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Bella Dodd
School of Darkness
About Bela
Dodd:
Reproduced
from: http://www.henrymakow.com/
Communism &
NWO: Wall Street's Utopian Hoax
By Henry Makow Ph.D.
March 16, 2003
 Bella
Dodd was a leader of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the
1930' s and 1940's. Her book, "School of Darkness" (1954) reveals
that Communism was a hoax perpetrated by financiers "to control the
common man" and to advance world tyranny. Naturally this important
book is out-of-print and not in any used bookstores. (I found it
through interlibrary loan.)
Bella Dodd was born Maria
Asunta Isabella Visono in Italy about 1904. A brilliant and
dedicated woman, she graduated from Hunter College and NYU Law
School. She became head of the New York State Teachers Union and was
a member of the CPUSA's National Council until 1949.
Dodd describes Communism as
"a strange secret cult" whose goal is the destruction of Western
(i.e. Christian) Civilization. Millions of naïve idealists
("innocents") are tricked by its talk of helping the poor, but it
cares only for power. For example, Dodd found there was no social
research at party headquarters. "We are a revolutionary party, not a
reform party," she was told. (163)
CREATING "HUMAN BEINGS THAT
WOULD CONFORM"
The Communist Party operates
by infiltrating and subverting social institutions like the
churches, schools, mass media and government. Its aim was "to create
new types of human beings who would conform to the blueprint of the
world they confidently expected to control." (162)
For example, Dodd
reveals that the CPUSA
had 1100 members become Catholic priests
in the 1930's. It also subverted the American education system by
taking over the teacher's unions and learned societies. Only people
who accepted the "materialistic, collectivistic international class
struggle approach" advanced. (98)
Involving women in the war
effort fitted the long-range program:
"The party did all it could
to induce women to go into industry. Its fashion designers created
special styles for them and its songwriters wrote special songs to
spur them.... War-period conditions, they planned, were to become a
permanent part of the future educational program. The bourgeois
family as a social unit was to be made obsolete." (153)
There was to be no family
but the party and the state. Dodd helped organize the Congress
of American Women, a forerunner of the feminist movement.
"Since it was supposedly a
movement for peace, it attracted many women. But it was really only
a renewed offensive to control American women... Like youth and
minority groups, they are regarded as a reserve force of the
revolution because they are more easily moved by emotional appeals."
(194-195)
SUBVERSION OF U.S. COMPLETED
IN THE 1930's
When FDR recognized
Russia in 1933, he deliberately turned a blind eye to the CPUSA's
massive program of espionage and subversion. Liberals denied that
this took place and complained about a "witch hunt." Guess what? The
"loony right" was correct. A new book (The Secret World of
American Communism, based on newly opened Kremlin archives,
confirms that CPUSA was a puppet of Moscow and the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations
were practically run by Soviet agents,
Alger Hiss,
Harry Hopkins and Harry Dexter White to name a
few.
The war years saw the CPUSA
actually renounce the class struggle and join the so-called
"Roosevelt camp of progress" which included "progressive
capitalists."
"The Communist Party now
assumed the responsibility of establishing a rigid discipline over
the working class. No employer was more effective or more relentless
in checking strikes among the workers, or minimizing
complaints...while wages rose a little during those years, they did
not compare with the rise in profits and in monopoly control of
basic necessities...war production was chiefly in the hands of ten
large corporations...the Communists carefully muted such
information." (153)
The war years saw amazing
coordination between the Communist Party and America's financial
elite. The elite financed a sophisticated propaganda agency called
the Russian Institute located on Park Ave. across 68th
Street from Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations. Here "famous
names like Vanderbilt, Lamont, Whitney and Morgan mingled with those
of Communist leaders. "(153)
At Roosevelt's insistence,
Stalin "dissolved" the Comintern in order to make the CPUSA look
like an American party. The CPUSA leader Earl Browder achieved
national prominence and consulted with senior Roosevelt cabinet
ministers.
The joint US-Russian war
effort was to be the basis of the new world order. But,
inexplicably, the policy changed and Browder instantly became a
non-person. Apparently the financial elite had decided the time
wasn't right for world government. A cold war would be much more
lucrative. Dodd was told that in the future, the party would often
find itself opposed not only to the government, but also to U.S.
workers.
