LOUISE BRYANT

An Informal Biography of an Activist

By William M. Greene

TO MY SISTER ANNE for dedicating the active years of her life to helping retarded children.

A FEW INTRODUCTORY NOTES

Even though Louise Bryant lived a unique, almost stranger-than-fiction life, little has been known about her and her participation in historically-significant events.

Indeed, the only information available about her has come from books about men and women with whom she was involved, notably the biographies of John Reed and Eugene O'Neill, with both of whom she was involved in a triangle which became the basis for O'Neill's award-winning play.

STRANGE INTERLUDE.

Her name may also be familiar to those in the rapidly shrinking ranks of men and women old enough to recall her activities during the post-World War One hysteria that gripped the nation, and her participation in the riots and hunger strikes in jail that marked the women's struggle for political equality. Her own two books detailing her experiences in Russia during the 1917 Revolution have long been forgotten.

But all this covers a short span of her life – five years. It says very little about her family, her childhood and the elements that set the pattern for her goal in life.

This book then is the story of Louise Bryant from the day she was born in San Francisco to her death in Paris - the thirty years of her life before she met John Reed in Portland, Oregon; her involvement with him and Eugene O'Neill; her role in the Russian revolution and other historically-significant events after Reed's death, the stormy years as the wife of Philadelphia's millionaire diplomat, William Christian Bullitt.

Despite destruction of all important legal documents in the earthquake and fires of San Francisco, where Louise was born, and other records in a school fire in Nevada, where her scholastic years began, it was, nevertheless, possible to locate and document essential information about her parents, grandparents and members of her immediate family, with the help of old federal census records (before these became unavailable to the general public), voter registration lists, real estate transactions, birth, death, baptismal and marriage records, and old San Francisco City directories in the California State Library in Sacramento.

Dramatization of her life on the West Coast before she met Reed is based on interviews (often on tape) and correspondence with men and women in their late seventies, eighties and even nineties, with recollections that go back to her grade school and college years. Some were classmates, sorority sisters and neighbors during the eighteen-nineties and the first decade and a half of this century.

There were even some with memories of their days as students in Paris, who recall seeing her in Paris bistros in the nineteen-thirties a few years before she died - by that time a sad caricature of the once beautiful wife of Bullitt.

AVAILABLE ILLUSTRATION MATERIAL

LOUISE

Age three and a half with large doll, a gift from her father.

In Cossack costume.

At Reed's funeral in Moscow.

Shortly before her death, showing devastating effects of drinking and drugs.

HUSBANDS

Paul A. Trullinger

John S. Reed

William C. Bullitt

OTHER

Eugene O'Neill

Alexander Kerensky.

Louise Bryant and Agnes Boulton revealing remarkable resemblance.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Birth of a Rebel

‘Boomtown’ Nevada

A Taste of Violence

Alienation

Campus Days

It's a Man's World

Mrs. Trullinger

John Silas Reed

The Way to a Man's Heart

PART TWO

43 Washington Square

Bohemia, U.S.A.

Marriage! Who Needs It?

War Clouds

The Provincetown Players

‘Strange Interlude'

Wheel of Pain

The Course of True Love

PART THREE

Utopia Must Wait

Ingredients for a Revolution

Prelude to Upheaval

LENIN: 'Radishes Are Red Only Outside'

Reporter at Large

The Lighter Side

Dosvida’nya

PART FOUR

Gene Doesn't Live. Here Anymore

Home of the Brave

Whatever Happened to Bohemia?

WOMEN'S LIB: The Tough Years

The Lecture Trail

Communism USA

Death of an American Radical

PART FIVE

Top Secret

Life with Bullitt

Disintegration

‘To Me Peace Means Death'

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Here is Anna Louise Mohan, age three and one half with Gretchen, a gift from her father, Hugh, a San Francisco journalist, politician and fighter for Irish independence. In 1892, two years after his death, widow Mohan married Sheridan Bryant and they all moved to a “hell-bent-for-leather” railroad town in Nevada, where Anna Louise, now simply Louise Bryant, got her first taste of violence during the Eugene Debs railroad tie-up. Here also was born her brother, who was destined to become an associate of Herbert Hoover, a top American business executive and important member of President Eisenhower’s administration, while she headed toward revolution and violence.

BIRTH OF A REBEL

Before the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Howard Street began at the Embarcadero on San Francisco Bay and ran southeasterly to Thirteenth Street. There it turned sharply south and dead-ended at Army Street bordering the hills. In the rebuilding that followed the disaster, the city straightened a good many of its streets, and Howard from Thirteenth to Army became a continuation of Van Ness and was named South Van Ness Avenue.

Among the San Francisco homes that survived the 1906 catastrophe, were those on what was once Howard Street near the hills, and they're still there today, solid and substantial, their great pre-earthquake magnificence gone long ago.

In one of these - a two-story brick house with six cement steps that began abruptly at the sidewalk and ended at a large varnished door bearing the number 2943 - Barbara Louisa Mohan was giving birth to her third child in an upstairs bedroom. She was twenty-eight, blue-eyed and blonde, with Teutonic features. Barbara Louisa was having a harder time bringing this child, into the world than her other two - Lou Parnell, age three and Barbara, a year younger. Two women were there to help; her younger sister, Marynell, and Mrs. Louise Emmerich, a midwife, whose home was a few blocks to the north on Howard.

In the kitchen, on the floor below, was the father - a San Francisco journalist who doubled as a Democratic politician - the two children, and Uncle Philip Flick, who was Mrs. Mohan's older brother - a San Francisco tinsmith and pipe fitter. At thirty Uncle Philip was still unmarried, but carrying on a courtship by mail with Mary Crestwell in Virginia City, Nevada, where the Flicks lived before moving to San Francisco.

