Boulton, with whom Eugene O'Neill first lived and then married, bore a remarkable resemblance to Louise Bryant. She was his second wife and gave birth to two of his children; a boy, Shane, and a daughter, Oona, who became Charlie Chaplin's wife.

Were it not for a voice that was slightly huskier, a mole on the lower right cheek and the absence of Louise's Celtic facial coloring, Agnes might have been Louise's identical twin. And as John Ransome, the San Francisco journalist, told her, a lot of people in the Village, seeing Agnes with O'Neill thought that Louise had returned from Russia to be with him.

When Agnes' husband died, he left her a debt-ridden farm in the Connecticut Valley overlooking the Housatonic River and a small child. She began to augment her income by writing and providing room and board for a few New Yorkers who found her farm a wonderful place to spend a relaxing summer vacation. It was in this way that she met Mary Pyne and her poet husband, Harry Kemp. In this way, also, she met the operator of a Greenwich Village restaurant, whom everyone knew only as Christine.

In October of 1917, she decided to go to New York to try her hand at writing, now that she knew Christine. It was not her first trip to New York. She had made one trip in connection with the sale of her article to the Evening World, and in 1916 she was there on the picket line of a dairy farmers' milk strike. It was on this trip that an Evening World reporter recognized the picket sign carrier as the author of the article, and made a great to-do in the paper about a beautiful woman from Connecticut who was a dairy farmer doubling as a writer.

It was all there on page two; her picture, big headlines, everything. . . "No money in milk cows," says woman dairy farmer who has made a brave fight. . .Now in New York to help her fellow dairy farmers win a strike for higher prices, the beautiful young widow farmer has supported herself, her baby and a herd of cows by her pen. . . "

In her book about her life with O'Neill, Agnes recalled that when she first met him she showed him the newspaper clipping; he read it and feigned horror: "Good God! Dairy farmer . . .brave fight. . .supported a child and herd of cows. . .I don't believe it. A waitress, yes; even a ribbon clerk. . . but a dairy farmer, milking cows and sticking pitchforks into manure; How could you possibly let them print such a thing?"

"I'll have you know," Agnes said indignantly, "this write-up got me eleven proposals of marriage, and one farmer came to my home to show me his bankbook. Another man wrote me that he was a widower and knew I was a fine woman, and that I would be good to his children because I reminded him of Abraham Lincoln."

"It must be your mole," grinned O'Neill, "it's in the same place his was."

She had little money when she left Connecticut for New York. Her parents had agreed to look after the farm and take care of the baby. She had told them she would return in the spring and make arrangements for moving to New York if she found something to do as a writer. If she didn't, she would return and try to make the farm pay its way.

When she arrived in New York, she took a room at the Brevoort, but it was seven the following evening before she could reach Christine by telephone at her restaurant. "It's too noisy here," said Christine, "I'll close the place and we'll meet at the Hell Hole." Agnes asked what the Hell Hole was and where it was. Christine laughed: "It's the back room of the Golden Swan, dearie; everybody knows where the Hell Hole is on Fourth and Sixth Avenue. I'll meet you there at ten-thirty."

She arrived at the Golden Swan early and waited uneasily in the darkened Hell Hole off the main bar. The place smelled of stale beer and tobacco. She was grateful no one else seemed to be around and no waiter came to ask her to order a drink. Then, as her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she noticed him staring at her from where he was sitting, motionless, in the far corner. She saw that he was wearing what looked like a seaman's sweater under his jacket, and as he kept staring at her she became uneasy. There was something both sad and cruel in the way he looked at her. She had a vague and troubled feeling that they may have met before. He reminded her of some one or something she could not quite identify.

Then Christine came in and embraced her. Christine, thoroughly Danish, tall and voluptuous, with a great pile of red-gold hair, called O'Neill and introduced Agnes. "This Is Gene O'Neill," said Christine. Long after 0'Neill's death, Agnes still remembered how pleasant the name sounded to her when pronounced by Christine with a Danish accent. Then his brother Jamie came and Agnes saw at once that Christine was in Love with him. When the two men left and went into the main car, Christine told Agnes that their father gave each of them fifteen dollars a week, and Gene had run out of money so that it was Jamie's turn to do the lending.

"Keep clear of Jamie," warned Christine, "He's a wild one. He tries to make love to every woman he meets, so look out, dearie." Christine sighed: "What a man! He's crude and cruel and foul-mouthed. But you hardly mind when he's making love to you."

Gene walked her to her hotel that night. It was cold and he had only a light topcoat. At the steps she held out her hand to say goodnight, but he wanted to go on talking. Finally she told him she wanted to go in because she was cold. He hesitated, and then startled her with: "I want to spend every night of my life with you - every night of my life." He turned and began walking away.

She lay awake a long time wondering about this strange man and what he had said only a few hours after meeting her for the first time. It was, she knew, not an unusual thing for men to say what he had to women with whom they wanted to go to bed. But she had the strange feeling that if she had invited him to come up to her room, he would not have accepted.

It was not long before everyone who had known about O'Neill's infatuation with Louise Bryant saw the remarkable way that Agnes resembled Louise and the effect that she had on O'Neill. A few days after they had met, Christine telephoned her to say that she was planning a party at her apartment Saturday night. She added that some people would be there who might be able to help her with her writing career, and then said: "Gene will be there; do come, dearie." Agnes said she would.

O'Neill arrived almost two hours after the party had gotten under way. He was drunk and seemed to have forgotten all about Agnes, as he began concentrating his attention mostly on Nina Moise, the least attractive, but perhaps the most talented of the women at the party. O'Neill had become greatly attached to her. She was, by this time, the producer at the McDougal Street Theater, and it was to her apartment that O'Neill came to talk despairingly about Louise after she left for Russia with John Reed.