"I now saw that with the
best motives and a desire to serve the working people... I and
thousands like me, had been led to a betrayal of these very
people.... I had been on the side of those who sought the
destruction of my own country." (229)
Like frightened mice, the
CPUSA membership scurried to adopt the new party line. Dodd tried to
quit but was told: "No one gets out of the party. You die or you are
thrown out." (197)
Eventually Dodd was expelled
and smeared as "anti-Negro, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic,
anti-labor and a defender of the landlord." (220). Sound familiar?
After more than 20 year of tireless sacrifice, she was without
family or friends. The party had been her family. Its "hates had
become my hates."
"This is the key to the
mental enslavement of mankind. The individual is made into nothing
... he operates as the physical part of [a] higher group
intelligence... he has no awareness of the plans the higher group
intelligence has for utilizing him." (158)
"A SECRET WELL-ORGANIZED
WORLD POWER"
Bella Dodd was circumspect
about the people behind the Communist Party. She once was told to
phone two multi-millionaires who live in the Waldorf Towers if she
lost contact with Moscow. Elsewhere, she refers to "a secret well
organized world power." She is obviously afraid to be candid. She
suspects that one CPUSA leader's "suicide" was in fact murder. (172)
But she does drop a possible
clue. She says that each of the nine floors of the party-owned
headquarters at 35 E. 12th St. was devoted to CPUSA
business. The Sixth Floor held "the publication offices of the
Yiddish newspaper, the Freiheit, and the "Jewish Commission." (162)
Indeed Jews were prominent among Communist dupes.
"What now became clear to me
was the collusion of these two forces: the Communists with their
timetable for world control, and certain mercenary forces in the
free world bent on making profits from blood." (229)
As "one piece of the puzzle
that finally became a picture," Dodd tells the story of the ship
"Erica Reed" typical of "hundreds of other stories." During the
Spanish Civil War, Americans donated money to load the ship with
medical supplies and food for Spain. The Communists diverted the
ship to Russia instead. (89)
Censorship is crucial to
Communists, Dodd says. "I have often seen leaders pull books from
shelves in homes and warn members to destroy them."(223)
Communism is essentially a
deceitful system of international elite control. It was not
suppressed during the McCarthy era. Rather it morphed into the New
Left, Counter Culture, Civil Rights, Anti War and Woman's Liberation
Movements, and later into a plethora of elite-sponsored NGO's, and
media, Democratic and Republican party factions, Liberal, Zionist,
Labor, and Gay Rights groups. Like the CPUSA itself, these groups
are controlled from the top so their memberships are unaware of
being used.
To the objection that some
of the above mentioned groups oppose globalization, Dodd refers to
examples where the CPUSA ostensibly supported causes they wished to
sabotage. (205)
In conclusion, Communism
was/is a plot designed to substitute a cabal of the rich for the
rule of God. It is a utopian fraud hatched by the rich to thwart the
dreams of ordinary people and stunt human progress. The same cabal
is behind most wars including the impending attack on Iraq.
A precursor to the new world
order, Communism espouses brotherhood, peace and equality in order
to deceive us. It has taken over society's eyes, ears, mind and
spirit. Much of what passes for truth in the media and schools is
part of this monstrous con job. The expression "politically correct"
in widespread use in America is an old Communist Party term. Our
politicians are mostly traitors.
Feminism
is Communist both in origin and spirit.
It pretends to champion women but in fact neuters both sexes and
destroys the basic social unit, the family. The promotion of
homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice" for heterosexuals is also part
of this brazen elitist fraud designed to "create new types of human
beings who would conform..."
Western Civilization is like
a ship floundering in a sea of evil, yet the passengers are too
duped and distracted to realize it. Bella Dodd had the courage to
sound the alarm 50 years ago. It is never too late to begin to
resist tyranny.
There are no lifeboats.
CHAPTER ONE
I WAS Born in
southern Italy on a farm that had been in my mother’s family for generations.
But I was really an American born on Italian soil as the result of a series of
accidents, and it was also an accident which kept me in Italy until I was almost
six years old. Not until years afterward did I learn that one reason my mother
had left me there was in the hope that someday she could persuade her husband,
in New York with her other children, to return with them to Italy. To her that
farm near Potenza was home. But she was never able to persuade them of that,
for America was the place of their choice.