All had hoped that the new baby would be a boy so that Barbara would have a brother slightly older and another younger. The children themselves, of course, were too young to care one way or the other. They were hungry and wanted their supper. When Mrs. Emmerich appeared at the head of the stairs and announced that they had a baby sister, they looked pleased. It meant supper would soon appear on the large, square, oilcloth-covered kitchen table. As for the father! If Hugh Jonathan Mohan was disappointed, he certainly did not show it. He walked to the cupboard for a bottle and two glasses, and after he and Uncle Philip toasted the new baby's arrival, both went upstairs to see Mrs. Mohan.

The children saw their little sister the next day, a squirming, squalling bundle swaddled in a long, flannel gown from the sleeve end of which stuck out two tiny, clenched fists. Her face, red from exertion, seemed all wide-open mouth, wrinkled skin and tightly shut eyes. Not until Marynell shifted her so that she could latch onto one of Barbara Louisa's breasts did her sobs and wailing stop. The children watched their sister, their faces mirroring both curiosity and disgust.

It was Saturday, December 15, 1885. A year later she was baptized and formally became an Episcopalian. By that time it was clear she would resemble her tall, handsome Irish father more than her Teutonic-featured mother, as did the other two children. They named her Anna Louise.

Anna Louise was nearing her fifth birthday in 1890, when two of her father's friends brought him home one afternoon and the children saw their mother help them carry their father into his bedroom. They ever saw him alive again. He died in five days, a victim of pneumonia. She recalled little of her father while he was alive, only that he sometimes came home and hardly talked to anyone, and at other times he was tender and brought home gifts. One of the most exciting of these occasions was when he brought home beautiful dolls, one for her and another for Barbara, and everyone marveled because they said her doll looked just like her. There was a rocking horse for Lou Parnell too. On these occasions there was always a faint, pleasant smell on his breath when he kissed her and the other children as he handed them their gifts.

She also recalled times when their home was full of strangers. They would sit and drink, mostly beer, with their father, while she, Barbara and Lou Parnell played in the other room. Even when they got tired at night and went to sleep, she would sometimes awaken and hear their voices, with her father's the loudest of all. She would hear words not even Lou Parnell, who was three years older, could understand. But the words seemed very important to her father and his friends. Once or twice she asked her mother to tell her what they were talking about. Her mother tried to explain, but she was not very successful, usually telling her to wait until she and Barbara and Lou Parnell were a little older. Her mother proved to be right. It was not long before Anna Louise began hearing the same words again and they began to take meaning, forming a pattern and shaping her life.

When she was seventeen her mother told her the truth about her father - Hugh Mohan was a heavy drinker, and it was a severe cold after a long drinking spree in "Blind" Chris Buckley's saloon, which turned into pneumonia, and killed him when he was only forty years old.

But a good many things had happened before her mother got around to talking about Hugh Mohan. By that time, they were living in Nevada and her mother had remarried and become Mrs. Sheridan Bryant. And when Anna Louise was ready to enroll in a Nevada school everyone knew her only as Louise Bryant.

By that time, however, Louise had learned so much about her father and her four grandparents, and she had surrounded their lives with such a romantic aura, it wouldn't have mattered to her if her father had died on the gallows for involvement in heinous mass murder. (Louise herself did not begin drinking until 1926 when she was married to Bullitt. Until that time she rarely smelled liquor on a man's breath without associating it with her father's tenderness.)

First in her dream world peopled by wonderful men and women was - of course - her father; but as her mother, bit by bit, unfolded the story of her grandparents, they too quickly joined the ranks" of all who deserved beatification for having lived and died as heroes.

It was not difficult for her to romanticize her four grandparents - alt were European refugees from hunger, tyranny and political turmoil during the middle of the nineteenth century.

On her mother's side were Christian Louis Flick and his wife Barbara. They were newlyweds in Germany (he was born in Hesse, she in Baden) when they joined other political activists fleeing Europe turmoil created by an odd combination of a middle class and oppressed workers, inspired by Marx-Engels theories, rebelling against monarchial arrogance and corruption. In America, they lived for a while in St. Charles in Louisiana, where her grandfather worked as a barber. With news that gold had been discovered in California, they joined the stampede from all over the world to what is now the Sacramento area, settling at Marysville. Here Grandfather Flick opened the mining camp's first barbershop. Two years later he built the town's first hotel, naming it Hotel St. Charles, after his first home in America. Among the first tenants at the new Hotel St. Charles was a bachelor merchant named Rowland H. Macy, who went broke in Marysville, but salvaged enough gold to return east and get into the department store business.

The Flicks had three children: Uncle Philip, born in 1853; Barbara Louisa, Louise's mother, in 1857; and Marynell in 1859. When gold began to give out around Marysville, the Flicks joined hundreds of others heading for Virginia City in Nevada. Here Flick opened a hair-dressing emporium with another German immigrant, Rudolph Grebner. They prospered, their patrons being mostly prostitutes, of whom there were a great many in Virginia City. In 1875 a disastrous fire destroyed the entire business section of Virginia City, and the Flicks, along with everyone else in business, were ruined. They managed to reach San Francisco, where Flick had a brother in the bakery business.

Here in 1880, Barbara Louisa, twenty-three, tightly-corseted and irresistibly pretty in her "bolero jacket and small hat perched precariously on top her blonde hair, heard Hugh Jonathan Mohan address a Democratic Party picnic. Even before he came to their table to say hello, while circulating among the crowd, Barbara Louisa was hopelessly in love with him. Mohan was seven years older than she was. They were married after a brief courtship.

The Mohans, Louise's other grandparents, were able to provide her active imagination with fuel that was even more inflammatory. For while the Flicks, upon arrival in America, quickly joined the mainstream of life in their new homeland, and pushed their rebellious past to a remote place in their memories, the Mohans never forgot the tyranny and ruthlessness of their former British overlords.