Agnes felt depressed and out of place. Christine was busy mixing punch, occasionally taking a drink from a pint bottle of brandy. Suddenly - years later she said she was unaware of what she was doing - Agnes walked across the room, drew O'Neill's attention away from Nina and said: "Hello, remember me? I'm the one with whom you wanted to spend the rest of your life."

O'Neill stared at her and tried to smile. Then he said: "It's a cold night - a good night for a party. Ah,the iceman cometh." He staggered away, and at the door Agnes saw him take a flask from his hip pocket and take a long drink, -he gave a loud laugh as though he wanted to draw everyone's attention to himself, and began to walk carefully across the room. At the fake fireplace mantel he grabbed a chair, mounted it, turned toward the room where all were watching him in silence, and in a thick, dramatic voice declaimed:

Turn back the universe

And give me yesterday.

Turn back………

He carefully turned to face the clock on the wall above the mantel, opened the glass cover and began twisting the long hand, and as the small hand followed, he again spoke:

Turn back the universe

And give me yesterday………

He stepped from the chair and managed to stagger his way out of the room. Agnes looked about her for Christine. She became aware that these people whom she'd just met, smiled when she caught them staring at her. Then she heard Susan Glaspell say to Mary Pyne: "It's your friend from Connecticut. He sees Louise in her. I think right up to the last moment poor Gene hoped she would turn to him and not leave for Russia with Jack, don't you? Poor Gene. How he must be suffering."

MARY PYNE: "This exhibition to impress us - this 'Turn back the clock and give me yesterday' When a man makes a gesture like that to convince others that he is still in love with a woman, it's safe to say he dramatizing his love, not feeling it."

SUSAN: "Whatever it is, I hope Louise leaves him alone when, and if, she gets back from Russia."

As the days passed, Agnes heard a great deal about Louise Bryant: how attractive she was, how talented, how distressed O'Neill had been to find himself in love with the wife of one of his best friends. She saw a snapshot of Louise, her long legs in tight riding breeches spread apart, her hands deep in the pockets of a smart jacket, an impish grin on her face, leaning against a shingled, weather-beaten wall, a gamin cap rakishly on her head. Agnes Boulton, not yet certain if she was in love with O'Neill, both envied and hated this woman. She had a famous and exciting and adventurous husband, with whom she'd gone to a new world - why couldn't she have left O'Neill alone?

She continued seeing him. Not once did he try to Make love to her or even hint that he was interested in making love. He drank a great deal and talked about writing and about revolutions and of how he would die only when the last bullet had been used up.

One piercingly cold night as they walked along the sidewalks of Washington Square, she said: "This must be the way it is in Russia." He stopped and glared at her, his face reflecting hate.

It was a week before Christmas. They had just finished dinner at Christine's restaurant. O'Neill suddenly announced that a friend of his who had an apartment had given him the key while he was out of town, and he asked if she would go there with him. She agreed.

It was a weird, nightmarish experience for the beautiful woman dairy farmer from Connecticut. When they reached the apartment they found it was so cold that the gas was frozen, and only a can of Sterno was available for making a cup of coffee. Then O'Neill's friend turned up unexpectedly with a quart of whiskey. Both began drinking. By two in the morning, Agnes, thoroughly miserable and nauseated by the whiskey she had been drinking in an attempt to keep warm, made her way to the bedroom and fell asleep on top of the evil- smelling bedcover. She awakened while it was still dark. O'Neill was asleep beside her, his topcoat covering her and only the edge over his own body. She moved closer to him and again fell into a stupor.

When she again awakened, it was daylight. O'Neill was still sleeping and breathing heavily. The vapor her breath made in the cold room reminded her of the farm in Connecticut, her baby and parents, and the cows and the white clouds their breath made on cold winter mornings. Crawling out of bed and into the living room, she found that O'Neill's friend had vanished. In the bathroom she adjusted her hair with her hands, picked up her handbag in the living room and started for the front door. She heard his voice: Where in hell are you going?"

O'Neill was standing by the bedroom door. He was furious. He unleashed a string of obscene seaman's oaths that stunned her. She bit her lip to keep the tears back and slammed the door. At the Brevoort, she bathed, tried in vain to sleep, and spent the rest of the day and night trying to decide what to do. In the morning she came downstairs to inform the clerk that she was leaving New York and returning to Connecticut. But before she could say anything the clerk handed her a thick envelope. Back in her room, she opened it and found a penciled George Middleton poem:

I am only a dream that sings

In a strange large place,

And beats with Impotent wings

Against God's face.

No more than a dream that sings

In the streets of space;

Ah, would that my soul had wings,

Or a resting place.

And with it was a typed copy of his "Moon of the Caribees." As she read the manuscript she saw a sensitive, unhappy, confused man in search of an indefinable something. She knew he would be at the Hell Hole waiting for her.

"Louise Bryant," wrote Agnes Boulton, "became only a dream for me that sings in the streets of space."

They had two wonderful, idyllic months in Provincetown. Silent and buried in the snow, the place did not even remotely resemble the raucous, tourist-cluttered resort it was in the summer. They moved into the apartment above John Francis' general merchandise store where O'Neill had lived with Terry Carlin briefly when they first came to Provincetown in the summer of 1916. He tapered off on his drinking and seemed determined to make her happy. They began working and making progress on "Beyond the Horizon," which was to win O'Neill another Pulitzer award. (Here, as in "Strange Interlude," O'Neill also drew heavily on his affair with Louise. He has two friends who are as close to each other as brothers might be. Both are in love with the same girl, and she alternates her affections, first favoring one and then the other.)