My mother had been left a widow when the youngest of her
nine children was still a baby. With the help of the older children she ran the
farm. If Rocco Visono had not come to Potenza from his home in Lugano no doubt
she would have remained there the rest of her life.
But Rocco fell in love with Teresa Marsica who, despite
her nine children and a life of work, was still attractive, with bright, dark
eyes and lively ways. Rocco had come to visit a sister married to a petty
government official and met Teresa in the nearby village of Picerno. A
stonemason by trade, he found work in Potenza while Teresa was making up her
mind. She was almost persuaded but hesitated when she learned that he planned
to go to New York. It took a long time to get her to agree to that. She would
look at her rich soil that grew good lettuce and beans. This had been her
father’s farm and her grandfather’s and his father’s. How could she give it up
and cross the Atlantic to uncertainty, and perhaps have no land there to cherish
and work?
But the quiet, blue-eyed suitor was persistent. The
children were on his side, too, eager to go to America, for Rocco had told them
glowing stories of the life there, of the freedom and the chance to get rich.
They argued and pleaded with their mother until she gave in.
The three oldest boys were to go with their
father-elect, and my mother and the others were to join them later. I say
“elect” purposely, for Teresa, for reasons of her own, had insisted that she
would not marry him until she arrived in America. Having lost all the rest of
the issues, he had to yield on this also, and the four left for the United
States.
From East Harlem they sent enthusiastic reports. There
were many Italians living there; it was like a colony of home people; she must
come quickly. So Teresa accepted the inevitable. She said good-by to her
neighbors and her beloved fields, to the house that had sheltered her all her
life and in which all her children had been born. She put the farm in the
charge of a relative for she could not bear to sell it. She might come back
someday. With six children she sailed for the new home.
The three older boys and Rocco took her in triumph to
their five-room flat on 108th Street. Teresa was happy to see them again, but
she looked with dismay at the honeycomb of rooms. She was only partly comforted
when her sister, Maria Antonia, who had been in America for some time, came to
welcome her.
In January 1904 Rocco Visono and Teresa Marsica were
married in the Church of St. Lucy in East Harlem. It was perhaps on that day
she felt most homesick of all, for a memory came to her when she heard the words
of the priest — a recollection of the past, of Fidelia, her mother, and Severio,
her father, and the farm workers and herself and her brothers and sisters, all
kneeling together at family prayer in the big living room of the Picerno
farmhouse.
Several months later a letter came from Italy telling
Teresa that there was trouble with the management of her property. At this news
she persuaded Rocco that she must go back to adjust matters, perhaps rent the
farm to responsible people, or even — this was his suggestion — sell it
outright.
It was not until she was on the high seas that Teresa
realized she was pregnant. She was dismayed. The business in Italy might take
months and the baby might be born there.
The affairs of the farm took longer than she expected.
In October of 1904 I was born in Picerno and baptized Maria Assunta Isabella.
With my father’s approval Teresa decided to return to the United States and
leave me in charge of a foster mother. She hoped to return within a year, but
it was five years before she saw me again. I was almost six years old when I
saw my father and brothers and sister for the first time.
The woman who became my foster mother and wet nurse was
the wife of a shepherd in Avialano. Her own baby had died and she was happy to
have me. For five years I lived with these simple people. Though there was
little luxury in the small stone house, I received loving care from both my
foster parents. I remember them and my memories go back to my third year.
Mamarella was a good woman and I was greatly devoted to her. But it was to her
husband, Taddeo, that my deepest love went. There was no other child in the
family and to me he gave all his parental affection.
I remember their home with the fireplace, the table
drawn up before it for supper, I in Taddeo’s arms, his big shepherd’s coat
around me. In later days, when life was difficult, I often wished I were again
the little child who sat there snug in the protecting love about her.
My mother sent money regularly, and gave my foster
parents more comforts than the small wages of Taddeo would provide. Time and
again Mamarella tried to make of Taddeo something more than a hill shepherd.
She disliked his being away from home in the winter, but in that mountainous
part of Italy it was cold in the winter; so the sheep were driven to the warmer
Apulia where the grazing was better.