Hugh himself was born in Pennsylvania, two years after his parents settled there. They were among the countless thousands who fled Ireland and death by starvation the Great Potato Famine of 1848 brought in its wake. The Mohans, for many years fierce Protestant Irish fighters for a free Ireland, almost immediately became involved in the relentless struggle Irish-Americans were waging to rid their former homeland of the British.

Hugh was a few months past his sixteenth birthday when he joined the large gangs of young Irishmen hired to lay the tracks for the Union Pacific, building America's first trans-continental railroad. Scores of the young Irish laborers perished under the blistering sun in the summer and below zero weather in the winter while working - often with rifles over their shoulders to fight off resentful Indians. Working their way slowly westward from Omaha, Nebraska, they reached Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. There, the Union Pacific tracks joined those of the old Central Pacific, built by thousands of Chinese coolies working their way eastward from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada.

When the great celebration in Utah ended, the bands stopped playing and the governors and other politicians ended their speeches proclaiming the start of a new era for railroading along with growth of America that would never end (For the railroads the end came in 1969, exactly one hundred years later, when a generous Congress, which had provided the means for the building of the railroads, had to start bailing them out to avoid bankruptcy.) flags were rolled up and many of the Irish laborers, including Hugh Mohan, headed for San Francisco. Most of them remained laborers, but a good many became businessmen, politicians and journalists. The Chinese coolies, who had survived the hardships involved in laying railroad tracks over the almost impassable mountains, also headed for San Francisco. Here they were herded into a ten block square, vermin-ridden, disease infested area, which ultimately became one of San Francisco's major tourist attractions - it's famous Chinatown.

Hugh began by working in a fish-cleaning plant in San Francisco, which had been booming since the 1849 California Gold Rush began. Then he turned to print shops and soon learned enough about setting type and proper construction of sentences while setting them in type, to be able to list himself in the San Francisco City Directory as a free-lance journalist. He, also, soon became an articulate member of the tightly controlled Democratic Party machine in San Francisco, and a favorite of "Blind Boss" Chris Buckley, who for a time ran City Hall from his saloon at 232 Bush Street. (Buckley’s political enemies insisted he was not blind at all. He was a poor “shanty” Irishman who had never learned to read or write and feigned blindness to explain why he could not read or sign documents.)

With the election of Grover Cleveland as Democratic President in 1884, Hugh Mohan hit affluence. The political "spoils system" was in full bloom and every Democrat, down to those who tacked up election placards on telephone poles, was assured a job. "Blind Boss" Buckley rewarded Hugh Mohan with a government post that bore an elaborate title, with which went a comfortable salary.

Mohan now began to appear in the San Francisco City Directory as a "Statistician of the San Francisco Division of the United States Department of Labor," a most appropriate appointment for a dedicated Democrat, the U.S. Department of Labor in those days being responsible for the naturalization of aliens before they became eligible to vote.

With the appointment and a secure income, Hugh Mohan moved his family from the rickety old house on Seventh Street where they had been living, to the expensive brick home at 2943 Howard Street, where Louise was born.

Louise's father was, by that time, not only a fiery orator able to arouse San Francisco Irish, German and other poorly-paid workers to the Democratic cause at election time, he had also become a leader among those extreme radical Irish-Americans in San Francisco favoring the sending of guerilla saboteurs into Canada in their increasingly-violent crusade against the British.

In the eighteen-eighties, Mohan and his fellow Irish activists were still smarting from the disastrous end of the attempt by Irish-American extremists to invade Canada. In 1866, they actually managed to get an "army" of seven thousand into Canada and claim a victory by routing the Canadians. The United States government, however, with Democrat Andrew Johnson in the White House, smashed the drive into Canada by closing the border, seizing the weapons of the invaders, and arresting the leaders. A second attempt four years later was smashed even more harshly, this time by Republican President Ulysses S. Grant.

Nothing apparently came of the guerilla-saboteur proposal. But in the years to come, Louise would hear echoes of the muffled voices of the father she worshipped and his friends as they drank beer and argued; she would hear them as John Reed talked with radical Irish friends in Greenwich Village; she would hear them as she was writing a moving tribute for the old Masses published by Max Eastman, lauding the life of Sir Roger Casement, the Irish patriot executed by the British as a traitor; and she would hear them again as a journalist when Irish-American senators with long memories, would scuttle Woodrow Wilson's hopes for United States membership in the League of Nations. He needed their support, but he also needed the support of England's Lloyd George, whose ruthless crushing of Irish revolts none of them forgot. He could not have both.

BOOMTOWN, NEVADA

Louise spent her childhood - the most critically formative years in the development of a child's personality - and her adolescent years in Nevada: Six years around Reno, and before that, ten in a wild, boisterous, booming railroad town, some thirty miles east of Reno called Wadsworth.

Here in Nevada, she got her elementary and high school education, lived through the violence which greeted Eugene Debs' attempt to organize a united and effective labor organization, helped collect food and clothing for the bedraggled families of striking miners driven from Colorado by militia and deputized strike-breakers. Here she learned that a sure-fire way to attract attention to herself was by doing and saying things which would shock people.

By the time she was thirteen, she was boasting about an imaginary sexual rendezvous with a twenty-year old man in a boxcar on a side-track in the railroad yards, but when she actually did have her first affair at fourteen and a half, it fell far short of her romantic expectations.

From that affair, however, and those that followed on the University of Nevada and Oregon campuses she did learn "the ways of the world," and this played an important part in shaping her life. While she shocked convention, men found her fascinating and alluring. She found that she could gain the attention of the most important, handsome men almost effortlessly, and she quickly learned to exploit her powers. Sex, she became convinced, could become a potent force in helping her achieve her goals, including that of becoming a journalist-crusader the way her rebellious Irish father had been.