Agnes had never known such peace and contentment. One afternoon there was a knock at the door and Laurence Lytton, who lived in the apartment next to theirs, said he didn't quite know how to say it, but he had something to tell them. He looked - recalled Agnes - like something the Dutch painter, Frans Hals, might have produced on canvas. He was so embarrassed both she and O'Neill had trouble keeping from laughing. Then it was her turn to blush furiously. Lytton found words to say he couldn't help but hear them talking at night because the walls were so paper-thin. Agnes realized with a shock that he must have heard them making love. O'Neill grinned. Lytton said his girl friend, Alice Uhlman, thought Agnes and O'Neill ought to get married. Agnes looked at O'Neill. He continued grinning. Agnes Boulton became Mrs. Eugene O'Neill in January of 1918 with Laurence Lytton and Agnes Uhlman as witnesses.

The first letter from Louise arrived on February 20th. Years later Agnes recalled with what she described as "dreadful clarity" that the letter was from New York and had been written only a day or two after Louise arrived from Russia on the Norwegian steamer Bergenfjord. When John Francis brought it and gave it to O'Neill, he recognized the handwriting on the envelope. He read it slowly, and then he handed it to Agnes.

She remembered that when she finished reading, her throat was dry and she was trembling. It was a most passionate letter, designed to overwhelm O'Neill. Louise wrote that she had left Jack Reed in Russia and crossed three thousand miles of frozen steppes to be with Gene - her lover. She must see him. She filled page after page with a passionate declaration of love for him - a love, she said, that could not - would not die; a love that was unchangeable, eternal. She knew at last that it was a mistake to have gone off to Russia with Jack instead of staying with him. She knew, wrote Louise, that he had met a woman who closely resembled her, and she deeply regretted the hurt and loneliness she must have caused him to look for her image in someone else. Her leaving was all a mistake. But there was no use trying to explain how she felt about it all in a letter. She must see him in person. "It was all my fault. . .I love you, I love you, I love you. . .," she echoed Jack's words to Mabel Dodge.

Agnes' heart sank as she watched indecision and confusion mirrored in his face. Finally he said - it was almost a moan: "I must see her. I have to explain. I can't leave it like this. - I can't do this to her. . .I. . .I. . ."

"You want to see her? You want to see this woman?"

"I should tell her in person that it's all over. She traveled three thousand miles. . ."

"And don't forget those frozen Russian steppes," broke in Agnes bitterly. (Steppes are the vast plains in Russia with settlements located many miles apart.) Suddenly she thought that Mary Pyne was right when she came to her and tried to warn her that O'Neill was the kind of man who had to experience torture to be creative, to be able to write. "I could see him recalling," wrote Agnes, "all the dark passionate travail of their love."

She said: "How can you do this? She loves John Reed. She chose to go with him, not to stay with you."

"You don't understand. She told me herself that there was never any physical relationship between them."

"Oh, you fool. You poor naive fool." Then she realized that she was saying the wrong things to him in his present state of mind. But even as she watched O'Neill and wondered what she ought to do, there was a knock at the door. It was the postmaster with a special delivery letter.

"I don't want to read it," said O'Neill as he took the letter, "She's crazy." But he did read it, and when he finished reading it, he said: "I must see her. I owe her an explanation."

Agnes began to weep and O'Neill looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. "I am not going to drink - I won't get involved with her - I just want to tell her that I have you and that it's all over between us." It was incredible, simply incredible, thought Agnes. He was trying to convince her that he was willing to stop work on "Beyond the Horizon", take a long trip to New York, just to convince Louise Bryant that he no longer loved her because he now had her, Agnes Boulton. It made no sense at all - and it frightened her.

The letters from New York continued arriving, sometimes twice a day, each more insistent than the one before. In one she hinted that she had talked to Reed before she left Russia about her love for O'Neill, and Reed was so involved in the Russian revolution and so eager to have her do whatever would make her happy that he had agreed that she should return to the United States. And this was what she wanted to talk to him about. O'Neill began to work furiously on "Beyond the Horizon", but Agnes felt he was throwing himself into his work only to get the play finished so that he would have an excuse for going to New York. Then he began to spend hours framing replies to Louise's letters. He would write something and tear it up and repeat this time and time again. They were the best things that O'Neill ever wrote, declared Agnes. She was in agony as she read them. They reviewed his love affair with Louise and the torture this meant for the three of them - for him, for Louise and for John Reed. There was such romance and Irish beauty in them that her heart would seem to stop beating as she read them. "For," said Agnes, "I had thought that our love had erased this wild longing and restless desire he had once felt for Louise."

Finally, seeing no other way out, Agnes Boulton made the suggestion that he write and tell Louise that he could not come to New York but would meet her and talk with her someplace between Provincetown and New York - say Fall River. This, thought Agnes, would keep O'Neill away only one day from Provincetown. She also thought that perhaps, just perhaps, Louise would become annoyed at his suggestion she travel half-way to meet him and refuse to do so.

Louise was not annoyed, she was absolutely furious. She replied that she was bitterly disappointed, not because she was not going to get a chance to see him - but in him personally. What sort of a man was he! How dare he play so lightly with her feelings? Realizing that she was defeated, she went on to scold him. Here she was participating in sensational world events, playing a part in shaping civilization and he had the nerve to suggest that she drop everything and take time to travel to Fall River just for his convenience. She added that John Reed was on his way home from Russia.

Agnes was torn between relief and pleasure that O'Neill was not going to see Louise, and distress as she watched the man she loved suffer and wilt as he read Louise's last letter to him.

One evening in the fall of 1924, when she was the wife of William C. Bullitt, Louise brought out a pack of letters and handed them to him, one by one. As he read each one and handed it back, she threw each letter onto the burning logs in the fireplace.

"He certainly was in love with you," said Bullitt when the last letter had been burned.

HOME OF THE BRAVE. . .