Even in the summer Taddeo often stayed all night in the
hills. Then Mamarella and I went to him carrying food and blankets so that we,
too, might sleep in the open. While husband and wife talked, I would wander off
for flowers and butterflies. I remember running from one hilltop to another.
My eager fingers stretched upward, for the sky seemed so close I thought I could
touch it. I would come back tired to find Mamarella knitting and Taddeo
whittling a new pair of wooden shoes for me. Not until just before I left for
America did I wear a pair of leather shoes.
Taddeo would give me warm milk from his sheep and try to
explain to me about the sky. Once he said: “Never mind, little one. Perhaps
someday you will touch the sky. Perhaps!”
Then he would tell me stories about the stars, and I
almost believed that they belonged to him and that he could move them in the
heavens. I would fall asleep wrapped in a blanket. When I awoke I would find
myself in my own bed back at our house on the edge of the village.
I have vague memories of the things of religion. I
remember being carried on Taddeo’s shoulders on a pilgrimage with many people
walking through a deep forest several days and nights to some shrine. It must
have been spring for the woods were carpeted with violets. I have never since
seen blue wood violets without hearing in my mind the hum of prayers said
together by many people.
One of the children told me about a place called
purgatory. She said that if you let the bishop put salt on your tongue and
water on your forehead you got into heaven, and that if it were not done you
stayed in purgatory for years and years. I took this matter to Taddeo and for
once he was not reassuring. Purgatory was a gray place, he said, with no trees
and no hills, but he said he would be there with me.
He talked to Mamarella, and she said though I was young
she was going to have me confirmed because the bishop was coming to our town to
perform the ceremony. This called for great preparations. I had a new red
dress with a high neck made “princess style.” I was to have my first pair of
leather shoes.
When the great day came I was at church early. It was
still almost empty save for the restless group of children awaiting
confirmation. The few seats in the big church were placed toward the altar.
You did not sit in these for they were for the gentry of the town. Everyone
else knelt on the stone floor.
I knelt, too, and looked around me at the statues. I
had a favorite among them: St. Anthony, with the tender smile and the Christ
Child on his arm. Taddeo told me that St. Anthony would watch over me and keep
me from evil; and that if I lost something St. Anthony would help find it.
One evening at supper we heard hurried footfalls and an
excited voice calling:
“Una lettera d’America!”
“Maybe it’s from my mother,” I said, “and there will be
money in it for Mamarella.”
When she opened it I saw only a very little letter and
no money at all. No one told me what the letter was about. Weeks later I was
alone in the house, close by the fire. February was cold that year. Taddeo was
in Apulia and would not be back for some time. Mamarella had gone to the
village fountain for drinking water.
I heard strange steps on the cobblestones. The door
opened and there stood a tall, dark woman in a heavy coat who looked at me and
without a word put her arms around me and hugged me. Then she took off her veil
and I saw she had thick black hair, a little gray, but soft and wavy.
I looked at her with amazement. “Who are you?” I
asked. She answered me in Italian, but it sounded different from that of our
village. “I’m a friend of the people who live here. Where is the shepherd?”
“He isn’t here. He’s in Apulia.” “Do you like him?”
“I love him better than anyone in the world. I love him
all the time.” I stared at her and wondered why she should ask such questions.
“Of course you do,” she said soothingly. “Come over
here and sit on my lap while I tell you a story. But first, do you love him
better than your own mother?”
“Of course I do. I don’t even know my own mother.” The
strange lady smiled at me. “Listen, dear, I had a little girl myself once.” As
I listened I began to feel uneasy. “I had to go away to a strange land where I
couldn’t take care of her and so I found a good kind man who said he would. His
name was Taddeo.”
“Taddeo?” Suddenly I understood and slipped from the
woman’s lap. “You’re my real mother.”
She stroked my hair and said, “I have come all the way
from America for my baby girl and I hoped she would love me.”
Something in her voice won me over. I went to her and
put my arms around her neck and so we sat until Mamarella came in. I was half
asleep and remembered only saying, “This is my mother, my real mother. You have
to love your mother.”
She went away again that evening, but she said she would
be back in a week or else send for me. She promised to take me with her to
America.