When Hugh Mohan died in 1890, he left a widow and three children, as well as a lot of unpaid bills. (Hugh’s affluent years ended when Grover Cleveland moved out of the white House and Benjamin Harrison moved in, and federal government jobs immediately went to deserving Republicans.) With nowhere else to turn, except her younger sister, Marynell, who had by then become Mrs. Ernest Girvin, the wife of a hard-pressed San Francisco court reporter, Mrs. Mohan decided to accept the invitation of brother Philip to join him in Nevada until she got over the shock of losing Hugh and could begin to make a new life for herself and the children.

In Nevada, Philip Flick, the pipe fitter, was now a farmer on one hundred and sixty irrigated acres nine miles northeast of Reno. He had left San Francisco shortly after Louise was born and moved back to Virginia City, Nevada, where he had worked in mines before the 1875 fire ruined the Flicks. What lured him back was Mary Crestwell, with whom he had been corresponding. They were promptly married and when their first child was stillborn, Philip decided to try his hand at farming. This was a time when Nevada's economic picture was beginning to change and the state was making it easy for unemployed miners to become farmers.

In January of 1891, Mrs. Mohan and her two young daughters, Louise, five, and Barbara, some eighteen months older, arrived in Reno. She had left Lou Parnell with her sister Marynell and her husband in San Francisco. It was to have been a temporary arrangement, but it didn't turn out that way, and it was many years before Louise's mother saw Lou Parnell again. Louise herself never did. If she had she would have been bitterly disappointed. There was nothing in his career to associate him even remotely with his namesake, the Irish freedom fighter, Charles Stewart Parnell. Indeed, he represented everything for which his father and Louise had contempt, an average Joe Blow or Smith, who would never rock any boat. And yet, it was he and Sheridan Bryant who were the only ones around in 1924 to mourn the death of Louise's mother.

Eighteen months after Mrs. Mohan and the girls arrived in Reno Barbara Louisa Mohan became the wife of Sheridan D. Bryant, to whom Uncle Philip introduced her one spring afternoon in downtown Reno while they were doing the weekly shopping for groceries.

Sheridan was short and stocky, with a round face and a pleasant smile. He boasted a lone gold tooth in the center of the upper row, a sign in those days that the tooth's owner was no plain gink; he was somebody with ambition. Sheridan Bryant's ambition was to be a railroad conductor on the Southern Pacific, whose biggest division point between Salt Lake City in Utah, and Sacramento, was at Wadsworth. He frequently came to Reno on a free railroad pass to visit his brother Sherman, a Washoe county deputy sheriff. When he was introduced to Louise's mother, his visits became more frequent. (Sheridan and Sherman, named by their father, a Civil War soldier, after the two great generals in that war, came west to find new homes as did so many others when the war was over.)

As for the mother, she faced his growing interest in her with mixed feelings. He was totally different from the handsome, passionate, intellectually and physically stimulating Hugh Mohan, who had encouraged her to continue her cultural interests - music, writing, good books - interests which had started in rip-roaring Virginia City when she was a teenager. There she had tried to keep aloof of her surroundings and was shocked to learn the sort of customers her father's hairdressing emporium catered to. She drew closer to her German mother, and showed Louise a clipping about her mother from the old Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which she had always treasured: "Virginia City's first ball," said the paper where Mark Twain had worked, "Was a gala affair held at the San Francisco Restaurant on Christmas Eve. Among our First Ladies, resplendently gowned, were the following: Mrs. Patterson, Mrs. Rothbucker, Miss Morgan, Mrs. Flick. . ."

Now she was thirty-five, a widow with three children, she knew nothing at all about earning a livelihood, and life on the ranch was beginning to become difficult. Aunt Mary was not very subtle about hints that her sister-in-law and two young nieces were becoming a burden. Sheridan Bryant, her courter, seemed kind, pleasant and generous, with a steady job in a town where the two girls could attend school. . .

On June 11, in 1892, Sheridan Daniel Bryant and Louise Barbara Mohan appeared at the Washoe County Courthouse, the large grey building in the heart of downtown Reno. They signed an application for a marriage license, and were married within an hour by Justice of the Peace, J. J. Linn. The girls were present, Barbara happy, Louise disapproving.

"He looks like Santa Claus without the red suit and white whiskers." she had told Barbara the first time he turned up at the Flick ranch, and added: "I don't like his yellow tooth. He's not like Papa and Uncle Philip."

They left for Wadsworth a few hours later.

It was not a long ride. Aboard the train Sheridan introduced his new family to the train crew, and could hardly wait to begin showing them off to his friends and neighbors in Wadsworth. The new Mrs. Bryant looked appraisingly about her when they all got off the train, at the tiny park in front of the depot, at the buildings with their high wooden fronts, and at the people to whom she was introduced, most of them in work clothes.

Louise and Barbara were wide-eyed and excited. There was so much new and strange to see and marvel at.

Wadsworth is now one of Nevada's many ghost towns, a dusty, forlorn little place on Interstate 80. There is very little left to recall the riotous place it was when the Bryants came to live there in 1892. It was then Nevada's biggest railroad division point - a booming, brawling, thriving saloon and brothel-crowded town - a rough place in which to raise children.

The town began to sink into dusty obscurity after the Bryants had lived there ten years. That was when the railroad decided to move its division point to Sparks, just east of Reno. This involved moving all the buildings and everything else out of Wadsworth, because it had been built on part of the Piute Indian Reservation, and the railroad, called the Central Pacific when it was being built, and now a part of the giant Southern Pacific network, having no title to the land, could find no customers for houses and other company-owned buildings without the land on which they were built. (What had happened was that the four men, now revered in California for their beneficence – Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charlie Crocker – had overreached themselves. They had managed to bamboozle the federal government, blackmail communities and bribe lawmakers in order to get the old Central Pacific Railroad built. However, they had taken the Piute Indians for granted, and the land undisputedly belonged to them.)