Louise was devastated. She felt that she had been victimized, humiliated and betrayed by this man who had told her he could not live without her, and would wait for her to the end of time. And then he had the temerity to reject her for a pale carbon copy. Had he not told her that although he had been involved with many women, he did not know what sex really was until she came along? It was the first time that a man had truly rejected her. It would have been no consolation had anyone suggested to her that it happens all the time.

Then the latent masochism that enables humans to enjoy wallowing in self-pity, took over and she tortured herself at night by visualizing Agnes Boulton in bed with O'Neill, and O'Neill responding to her caresses and passionately clinging to her. She had weird dreams. She was lost and when she asked a policeman for help he turned and walked away. She was a child again and saw her mother beckoning to come to her, but Mrs. Bryant kept moving away, and no matter how fast she walked or ran she could not reach her.

Fortunately, it did not last and before long Louise was telling friends that O'Neill had literally camped on her door-step, pleading with her - but she had been firm; her duty was to her husband whose life was in constant peril, three thousand miles away, and she was certainly too involved in world-shaking events herself to have time to trifle with playwrights, particularly those who drank as heavily as O'Neill did.

There was another reason she was able to clear her mind so quickly and easily of O'Neill. There were so many things-she had put off doing since she had returned. There were the articles she had sent to America to be published, which now had to be assembled for her book, "Six Red Months In Russia." Radical groups wanted her to address meetings where they might get first-hand information about what was going on in Russia - information they were certainly not getting from the newspapers. Women fighting for an amendment to the Constitution that would give them the political rights men have, were eager to learn more about the Russian women who had been beaten, tortured and raped in czarist prisons, and were now in important posts helping to build a mighty new nation.

But above and beyond everything else, overshadowing all other considerations was the fearful realization that Jack was on his way home to face conspiracy charges, and that there was a strong possibility he would be convicted and nave to spend many years in a federal prison.

When the skimpy cable had arrived in Petrograd with word that Reed had been indicted, there were few details and nothing at all to suggest the tremendous impact of the Bolshevik takeover on the American people. Customary war hysteria was rapidly moving the nation toward mass paranoia - the name Lenin began to stand for something more sinister than Kaiser Wilhelm.

She recalled the morning in Petrograd when Raymond Robbins turned up while she and Reed were still in bed and pleaded with them not to return to the United States at that particular time. He must have learned at the embassy, she thought, but could not tell them, that there were powerful people back home, in and out of government, who considered John Reed a traitor and a menace. She felt a sudden surge of warmth for this gentle man of the Red Cross. He had tried to impress on American government representatives in Russia, his conviction that Lenin and his Bolsneviki would be around for a long time; that she and Reed were among the very few Americans Lenin trusted and could be helpful in bringing about some sort of an understanding between the two governments. There were other Americans in Russia, but only Raymond Robbins seemed to recognize the dynamics of Russian history.

Max Eastman had met her when the steamer, "Bergenfjord," docked on February l8th. He had taken her to his sister Crystal's apartment to stay until she could make other arrangements. Both Eastman and his sister were intensely busy, for - despite suppression of The Masses and the indictments - they had just finished putting final touches to the successor of The Masses, The Liberator, the first issue of which was due off the presses on the first of March.

Reed had cabled that he was Leaving Russia and, barring something unexpected, was due to reach the United States about the middle of March. The trial on the Indictments was now scheduled to start on April 15th, and feeling certain that Reed would not want to live at their place in Croton while the trial was under way, she rented a dingy apartment on Patchin Place, a short narrow street in the Village, that was no more than a break In the north side of West Tenth, between Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Avenue.

It was not much of a place, but it was furnished and outside, in front of the building, was a scrawny ailanthus which she promptly adopted and began nursing back to health, as she did with the sickly geranium she found in their Provincetown cottage two years earlier.

Then something unexpected happened to Reed while he was en-route home. The American consul in Norway refused to give him the visa he needed to continue the journey. Hs was thus forced to stay in Norway two months, and miss being present with those indicted when the trial got under way.

The reason John Reed was held up two months in Norway, while Louise was frantically trying to get him home, would surely win first prize in any contest to find the most bizarre unpublished incident in the administration of an American president. And no one would believe it, if it were not for Louise's testimony before a Congressional Committee a year later.

During the two months he was held up in Norway, said Louise, only one of the many letters he had written to her was allowed to reach her. But it was during that time that George Creel, one of the men close to President Wilson - he was head of the propaganda department called The Committee of Public Information and the man who had once offered Reed a job - sought her help and that of Lincoln Steffens. Creel, she said, wanted Reed is go back to Petrograd and try to convince Lenin and Trotsky of President Wilson's sincerity, and urge them not to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, for this would free me German armies in the East to fight the allies in the West.

Two cablegrams then reached Reed on the same day. The first signed Steffens-Louise Bryant, said: "Don't return (home) await instructions." The other: "Trotsky making epochal blunder doubting Wilson literal sincerity. Am certain President will do whatever he asks other nations to do. If you can and will change Trotsky's and Lenin's attitudes you can render historical international service." It was signed "Steffens."

(There was a reason for the sudden decision of radicals to help a President, who had justified the Palmer raids. It was based on the belief that the only hope the "have-nots" in capitalist countries to win concessions from the "haves" was in survival of socialism in Russia. Fear of the "Red disease" spreading to their own countries would be the incentive, the radicals were convinced. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty would so weaken socialism in Russia, the incentive would be gone. Moreover, President Wilson's fourteen-point plan for world peace, and hints that he would recognize the Lenin regime if they did not capitulate to the Germans, as Russia's best hope, they felt, for saving the revolution. In Russia, itself, there was a division among the Bolshevik leaders, with Lenin insisting that the plight of Russia was so desperate the masses could not be aroused to continue the fight. And, anyway, none of them trusted Wilson or any of the other allied leaders. They all dreaded the consequences of the German demands at Brest-Litovsk, but Lenin's view prevailed - the Russians chose what they considered the lesser of two evils. John Reed held Lenin's view, but he cabled Steffens that he would return to Petrograd and talk to Lenin and Trotsky if radical American leaders like Eugene Debs asked him. . .Wilson could go to hell. In the meantime, the Germans began an invasion of Russia, and the Russians signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was not abrogated until the end of World War Two.)