Now all was feverish preparation. Word was sent to
Taddeo and he sent back word that he would be home before I left. For me that
last week was one of triumph among my playmates.
“Did she bring you presents?” the children asked. “Will
you go in the coach to Potenza?”
“The houses in America are made of glass,” said another
child. “No one is poor there. Everyone is happy.”
“And they eat macaroni every day,” piped another. This
even I knew would be a wonderful thing, for to eat macaroni every day was the
essence of plutocracy to children whose chief diet was beans and polenta.
“And will you come back?” someone asked.
Somehow this was the first time I had actually thought
of going away and I felt a little shaken, but I answered boldly, “Of course I
will, and someday I’ll take you all with me to America.”
No further word had come from Taddeo on the eve of my
departure to join my mother. Mamarella had prepared a wonderful supper of
pasta arricata, and nuts and squids stuffed with raisins. There was sweet
white wine. It was like carnevale. We waited for Taddeo but when he did
not come, we sat down and ate in silence. Then we cleared the table. I sat
with my head against Mamarella’s chair. She was crying, but she stopped when
she saw that I was crying, too. She took me in her arms and sang to me — a song
about the saints.
Still Taddeo did not come. I feared I would never see
him again. I tried to picture exactly how he had looked so I would always
remember him.
When the fire was embers, Mamarella put ashes over it
and we went to bed; but I could not sleep. Suddenly I heard what I had been
listening for — heavy steps on the cobblestones. When the door opened I was in
his arms. My feet were cold and he took off his muffler and wound it round them
and rubbed them.
Mamarella came in and poked up the fire and said to me
sharply, “Non far mosso,” and began warming polenta. I sat still in his
arms while Taddeo talked to us about his trip home.
“I traveled half the night and had no idea it would be
so cold in Avialano,” he said. He must get to the sheepfold in the valley right
away, he said, for he had left the sheep in charge of Filippi. He could stay
only an hour with us.
“St. Anthony brought me,” he told me. “He helped get me
here in time. Don’t ever forget he will help you get where you ought to go and
find what you lose.”
I paid little attention to his words. I was happy to
sit by the fire and watch him eat polenta and dip bread into the red wine.
Then he rose, put on his long cloak, and tied the
muffler around his neck. “This muffler is too thin to be of much use any more.
Listen, child, will you send me a new one from America?”
My eyes filled with tears. He kissed me. “There,
caring, someday you will come back,” he said reassuringly. “And you are
going now to a fine home where you will be una signorina and have silk
dresses and maybe two pairs of leather shoes.”
“I don’t want to go,” I cried in panic. “I won’t go! I
wont!”
He held me until I stopped sobbing and then he said,
“Now I must really go.Addio, caring,” and he handed me over to Mamarella
and hurried from the house. I struggled free and ran after him. I had no shawl
and my dress flew in the wind. I kept calling, “Taddeo! Taddeo!” I ran down the
street till I came to the piazza and I could see Taddeo and Filippi driving the
sheep ahead of them. It was bitter cold and the ground was icy.
I called Taddeo again and again. I had put on my first
pair of leather shoes to show to him and the untied laces made me stumble; the
hard leather hurt my feet. I lay in the snow and sobbed. There Mamarella found
me and took me home and put me between hot blankets. She stayed with me until I
fell asleep.
Next day I was dressed in my red confirmation dress
which was to have been saved to wear on the feast of the Virgin and carnevale.
My hair was carefully combed. The leather shoes were laced around my ankles.
Mamarella brought out her wedding box and drew from it a white silk kerchief.
“I wore it when I was a girl,” she said, as she folded it in a triangle and tied
it under my chin. Then we went to the coach which was waiting to take me away.
“Madonna, questa creatura e tutti occhi,” said the coachman when he saw
his smaller passenger. Mamarella and I sat in the coach in silence and watched
the desolate mountain scenery and the snowdrifts banked along the road.
Finally, numb with cold, we reached the railroad station in Potenza. Mamarella
put me on the train and kissed me. I could not cry for all the feeling was
drained from me. Then I was alone on a train with strangers and on my way to
Naples where my mother was to meet me.
It was the first time I had ever been on a train but I
did not find it strange. I looked out of the window at the changing landscape.