What still remains in Wadsworth is the large two-story, brick school building, with its huge exterior, steel cylindrical fire escape down which Louise and all the other children screamed joyfully as they spiraled down the shiny slide during fire drills. The only other reminder of early Wadsworth is the small, white-painted clapboard interdenominational church. Here Louise and Barbara attended Sunday school, and it was here also, in 1897, three years after he was born, that Louise's brother Floyd, the future Rhodes Scholar, friend and associate of Herbert Hoover, vice-president of Standard Oil Company of California and assistant to Secretary of Defense Wilson during the Eisenhower years, was baptized into the Episcopalian faith.

Early railroad division points in the Western United States all looked alike. They were established along the railroad's main line, the distance between them determined by the terrain over which locomotives and crews were able to haul freight and passenger trains before the crews and locomotives had to be changed, somewhat the way horses and riders had to be changed during the old Pony Express days.

Occasionally it was possible to build a division point at a spot on the main line where a town or village was already established, as in the case of Wadsworth, which was an Indian trading post before the railroad came through.

There never was a railroad town where the main street wasn't called Railroad Street, and never one where all the bachelors didn't live in boarding houses, generally run by widows whose husbands had been killed in train wrecks or saloon brawls. For those with families there was always a long string of one-story homes exactly alike - always painted red and always with front doors facing the street and back porches a short distance from the railroad yard. The homes were railroad-owned and when a bachelor got married he moved out of his boarding house and usually into one of these dwellings.

The Bryants began life in one of these houses near the west end of Railroad Street, some distance from the main part of town. Two things fascinated Louise and Barbara from almost the moment they moved in -- the roundhouse where the locomotives were kept while being checked and serviced after each regular run, and a big two-story frame house in a large hollow across the street from their home, which had a wide porch running the full length in front. It was one of Wadsworth's twenty-four whorehouses, called "houses of ill fame" by genteel folks. The roundhouse they were able to watch anytime they wished, but the place across the street, only when Mrs. Bryant and Sheridan were not around.

The roundhouse was a large, brick, half-circular structure, with only the outside half-circle walled in. Two dozen sets of rails began inside the building and extended outside like the spokes of a wheel, ending at the end of a huge, round, concrete pit. In the exact center of the pit was a heavy steel column on top of which was a narrow bridge with a pair of tracks. The column with its bridge was so precisely balanced it could be easily turned and the tracks lined up with any pair of those which led into the roundhouse. Louise never got tired watching a hostler bring a huge locomotive onto the bridge tracks and slowly and carefully balance it in the exact center so that the locomotive and bridge rocked gently, the way a well-balanced teeter-totter does. Then the whole business was easily pushed around until the tracks were lined up with a vacant roundhouse stall. Then came two toots by the hostler inside the cab and the huge mass of steel lumbered slowly into the roundhouse.

The house across the street was another matter. Each night it was brightly lit, and men would go in, and sometimes they would be staggering when they came out. On warm evenings there would always be a half-dozen ladies in beautiful clothes on the wide porch. At first, only a few days after they moved in, when Louise asked her mother about the women, the men, and why the house was always lit up at night, Mrs. Bryant was cross and told her it was nothing she and Barbara were to talk about, and ordered them to keep away from the front windows. But then the mother recalled her own shock as a teenager when, not having been told, she learned the truth about the women whose hair was made to look pretty by her own father in his hairdressing emporium, and she decided there was no way to evade the problem of satisfying their curiosity forever. She began by telling them that when they grew older they would understand much better, but in the meantime it was enough for them to know that the women across the street were forced to do bad things with men they didn't even like, because their parents were poor and they had no husbands to take care of them, and that this was the only way they could get money to buy food and other things that they needed.

Louise immediately demanded to know what the bad things were, but Mrs. Bryant only told her again that they would understand more when they were older, adding that she and Barbara should choose their lives carefully, so that under no circumstances would they ever find themselves having to do what the women across the street had to do in order to live.

Louise thought of asking Sheridan, but thought better of that. She was always comparing him with the picture of her daring, handsome father, and he always came off most unfavorably. When school began she soon discovered that her school-mates were impressed when she talked about the bad things the ladies, who lived across the street from her home, had to do with men they didn't even like.

She was learning that there were many ways one could become popular.

Louise and Barbara began their formal education in Wadsworth in September and by the time the term ended in June of 1893, it was clear that if Louise achieved fame either at Wadsworth or on college campuses, it would not be scholastically. She did very well, however, on both the University of Nevada and Oregon campuses in American and world history, English literature and in art.

While she was a bright student who made good grades in subjects she was interested in, she became bored with school routine almost as soon as the novelty of being in class with a lot of boys and girls wore off, and she would wait impatiently for recess, when more important subjects than school work could be discussed. She enjoyed the excitement that came with the periodic fire drills, and at home she suddenly began to find excuses for not plunging eagerly into performing assigned chores the way Barbara did. Mrs. Bryant chided her gently, seeing in her youngest daughter the early signs of development of characteristics that had made Hugh Mohan the glamorous husband she had loved so passionately. She had an uneasy feeling about her pretty young daughter's future, but not the slightest premonition of the despair and heartbreak that would be hers and Sheridan's when her daughter's career became almost indistinguishable from one that Hugh Mohan might have followed was he alive.

During the first half of her second term, Louise began the practice of trying to banish boredom by losing herself in daydreams during class hours - drifting off into reveries where life was exciting and romantic, where difficulties mellowed and problems became easy to overcome, no matter what they were. It was the genesis of the schizophrenia that would ultimately destroy her.