For a while, Louise clung to the hope that Reed's return to Russia to talk with Lenin and Trotsky would bring results that would cause the American government to drop charges against him. When the newspapers reported that the Brest-Litovsk treaty was signed and Reed was still being refused a visa to return home, there was only the one letter in which he told her of his great longing for her and of his isolation.

As the date for the trial drew nearer, and conditions for war protesters, radicals and other dissenters and no conformers grew worse, Louise began to fear for Reed's very Life. To the usual aversion Americans always have had for war protesters and radicals, there was suddenly added the word, "Bolshevik-sympathizer". For while the sympathizers saw the Bolshevik takeover as the dawn of a new day for the world and America (slogans like "Why Not Here?" were beginning to appear on the West Coast), to most Americans, the words Bolsheviki and Communists came to stand for everything that was evil.

Incredibly sensational reports and magazine articles fanned the nation's violent reaction to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia. Some, such as those relating to the murder of the Czar and his family in July of 1917, were true. Others were sheer fabrications. Edgar Lloyd Hampton, for instance, in an article in the Saturday Evening Post, declared that Lenin and Trotsky, on their way to Russia, stopped in Seattle, and not only planned the general strike which occurred there early in 1919, but that the strike was to be the signal for a great rising of the American proletariat and the takeover of the American government.

(Neither Lenin nor Trotsky, of course, had ever been in Seattle. But the strike, itself, limited though it was to Seattle, gained such nation-wide attention and notoriety for the state of Washington, that two decades later James A. Farley, the postmaster general, toasted the state at a banquet with, "To the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington.")

Louise talked with Max Eastman and all the others indicted with Reed for their work with The Masses. They were indicted under the Espionage Act, which Congress had passed and President Wilson had signed shortly after the United States entered the war. The Act, plus some amendments enacted the same year, were so broad that it became a federal offense to address an audience which contained draft-age men, or even to write and publish anything that might possibly influence the thinking of those involved in building ships or manufacturing munitions. When Eastman protested to President Wilson, a former president of Princeton and a brilliant exponent of democratic principles, the President replied: ". . .I think that a time of war must be regarded as wholly exceptional and that it is legitimate to regard things which would in ordinary circumstances be very innocent, as very dangerous to the public welfare. . .

Cordially and sincerely yours, Woodrow Wilson."

So flimsy was the case against The Masses as a magazine busy spreading sedition that, even with the nation well in the grip of mass paranoia, the best the federal government was able to do was get two deadlocked juries after two trials.

Jack had finally been given a visa to leave Norway, but was not present at the first trial. The jury deliberated four days after hearing an eloquent appeal by Prosecutor Barnes for conviction. "A war", said he "is a time when a nation's life is at stake. The freedoms the defendants claim as their birth-right will be no more if we are vanquished by a mortal enemy." Then Socialist Norris Hilquit for the defendants: "Constitutional rights are not a gift. Countless thousands paid for them with their lives. War or no war, constitutional rights taken away and given back are never again the vivifying force they were before when they expressed the soul of a nation. They become just a gift to be given and to be taken away. ..."

It was noon, Monday, April 28, 1918. As the jury was reporting that it was hopelessly deadlocked, the ship bringing John Reed home was clearing customs in New York harbor.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BOHEMIA?

Less than three years had passed since the day that Louise caught her first glimpse of New York, and with the passage of that brief period of their "Lives went every trace of the care free abandon with which they greeted each day as they awoke, and the anticipated excitement at night as they climbed into what Reed had described as "our scandalous and sinfully voluptuous bed."

They now lived skimpily in their thoroughly disorganized Patchin Place apartment. Newspaper clippings, manuscripts, typewriter and carbon paper littered the living room floor. A flattop desk was full of dusty newspapers. A smudged coffeepot and a few cups and saucers were on a small table. Cracked dishes were piled on a shelf above a two-burner gasp-ate. In the bedroom there was a cot in addition to a single bed. The bed usually showed the speed with which Louise made it up; the cot was always mussed, with a few pillows scattered on its surface. Both in the living room and bedroom were ashtrays full of cigarette butts. Reed smoked chain fashion.

When summer came, they divided their time between their Patchin Place apartment and their home in Croton, but it was at Patchin Place that Louise with Reed's help finished her "Six Red Months in Russia." Proceeds from sale of the book, plus a small advance that Reed got from Boni and Liveright for "Ten Days That Shook the World" took care of their living expenses. A fee for a lecture on Russia occasionally augmented this - both of them remained greatly in demand - but in most cases there was no fee, and Reed continued to wear his threadbare suit and borrow a quarter for coffee before or after lecturing for a comrade.

Boni and Liveright made the advance on royalties even though the government has confiscated all his notes and other material he had collected in Russia for the book. This was done in April when Reed's ship reached the United States from Norway, and it was not until the early part of August that his papers were released and he was able to start writing.