After awhile there were no snow and no mountains, only grass and plains, with
olive trees here and there. Once I saw a flock of white sheep with a shepherd,
and I thought of Taddeo. But Taddeo was now far behind, and I was alone. I had
left everything I knew and was going into the unknown.
The compartment in which I rode was almost empty. The
conductor had promised Mamarella that he would take care of me. Finally, as I
sat on the wooden bench, I fell asleep, leaning against my bundle of clothes,
exhausted by the strange movement of the train.
It was night when the train pulled into Naples. The
conductor came in and picked up my bundle. “Viene subito,” he said, and
I followed him to the platform. And there was my mother looking anxiously for
me. She was tall and straight and reassuring. I waved excitedly to her and it
made me happy to see her warm smile as she ran toward me.
I was frightened by what I saw of Naples. There were
beggars whining and wheedling in the name of St. Rocco. There were dirty
children in the streets. There was noise and confusion. I wanted to fly back
to our quiet little village, where the people were poor, but clean and proud.
I was glad when the next day we sailed for America.
CHAPTER TWO
THE REASON
my mother had not returned to Italy for me for five long years, my father later
explained, was because there had been a terrible depression in America. It had
been impossible for him to raise the money for Mother to make the trip, and a
small child could not travel alone. I had been shy in meeting my father. He
was blond, blue-eyed, and reserved, the opposite of Mother. But despite his
quiet, undemonstrative manner I felt that he loved me. He was kind and he made
a pet of me.
There were only four children at home now; the rest had
married and had homes of their own. They came to see the new sister and made a
big fuss over me. But they all made fun of my best dress — my red confirmation
dress which every child in Avialano had admired. They laughed at me and
insisted I be rushed to a store to buy an American dress. With great reluctance
I put away the beautiful red princess dress and with it the last of my Italian
years. And I turned with zeal to the task of becoming an American child.
The three brothers still at home were kind enough, but
they had their own interests which were certainly not those of a six-year-old
girl and one who could speak no English. But my seventeen-year-old sister,
Caterina, called by the American name of Katie, took me in hand. She was a
tall, slim, beautiful girl with big gray eyes. She was kind and gentle. She
did not like the name I was called by — Maria Assunta — and when she learned
that I had been baptized with another name — Isabella — she insisted on calling
me Bella.
Katie took me to school. She had made up her mind I was
a smart little thing and so she got me in a grade ahead by saying I was born in
1902 instead of two years later. In those earlier educational days she had no
difficulty in having me enrolled in the second grade. For a few days I was
pursued by cries of “wop, wop,” but I paid no attention to them. I did not know
what they meant and by the time I did I had been accepted as a leader in my
class.
I liked going and coming from school, especially
wandering along and staring at the merchandise piled up on barrows right in the
street. You could buy fruit and peppers and sweets and even dress goods and
hats there. I liked to watch the pigeons in the street strutting about in their
gray and rose coats and silver wings.
My mother did not share my delight in the city. “If we
lived in the country!” she would remark sometimes. Only later I learned how
much she hated the dirty streets, the gossip of her neighbors, the narrow flat.
There were parks, of course, but they made her even more homesick for the open
fields.
Mother was a competent woman. She could do a prodigious
amount of work and never looked tired or bedraggled. She quickly established a
routine of work and play for me. She tried to help me learn English though her
own was far from good. She would point to a calendar and repeat each month and
day in her curious, soft English and I would repeat the words after her. She
would then take the broom and point out the hours and minutes on the
old-fashioned kitchen clock, and again I would repeat what she said.
I think one reason for these educational efforts was
that she wanted to keep me busy after school for she would not let me spend time
in the city streets. She taught me to sew and crochet; sometimes she would take
a crochet needle and coarse thread and show me simple stitches. “Someday you
will crochet a bridal spread for yourself,” she said solemnly, and when I did
not show interest in this idea she added: “Anyway, it is a sin to be idle.”
I liked my family, all of them, but best of all I loved
Katie. I loved her not only because she was kind but because she was beautiful,
with her hair a cloud about her face, her tiny waist, her pretty dresses. My
mother said she resembled her father who had been a cavalry officer. I soon
learned that Katie at seventeen was in love with Joe, a tall young man with long
thin fingers and the temperament of an opera star.