Philip Crosby of Reno, ninety years old when interviewed in 1972, shut his eyes and easily recalled when he was in school with Louise. He described exactly what she wore - a bright blue dress, her black hair in two long braids tied neatly at the ends with a blue ribbon and reaching far down her back. "She would sit there," said Crosby, "staring straight ahead like she was asleep, and stay that way until Miss Cruikshank brought her sharply back to life."

"She was very smart," said Crosby, "and always finished what Miss Cruikshank had assigned us before anyone else. Then she would look around the room for something to do that would liven things up. I sat in front of her in the fourth grade, and one day I suddenly felt something around my neck was choking me. She had taken her long braids with the ends tied with the blue ribbon and using it like a lasso threw it over my neck and began pulling. So I grabbed the ends, got them from off around my neck, stuck the ends in the inkwell, turned around and rubbed ink all over her face. Miss Cruikshank sent us to the principal's office where he made us hold out our hands with the palms up and gave it to us with the end of a razor strap; first me, then her - five times. I counted them. She didn't cry, but when we got out of the office, she said "that sonafabitch".

"That was her popular swear word," said Crosby. "I think she learned it from the Polack who said she was his girl."

Around the first of December in 1893, Mrs. Bryant informed Sheridan that she was pregnant with his first child, and the following week, Sheridan came home with a handbill announcing a meeting of the Wadsworth lodge of the American Railway Union to be addressed by Eugene Debs - founder of the union, and that after lodge there would be a public mass meeting.

A TASTE OF VIOLENCE

Every folding chair in the big hall was filled by railroad men, their wives and children when the two men appeared on the waist high platform that ran the full width of the rear wall. Their appearance set off a long ovation with everyone stomping their feet, applauding and yelling, "Hooray, Gene; Hooray, Gene." With Eugene Debs was C. W. Lindsay, the chairman of the Wadsworth lodge of the American Railway Union. Debs was a full six feet tall, with angular features, deep-set eyes and a slightly protruding chin. His clothes were worn and wrinkled as though he had slept in them for several nights. He looked tired.

Louise leaned over and whispered to Barbara: "He's got a shoelace around his neck."

"That's a necktie, silly," said Barbara.

At that time Debs was not yet the fiery speaker he became when he was nominated five times by the socialists as their candidate for President of the United States, collecting nearly a million votes on one occasion while he was a prisoner in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. But this night he didn't have to be fiery or eloquent. Everyone in the crowded hall listened closely to every word. Only the children were restless, turning their heads in every direction to see who was there. Barbara also became fidgety after a while, but Louise kept her eyes on Eugene Debs. She saw in him her father as he must have looked while addressing large crowds, and soon she began daydreaming, even imagining herself on the stage with everyone applauding. At times she turned from the platform, glancing at Sheridan, who was listening carefully, and then at her mother. Once she saw her mother with her eyes tightly shut and thought that she was asleep, but then she felt her mother's hand squeeze her own tightly.

When Debs got through talking something unusual happened -something Louise would recall for Debs years later when she and John Reed visited him in prison. All the chairs were folded and disappeared, as if by magic, and a long table appeared by the wall loaded with cookies, lemonade and coffee. Everyone collected in groups to talk about Debs' speech, and Debs himself, as he nearly always did at meetings of this sort, began to stop at one group and then another to chat, and once in a while to pat a child on the head.

When he came to the Bryants, he talked to Sheridan and Mrs. Bryant and then turned to Barbara and asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. Barbara was so surprised she was tongue-tied for a moment. Then she pointed to Sheridan and said, "I'm going to work on a train like him."

Debs smiled and said: "I'm afraid dear, you are going to have to think of something else. The railroad company seems to think that women should stay at home and keep house."

Louise was bubbling inside. Her mind was racing. She knew that she would be next and was ready when the time came, the words came tumbling over each other: "I'm going to be a great writer and get all my friends to kill British soldiers, and I'll buy new clothes for the Indian children, and I'll give some money to the ladies in the house across from us so they don't have to do bad things with men just because they don't have any money, and. . . and. . . ."

The men in their group and some others nearby began to laugh when she mentioned the bad things the ladies had to do, but Eugene Debs didn't. He looked at Louise, and to everybody's surprise, bent down and lifted her from the floor, and kissed her on the forehead.

Louise felt her face get hot, but she also felt a pleasant glow. So many people were looking at her. She had never felt quite so important. As they were all walking home through the falling snow, while Barbara kept asking why he wore such rumpled old clothes that were too big for him, Louise wanted to know what he was talking about. (The report of Deb’s appearance at Wadsworth is from the files of the old Wadsworth Dispatch, where Mrs. Bryant worked in her spare time for a white.)

Louise's feelings of importance grew the next day at school. Philip Crosby wasn't at the meeting, but he heard all about it; nearly everybody at school knew that Mr. Debs had kissed her. This was a new Louise Bryant whom all now envied. She did not have to do or say anything startling to draw attention to herself.

At home, the moment they all returned from the meeting, Louise began pressing her mother for information about Mr. Debs, starting with why did her mother fall asleep while he was talking. Mrs. Bryant said she hadn't fallen asleep, only closed her eyes because Mr. Debs was talking about the same things her father had talked about the first time she saw him in San Francisco. He was using almost the same words, exploitation, tyranny. . . .it was then that Louise began to hear echoes of the strange sounding words she had heard while her father and his friends were talking heatedly when she and Barbara were small children. Her father, said Mrs. Bryant, wanted people to vote for Mr. Cleveland for president because Mr. Cleveland was a Democrat and would help workers get more money from their bosses. He also wanted, said her mother, Ireland, where her grandparents come from, to be free of the English. But she must never again talk about killing English soldiers, no matter what she heard about her father. Soldiers are not bad people. They only do what they are ordered to do. Even the Indians who had attacked her father and his fellow-workers while they were building the railroad, Mrs. Bryant told Louise, were not bad men. They were unhappy because the railroad was being built on land that was once theirs and nobody even bothered to ask them if it would be all right to build the railroad on the land that was theirs. White men were also killing the buffalo and taking only the skins leaving the meat to rot, taking away the Indian's food supply.