Sex became almost a passionless ritual; often leaving her depressed and frustrated as she recalled what it had been only a short time ago. But she was becoming bound to him in deeper, quieter ways. Revolution was now his passion. He had become more serious, often worried and deeply depressed. A Letter from his mother, again threatening suicide because he was "besmirching the name Reed" while his brother Harry was fighting in Europe, left him so despondent, so pathetic, she was overwhelmed with a yearning to console him. She knew she would never again leave him. And when, during the trying weeks and months that followed, she heard reports of an affair Reed had with Edna St. Vincent Millay, she recalled dark-eyed Anne Calahan - how she had frozen with anger at the sight of her walking naked, a lighted candle in her hand, reciting poetry - she brooded only a few days. When Reed returned from Philadelphia, where he had again been arrested, she embraced him and said how happy she was that he was home. And this time she knew that she really meant it.

The years Louise Bryant was most active, 1917 through the early 1920s, were perhaps the most tumultuous and the worst in American history for those attempting to bring about changes in the political status quo of women and any sort of changes in other phases of the American Way of Life. Louise was deeply involved in both the drive to change the political status of women and that of bringing improved conditions for workers through unions.

The man leading the drive to keep things as they were was a close friend of Woodrow Wilson's - Alexander Mitchell Palmer - a power in the Democratic Party. His chief assistant was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the recently created department that would later become known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(The year 1920 also saw the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union by a Princeton-trained sociologist, Roger Nash Baldwin, who had himself been imprisoned for making anti-war speeches.)

A. Mitchell Palmer was a Quaker, as had been all members of both sides of his family for many generations. Because he was a Quaker and didn't believe in war, he turned down Presidents Wilson's offer to become Secretary of War. (There has not been a Department of War in the United States since 1947, when the Department of Defense was created by congress, and it, along with the Navy Department and the Air Force, became units of the newly-created Defense Department.)

Peace-loving Quaker or no. Palmer made a clear distinction between external and internal enemies of America, and readily accepted Wilson's offer to become Attorney General with almost religious fervor. Some Newspaper columnists, however, did not see the distinction quite as clearly. When he began referring to himself as the "Fighting Quaker," they began referring to him (among themselves) as the "Quaking Fighter."

Attorney General Palmer had a big job on his hands. The nation had begun to polarize with America's involvement in the war, and the polarization became more widespread instead of better when the war came to an end in November of 1918. The law, with new and tougher amendments, under which Reed, Eastman, Debs, Baldwin and so many others were indicted, with some being imprisoned, was still on the books. Palmer, by a unique form of reasoning, kept on enforcing it long after the shooting in Europe ended. The Senate, reasoned Palmer, had not yet gotten around to voting on the terms of the peace treaty, therefore, he was legally allowed to use his wartime powers to smash, among other things, the big strikes that had begun in many industries.

Palmer genuinely believed he was justified in doing what he did. Throughout the country, government officials and business executives were receiving packages by mail that proved to be time bombs. Palmer's own home was damaged by a bomb, and near the remains of a man who had been blown to pieces was found a radical magazine advocating bombing tactics.

In many places, notably in the West Coast states of Oregon and Washington, there came into existence Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors, organized on the Russian Soviet pattern. The newspapers were full of reports that the Bolsheviki were shipping gold by the trunk load to America to foment a revolution. Letters to the editors and editorials demanded action, and they got it.

A. Mitchell Palmer whipped things to a frenzy with public statements, reminding the millions of Americans who had bought war bonds, the owners of farms, and those with savings accounts in banks, that what he called "America's red hordes" intended to take all of this away from them. His campaign, which became known as the "Palmer Red Scare Raids," resulted in the arrests of thousands - most of whom had to be released for want of even flimsy proof that they were a threat to the nation - and the deportation of those who had not taken out citizenship papers. Among the first deportees were the anarchists Emma Goldman and her lover, Alexander ("Sasha") Berkman.

In Washington, a Senate committee turned its attention to the spread of radicalism in the United States. This was the Overman Committee, named after its chairman. Senator Lee Slater Overman, Democrat of North Carolina. The committee was formed while the war was still raging in Europe to investigate German propaganda, there having developed a conviction that wealthy German brewers were helping the Kaiser. But by early 1919, the investigation of Germans no longer made headlines. The new Attorney General then noticed that many of those who had once been pro-German were now pro-Bolshevik. He took careful note of the 1917 Kerensky charges that Lenin was an agent of the Germans, and it became easy for him to get full Senate approval for the Overman Committee to start investigating anything that he equated with Bolshevism. The other members of the committee were Senators King, Wolcott, Nelson and Sterling. The War Department assigned Major Lowry Humes to help the committee get all the "facts", and it soon went to work.

The committee members were intrigued almost immediately by the testimony of friendly witnesses. A. E. Stevenson of New York, a member of the New York Mayor's committee of National Defense and a special agent for the Department of Justice, told them about marriage and divorce in Russia under the new government. "All one has to do," said Mr. Stevenson, "is appear before a commissar with a woman, or vice versa, and say he wants to be considered married, and he is. If one of them wants to get divorced, all he or she has to do is say he or she wants to be divorced and he or she is."

"You mean," asked Senator Overman, "a man can have as many wives as he wants?"

"Yes," replied the witness, "but not all at once. He must have them in rotation."

SENATOR NELSON: "You mean a man can get a divorce when he gets tired of his wife, and get another wife?"

MR. STEVENSON: "Precisely."

SENATOR OVERMAN: "Do they teach free love?"

MR. STEVENSON: "They do."

MAJOR HUMES: "Polygamy is recognized, is it?"

MR. STEVENSON: "I do not know. I have not studied their social order as fully as that, and I cannot say with certainty about polygamy."