My new family gradually made my other family in faraway
Avialano recede into the past. But now and then, when I felt unhappy and
thought my father cold or my mother preoccupied, I would imagine myself back
with Taddeo. At such times I would take my red confirmation dress from the box,
and the white kerchief Mamarella had tied under my chin, and, putting on my
finery, would imagine myself back in Avialano.
In four months I was able to speak English well enough
to enjoy the school I attended — Public School Number One. This school still
had the characteristics of what it had formerly been, a charity school, one of
the last so-called “soup schools.” It was in several adjoining old brownstone
houses and was in the charge of two old ladies who opened classes each morning
with prayer and the singing of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”
When I was ready for the third grade we moved from East
Harlem. Mother had at last convinced Father that she could no longer bear to
live this cluttered life of the tenements. So we moved to a house in
Westchester, but this house did not prove satisfactory either. We moved several
times. Finally, Father established a successful grocery business, and several
years later Mother took over a large house with tillable acreage near Castle
Hill. In this home the rest of my youth was spent.
There were sixty-four acres of land and a big rambling
house. Mother had coveted this farm before we went to live on it. It was the
property of Mattie and Sadie Munn, two maiden ladies who lived near us. They
were old and Mother took care of Miss Sadie, who was an invalid. She also
looked after their house, and the old ladies grew to depend on her. It was when
they died that we went to live in the house.
The former occupants had called the colonial house
“Pilgrim’s Rest.” There were no lights but kerosene lamps. The roof leaked and
there was only an outside toilet. But from the first I loved this home dearly
and especially my own room on the second floor which was literally in the arms
of a huge horsechestnut tree, lovely at all times but especially so when its
flowers, like white candles, were lighted in the spring.
Our home was full of children all the time. My
brothers’ youngsters came and went. Katie brought her baby over often. In
addition, there were dogs, cats, chickens, geese, and now and then a goat or
pig. Mother fed everyone well. She bought so much feed for the chickens and
for the wild birds who knew ours as a generous temporary home that Father
complained that she spent more on feed than she made on eggs. This I doubt, for
Mother was a good manager. She ran her farm with hired helpers but she was the
best worker of all. We grew all sorts of produce, enough for ourselves and some
to sell in Father’s store and some was also sent to Washington Market.
We had little cash, but we had a house, a slice of good
earth, and a resourceful mother, one with imagination. We were not conscious of
want or insecurity even when there was no money. I remember one particular
dessert she made for us children when money was scarce. We were always
delighted when she mixed new-fallen snow and sugar and coffee, and made for us
her version of granita de caffé.
We had neighbors all about us — Scotch, Irish, and
German families. There were two Catholic churches not far from us, Holy Family
Church largely attended by the German population and St. Raymond’s attended by
the Irish Catholics. We did not seem to belong in either church and Father and
Mother soon ceased to receive the Sacraments and then stopped going to church.
But Mother still sang songs of the saints and told us religious stories from the
storehouse of her memories.
Though we still considered ours a Catholic family we
were no longer practicing Catholics. Mother urged us children to go to church
but we soon followed our parents’ example. I think my mother was self-conscious
about her poor English and lack of fine clothes. Though the crucifix was still
over our beds and Mother burned vigil lights before the statue of Our Lady, we
children got the idea that such things were of the Italian past, and we wanted
to be Americans. Willingly, and yet not knowing what we did, we cut ourselves
off from the culture of our own people, and set out to find something new.
For me the search began in the public schools and
libraries. There was a public school a half-mile from our house — Number
Twelve. Dr. Condon, the principal, a man of varying interests, was fond of
having his pupils march to the school fife-and-drum corps. He was apt to
interrupt classes and call on everyone to go marching, the fife-and-drum players
in the lead. In this school there was Bible reading daily by Dr. Condon
himself. I learned to love the psalms and proverbs that he read to us and to
admire their poetic language.
Near our house on Westchester Avenue was St. Peter’s
Episcopal Church and on Castle Hill was the rectory. In architecture and
landscape, St. Peter’s looked like pictures of English churches. Its grounds
extended a half-mile or more. In summer we picked blackberries there and in the
spring we hunted violets and star of Bethlehem.