It was all interesting and confusing, for Louise was only eight years old. And before she reached her ninth birthday, not even her mother would be able to convince her that strikebreakers and railroad bosses, to whom she soon began to refer to as "them sonafabitches" were not bad people.

In June of 1894, six months after Debs' appearance in Wadsworth, two important events occurred, one affecting the Bryant family, the other everyone in the Western United States. On the twenty first of that month, Mrs. Bryant gave birth to the first of Sheridan's two sons, and five days later the "Debs Rebellion" (it was labeled that at once by newspapers) began, and before it was three days old it had brought to a standstill all railroad transportation west of Chicago.

It was the great and violent railroad tie-up of 1894, involving Debs' newly created American Railway Union and every community whose existence depended on shipments of supplies the struck roads had been providing.

The greatest impact of the upheaval was on railroad towns like Wadsworth where everything depended on the railroad. In Wadsworth, itself, a food shortage developed almost immediately, and Louise's new brother Floyd, a sickly baby, rejecting his mother's breast, added to the gloom that enveloped the Bryant home, with his almost round-the-clock screams, wails and long, pitiful sobs.

They were sad, dreadful days for eight-year-old Louise, even though the conflict lasted only a short time and all rail transportation everywhere was back to normal by July 15. Worst of all was her loneliness and feeling of rejection by her mother. Mrs. Bryant was so preoccupied with the baby and so many other problems the strike had created, she had little time to talk to her about what was happening and why.

She heard the old words again, "exploitation," "tyranny," and some new ones, "boycott," "injunctions," and Jimmy Kolchak's furious blasphemous attack on the railroad owners and "scabs" and soldiers, all of whom were "sonafabitches." Jimmy, whom everybody called "the Polack," was the boy Louise Bryant would have her first sex affair with some years later, but now he wasn't even ten, and he offered her his explanation of what was going on.

"Them sonafabitches bosses want to cut my papa's pay again," said Jimmy. Louise was skeptical. She hadn't heard Sheridan or anybody else say that. "Well," said Jimmy, spitting viciously on the ground, "them sonafabitches don't like my papa because we're Polacks."

Eugene Debs was a member of the railroad firemen's brotherhood at the time the A. F. of L. was launched. He had begun work as a roundhouse laborer in 1870 in Terre Haute, Indiana, at the age of fifteen. His pay was fifty cents a day for cleaning the grease from freight locomotives after their regular runs. He had to buy his own scraper to loosen the grease, but the company provided the borax. His knuckles were always raw and bleeding.

A half dozen unsuccessful railroad strikes, called by unions to keep wages from being slashed when profits, for one reason or another, dipped, convinced Debs there is little chance of winning any concessions from railroad owners so long as workers were organized in individual unions according to their crafts. A union striking without support of the other unions on the same railroad was bound to lose. The A.F.of L. was just the kind of labor organization Debs was talking about -engineers, firemen, conductors, brakemen, switchmen, machinists . . .all had individual unions. And it was not at all unusual that when one called a strike, the others would act as strikebreakers.

In 1893, the union Debs organized - the American Railway Union - came into existence. It was a revolutionary new type of a labor organization and was immediately attacked from every quarter - industry, the newspapers, railroad owners, mining interests, and, not too surprisingly, by the officers of the American Federation of Labor.

Every railroad worker, no matter what his craft was, could join the One Big Union. And despite opposition from every quarter, the new union was an immediate success. By the middle of December, only six months after it was organized, when Debs appeared in Wadsworth, a sizeable part of the railroad industry west of Chicago was organized into the American Railway Union. The rush to join was a stampede. To the railroad workers it meant that in the event of a strike there would be no strikebreaking by one group of workers against another. The entire railroad network would be tied up.

The 1894 railroad strike, the most violent in labor history - "the Debs Revolution", it was called, began under these circumstances:

The builders of Pullman sleeping cars would not budge in their refusal to talk with their workers, who had gone out on strike because their wages were slashed by the usual practice of simply posting a notice.

The Debs union ordered members on all railroads to refuse to couple and uncouple sleeping cars to passenger trains.

The railroads complained their contracts with the Pullman Company barred them from running passenger trains without sleeping cars.

The federal government declared the mail must move, no matter what is involved, and called out troops to see that trains moved.

In Wadsworth, eight-year-old Louise Bryant knew nothing of this at that time. She sat on a three-legged stool in the kitchen, watching her mother trying to pacify the baby, and listening to Sheridan read the strike news in the Wadsworth Dispatch and the Reno Gazette and the Nevada Journal. Nothing made sense. She had never before heard phrases like; "court injunctions," "propaganda leaflets," "shoot to kill orders," "dynamite on train trestles," "six soldiers drowned," "strike- breakers beaten." In Wadsworth, so far there had not been any violence, and the twice-weekly Dispatch, in an attempt to lighten the grim news, said in its usual column of brevities: "Wadsworth is at present as quiet as a country graveyard. Not even a dog fight to disturb anybody."

But it was a strange, eerie, quiet - particularly in the railroad yards a short distance from their back porch. Ever since they came to Wadsworth, there had never been a moment when Louise couldn't hear the clatter and clanging and shouting of railroad crews, coupling and uncoupling freight and passenger cars, and the puffing and whistling and racket of switching, called "goats." The roundhouse, too, was quiet and no smoke came from the large, square smokestacks on the roof to show locomotives were being fired up or waiting to be moved outside by hostlers and their helpers.