On Sunday, February 2, 1919, Louise was one of the two main speakers at a big rally at Poll's Theater in the nation's capital. The advertisements in the newspapers said she would tell "the truth about Russia." The place was packed. Several congressmen attended and brought down upon their heads abuse from both Representatives and Senators on the floors of both Houses, to say nothing of the newspapers. It was the presence of Congressmen at the meeting to hear Louise which prompted the New York Times a week later to devote four full columns of space to the event, substituting for the usual writer's byline the words BY ONE WHO WAS THERE. The headlines: "Bolsheviki Are Busy In The United States. A Sample of Their Methods and Distortions of Fact at Washington Meeting Attended by Congressmen."

As the furor over members of Congress listening to a Bolshevist mounted. Senator Overman's committee stepped up its investigation.

The committee called more witnesses, all of them violently opposed to the Bolshevist regime in Russia. With the exception of a commercial attaché to the United States embassy in Russia and "Babushka" Breshkovskaya, who was in the United States at that time, none of them seemed to know anything about Russia other than that Lenin and his followers were "anarchist atheists." (Babushka, which means "little grandmother," came from a family of Russian noblemen and was one of the early advocates of the use of violence to overthrow the czar. Louise had interviewed her in 1917 in Russia and described her as a charming old woman whom everybody loved. Soon after the Bolsheviki came into power she became violently anti-Lenin and was forced to flee Russia, coming first to the United States and then moving to Czechoslovakia, where she died in 1934.)

R. B. Dennis, a professor at Northwestern University, told the committee: "Now I don't know Mr. Williams or Mr. Reed, but I have read their stuff. I have also read the book by John Williams' wife." (He meant Albert Phys Williams - and the book he read was not Mrs. Williams" - it was Louise Bryant's "Six Red Months in Russia.")

The Reverend George Simonds read the infamous Jewish Protocols to show that the pogroms against Jews in Russia during the Czar's years may, after all, have been justified. He said he had it on good authority that the Bolsheviks "rape and ravish and despoil women at will." "Babushka" Breshkovskaya's testimony made big headlines. She made a bitter attack on Lenin and Trotsky, declaring that they were bringing into existence the very things the revolution was supposed to end. They were abolishing freedom of expression.

Big headlines, with columns upon columns of space, were devoted by the newspapers to the commercial attaché. Dr. W. C. Huntington, who was in Russia for more than a year. He described atrocities, told the committee of the slaughter of whole families in their cellars, read into the record a long order he said was by M. Petrovsk, the commissar for home affairs, which provided explicit instructions for killing all those opposed to the Lenin-Trotsky regime, and a great deal more.

SENATOR OVERMAN: "Why do they hate us so?"

DR. HUNTINGTON: "For two principal reasons. First because we do not have a Soviet government in this country, and secondly, because we went into the war."

"It seems to me," remarked Senator Overman, apropos of nothing that was germane at the moment, "this man Gorky is a most immoral man."

(Maxim Gorky, the noted Russian writer, who was living with a beautiful actress, had, as a matter of fact, by this time turned against the bolshevist regime because of the violent methods it was using to suppress opposition.)

As this went on, and few with any knowledge of Russia were called to testify, Louise, John Reed, Albert Rhys Williams and Raymond Robbins of the Red Cross asked to be heard. Senator Overman finally announced that they would be heard, and on February 2nd, Louise appeared as the first "unfriendly witness" of the Overman Committee.

Louise looked radiant. In a fashionable dark suit, gunmetal stockings and a large, floppy hat, she looked utterly out of place in a Senate hearing room. "But," said the Portland Oregonian correspondent in a special dispatch, "it soon became clear from the way she responded to questions that this was a brilliant individual. She looked her questioner squarely in the eye and, in the language of the national game, 'never muffed a ball.'"

She smiled at the men at the press table, and they smiled back. All papers in the country covered the hearings, Nevada papers especially recalling Louise's days as an agitator on the University of Nevada campus at Reno. The -New York Times devoted more space to testimony that Louise was an agitator on the Nevada university campus and that while she was defending the Bolshevik!, two of her brothers were fighting in Europe, than to any other phase of the hearings. The incorruptible members of the Fourth Estate strove, and in most cases succeeded, in separating the beautiful woman from the defense she was making of a system they abhorred.

The first question she was asked, before the oath was administered, was by Senator King of Utah: "Do you believe in God, in Christ, in the sanctity of an oath and in a hereafter?"

"I thought," smiled Louise, "I was here to talk about Russia."

SENATOR OVERMAN: One who doesn't believe in a Supreme Being can't attach much importance to an oath."

LOUISE: "I understand." She winked at the reporters at the press table and said: "Let the record show that there is a God."

Major Humes took over. He wanted to know about her fist husband, Dr. Trullinger. A shadow crossed Louise's face. Sue hesitated, then smiled and said again: "I thought you wanted to know something about Russia."

"We need to know something about the character of the person we are questioning so as to be able to decide how much credence we can attach to the answers."

Louise informed Major Hume that she and Dr. Trullinger were divorced in 1916 and that seemed to satisfy the committee.

The first demonstration by the audience came shortly after that. Senator Nelson asked her: "Were you in Washington at the time when demonstrations were staged before the White House?"

LOUISE: "I still don't understand what that has to do with the truth about what's going on in Russia. But I was in Washington and I was in the demonstration."

SENATOR OVERMAN: "Did you participate in the burning of President Wilson in effigy?"

LOUISE: "I did, and I went on a hunger strike."

SENATOR OVERMAN: "So you mean by that that you went to jail?"

LOUISE: "I didn't go to jail. I was dragged into a patrol wagon and was hauled off to jail. And I went hunger Strike."

SENATOR OVERMAN: "A hunger strike?"

LOUISE: "Yes, a hunger strike. You see, if you go without food and become weak, the authorities let you out. They don't want you to die in jail."

It was then that cheers and jeers broke out among members of the audience and Senator Overman ordered the hearing room cleared of everyone except members of the press and witnesses. As the audience was being hustled out of the room, two women shouted as with one voice: "Please, Senator, may we remain. We didn't shout or applaud."