Then one night the quiet ended. Louise was awakened by a terrible explosion and shouting and screaming, and through the window of her bedroom she saw the fire from the roundhouse. Outside were all the neighbors on their back porches looking in the direction of the roundhouse fire. Strikebreakers had been brought to Wadsworth, guarded by troops that afternoon, and the railroad superintendent was determined to reopen the shops and the roundhouse in the morning and get the locomotives back into service. At night, the strikers mostly shop and car repair workers had managed to get into the roundhouse and the shops despite the guards. They smashed machinery, disconnected pistons from locomotive cylinders, tore off brake shoes and created all kinds of other havoc. Then someone threw a lighted match into one of the kerosene barrels, and as the strikers fled, they were fired on by the guards. In the morning Louise heard about the men who were beaten and shot at, and hauled off to a stockade that had been put up on the school grounds.

Then it was over. It began on June 26, and by July 15 everything was back to normal, with all trains running on time. Court injunctions, federal troops and state militia, along with strikebreaking craft union members smashed the boycott. Every member of Debs' American Railway Union was jobless and none was back to work until he could demonstrate he was not involved in violence or sabotage.

Debs, himself, served a six-month jail term for contemptuously tearing up a court injunction, and in 1920 while in prison for opposing World War One, ran for President of the United States, collecting almost a million votes. As for his revolutionary plan for organizing workers along industry-wide lines instead of craft unions, it followed the pattern of all significant new ideas considered outlandish, preposterous, anarchic, a threat to civilization itself, when first proposed. Upon accumulating enough myths and traditions of their own - they are accepted. Thus Debs' industrial union idea became the Congress of Industrial Organizations, better known as the CIO, in Franklin Roosevelt's nineteen-thirties, with opposition only from those opposed to unions by whatever name.

ALIENATION

It was surprising how quickly Wadsworth's children forgot Eugene Debs and nearly everything that had happened to them and their families only a few months earlier. In September, Louise and Barbara were back in school, even though Sheridan had not yet been cleared of involvement in violence, and was not rehired until just before Christmas. There were quite a few empty seats that term because so many had been blacklisted, and many of them were forced to move to Winnemucca, some distance to the east in Nevada, while others went to Reno, or over the mountains to California.

Louise didn't forget - not for a moment. But it was not until she began attending the lectures of a remarkable English instructor, Herbert Crombie Howe, on the University of Oregon campus at Eugene, was she able to start piecing together the social and economic elements in American life which created such violent opposition to Eugene Debs and his attempt to organize workers along non-traditional lines.

Campus days, however, were still a long ways off for Louise, and Debs' appearance in Wadsworth and the impression he made on her, did very little to suppress her urge to draw attention to herself, no matter by what means or what the consequences might be.

Thus, Ernie Pierson, who says he is ninety or maybe more, and who lives in a shack in Wadsworth just about where the Bryant home stood three-quarters of a century ago, takes you outside, faces west, swings his right arm in a wide arc and points to what is now a large stretch of desert. "Right there is where the roundhouse and shops were and all the rest was mostly railroad yard." Then he turns to the left, points to a large weed and shrub-infested hollow, and says: "That's where the whorehouse was. My brother and the fellows would stand there and get horny watching it."

He remembers one cold winter morning he was helping his brother deliver milk. When they came to the Bryant home, his brother told him to go ahead and deliver the milk. He took the big milk can and opened the front door (nobody locked their doors at that time) to fill the pan customers always had ready.

"And there stood Barbara and Louise by the stove to keep warm while getting dressed. Barbara skedaddled into the bed-room like a scared rabbit when she saw me, but Louise only pretended she was in a hurry, and walked slowly to where she stood behind the stove, dragging her dress after her, and she kept peeking out at me. I never saw a girl before without a dress on in long white drawers with lace at the bottom of the legs."

In the fall of 1896, when she was nearing her eleventh birthday and school had just begun, the Wadsworth Dispatch carried this item under the caption BIRTHS:

BRYANT — at his home on Railroad Street,

on September 8, 1896, to the wife

of Sheridan Bryant, a son.

It was her mother's second child by Sheridan, and they named him William Philip, the Philip to honor Uncle Philip Flick. (William Bryant was hopelessly crippled in the First World War and died at his home in Van Nuys, California, a ward of the Veterans Administration.)

The item in the paper made ten-year-old Louise mad. Why, she wanted to know, did the newspaper item fail to mention her mother's name? It was she and not Sheridan who gave birth to the baby, wasn't it? This new injustice only increased her growing dislike of Sheridan and his gold tooth, who complained because she had began referring to him as Sheridan instead of the usual names children use.

"You must call me father or daddy or papa, like Barbara does," Sheridan admonished her.

"You are not my papa or my daddy or my father,” replied Louise on the verge of tears, "My father was a famous writer, and fought Indians while building the railroad, and he even knew President Cleveland, and I am going to be a famous writer like him some day, and I don't care what Barbara or anybody else calls you. I am going to call you Sheridan, Sheridan, Sheridan!"

Her mother was very tired, and worried about the way Louise and Sheridan had been quarreling, and could not answer questions about why newspapers wrote the way they did about births or anything else, in a way that would satisfy Louise. Louise, however, would not be put off. She could not under-stand how her mother could accept this terrible slight so calmly and resolved to do something about it herself. She sauntered out of the house, and began to walk faster when she was outside. Her destination was the Wadsworth Dispatch Office.

She was going to find out why women were being treated even worse at times, than the railroad workers by their bosses. They gave birth to children and cooked and kept house and all they were allowed to do for money was to teach school or work in the library, or do what the women in that house across the street from them did.

Nick Hummel, the editor looked up. "Oh, you're the Bryant girl who collected food and clothing for the miners' families from Colorado