"No," said Senator Overman, "everyone must get out of the hearing room."

MALE VOICE FROM THE AUDIENCE: "May I remain, sir?"

SENATOR OVSRMAN: "No, you may not."

MALE VOICE: "But I am the husband of the witness. I am John Reed."

SENATOR OVERMAN: "All right, you may remain."

Reporting this remarkable scene (demonstrations at Congressional hearings were rare at that time), the news dispatches said the people excluded held a protest meeting in the corridor and as a result all were allowed to return, to be excluded again shortly thereafter for staging another demonstration.

Despite interruptions and sharp questioning by Major Humes and by Senator Overman and the other senators, Louise managed to provide them with a great deal of what she said was the truth about Russia.

She painted a bleak picture of Russia before the Revolution; the repression, the autocratic behavior of the czar and czarista under the influence of Rasputin and the war. She told them of her talks with Kerensky, Trotsky and others. She denied the many news reports of atrocities.

She insisted that neither she nor her husband, John Reed, favored a Bolshevik-type government for the United States, but that it was the best thing that could have happened for the Russians in Russia. "I believe," said Louise, "in self-determination." And if that's what the Russians wanted - and she was certain that it was - she did not want to see her own country's leaders talk about the rights of nations to self-determination and then interfering in the Russian revolution.

Asked about the Bolsheviki grab of private property without compensation, she replied:

"They requisitioned the banks, just as Benjamin Franklin requisitioned his majesty's post office funds here."

About Madame Breshkovskaya, Louise said: "I know Babushka well. We had so many talks over tea in Petrograd and she gave me her autographed photograph. She was one of the early revolutionists and believed in violence against the Czar's government. But things did not turn out as she sincerely believed they should turn out," adding sadly: "Babushka is an old woman with a magnificent past and a pitiful present."

"Are you," asked Major Humes, "a proletarian?"

"I must be," smiled Louise, "I am poor and sometimes have to go hungry."

MAJOR HUMES: "Did you see people starving in the streets?"

LOUISE: "No, I didn't."

MAJOR HUMES: "Then you found things not so bad as painted, is that what you are telling us?"

LOUISE: "I found conditions in Russia about the same as they were in France when I was there."

MAJOR HUMES: "You say you don't want to see this nation intervene in Russian affairs. Do you then think it is all right for the Bolshevik government to stir up a revolution in the United States?"

At this question, she rose slightly from her chair, remained silent for several seconds, and then said passionately: "Revolutions, sir, are not like commodities that are exported from one country to another. They are created by conditions within a country. The Russian Czars made the Bolshevik revolution possible. If there is ever a revolution in this, my country, it will not be created by the Wobblies or the anarchists or anyone else. It will be the result of the sort of repression now sweeping this country, and by those of this country's leaders who want to see the repression go on."

(There are numerous explanations for the use of the word, Wobblies, for members of the revolutionary labor group Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the I.W.W.s. The one generally accepted, however, is that a Chinese owner of a small restaurant in Seattle, whose patrons were mostly I.W.W.s referred to them as "wobelyou, wobelyous.")

Some of the headlines: RED WITNESS NEVER FAZED.BY SENATORS. . .LOUISE BRYANT PROVES MATCH FOR INQUISITORS. . . HOT RETORT ALWAYS READY. . . SENATORS HEAR WOMAN DEFEND BOLSHEVIKI. . . MRS. JOHN REED DISCREDITS TESTIMONY OF AMERICAN OFFICIALS. . . NOISY AUDIENCE EXPELLED. . . SISSON PAPERS DENOUNCED. . .PROBE HALTED BY HISSES. . . MISS BRYANT "RED" WITNESS. . .NEVADA WOMAN GAINS NOTORIETY. . .RAVISHING BEAUTY A BOLSHEVIST DUPE. . .

Louise wrote Frank Harris, the author - he had not yet written at that time, the sensational, banned-in-Boston book, "My Life and Loves:"

I have been testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee and I want you to know my impressions of that unpleasant experience. .

I found myself at a long table, at which sat six men with cold eyes and harsh angry voices. They were my countrymen, but they were also my enemies. Their hate was naked and ugly, the flame of it burned away the mist before my eyes and I came away with the old, vague fears suddenly turned into vivid realities. . .

The men I write about are old men - not so old in years as in obsolete thoughts. They have determined to fight for a world as it was before the Great War - and that world no longer exists. They had decided to crush unmercifully all defenders of change. Each aged senator, chewing his everlasting cigar, sees in himself a Marquise de Lantenac - a strong man of the hour.

I have never been afraid of intelligent conversation, but I am afraid of ignorance, ignorance is cruel and intolerant. One cannot reason with it. When I went before the Committee I was full of hope. Here in America, I said to myself, we can surely get together. . .the breach is not so wide, there need be no violence. But; I was wrong, there will be. Our conservatives will see to that. It is idle to plead with such men; they will bring the house down on their own heads. They will destroy themselves and thousands of others. How many centuries ago Sophocles wrote: 'Woe for the doom of a dark soul!'

I could understand their hostility toward those of us who frankly confessed that we are socialists and against capitalism. But their madness ran beyond bounds when they scorned the staunch defender of his own class, the denouncer of socialism, Raymond Robbins.

Raymond Robbins is a man with a conscience. He has been a devout preacher, which is a grave matter because he reckons with God. . . He is sometimes weak and undetermined, but he does not lie. If they could only have understood, those old men, that he, more than any of the people who told them the things they wanted to hear, was their sincere friend and champion. They would have thanked him and not Simonds who wants them to plunge the world into another war more terrible than any we have yet faced.

The truth is, It is stupid of me, or of any