St. Peter’s was an old church; in its graveyard were
headstones with weather-dimmed names. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons I wandered
through the graveyard trying to reconstruct the people from their names.
Because of my constant reading of books on American history I thought of them
all as Pilgrims and Puritans or heroes of the Civil War. I frequently placed
bouquets of flowers on these graves as a token of respect to the men and women
of an American past. I wanted passionately to be a part of America. Like a
plant, I was trying to take roots. We had cut our ties with our own cultural
past and it was difficult to find a new cultural present.
The minister at St. Peter’s, Dr. Clendenning, was a
dignified and kindly gentleman whom we greeted as he walked or rode from the
rectory to the church. Across from St. Peter’s was a building for church
activities which I passed on my way to school. It was near the Huntington
Library and I became friendly with the librarian. She was interested in
children who liked books and it was she who suggested that I go to the afternoon
sewing circle at St. Peter’s parish house.
In charge of this work was Gabrielle Clendenning, the
minister’s daughter. We met once a week and we sewed and sang. It was here
that I first learned such simple songs as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Rock
of Ages Cleft for Me.” The other children used to cross the street and go to
services in the church. I drew the line at joining them in this because I
regarded myself as a Catholic, though actually I was conscious of almost no tie
to my own Church. I explained to Miss Gabrielle that Catholics were not
permitted to attend any other church. She seemed to understand and she never
objected or argued with me about it.
When the children came back from services, we all had
tea and cookies together. It was a most happy association. Often Gabrielle
Clendenning invited the children to ride with her in her pony cart. That was
high adventure for me; and it meant being accepted among people I loved.
Gabrielle’s mother, the librarian told me, was the daughter of Horace Greeley.
I didn’t know who Horace Greeley was but she told me he had been a famous editor
and a patriotic American. I remember this family as a wholesome influence on
our neighborhood. They set the pattern for what I believed to be the American
character.
Life in that little community was peaceful. Our cluster
of houses was filled with people who respected each other despite differences of
race or religion. We were not conscious of the differences but of the
kindnesses to each other. Mr. Weisman the druggist and Mrs. Fox the candy-store
owner, the McGraths and the Clendennings and the Visonos — all lived together
with not the slightest sense of hostility or of inequality. We accepted our
differences and respected each person for his own qualities. It was a good
place for a child to grow up.
Several years before I graduated from Public School
Number Twelve, World War I had commenced. I became an avid reader of
newspapers. I read the gruesome propaganda charging the Germans with
atrocities. My imagination was stirred to fever pitch. I never lost the
newspaper habit after that. And what I read left its imprint upon me.
In the fall of 1916 I was ready for Evander Childs High
School. But I did not enter for another year, a hard and terrible year for me.
I was coming home on the trolley car one hot day in July and I had signaled the
motorman to let me off. The trolley stopped, and I don’t know what happened
next, but I was flung into the street and my left foot went under the wheels.
I did not faint. I lay in the street till my father
came to me, picked me up in his arms, and with tears streaming down his face,
carried me to a physician. I was in great pain by the time an ambulance
arrived, but the doctor who sat beside me was so kind that I hated to give him
trouble. So we joked together all the way to Fordham Hospital.
As they carried me in, I fainted. When I came back to
consciousness there was the sickly smell of ether and pain that stabbed
mercilessly. The look on Mother’s face as she sat beside my bed told me
something was terribly wrong. I learned that same day that my left foot had
been amputated.
Mother came faithfully to the hospital, loaded with
oranges and flowers and whatever she thought would interest me. It was a hot,
sultry summer. There was a strike on the trolley system and Mother had to walk
many miles to the hospital. She never missed a single visiting day during that
dreadful year.
It was a bitter time for me. I was in the women’s ward,
for I was tall for my age. I saw women in pain and saw them die. I was
particularly affected by one old lady, who came to the hospital with a broken
hip and died of gangrene when they amputated her leg. I could not sleep that
night, nor many nights thereafter.
My wound did not heal well. I was in that hospital
almost a year — treatment after treatment, operation after operation, with
little improvement. Five times I was taken to the operating room; five times
there was the sickening smell of ether. The day I felt most desolate was the
day school opened and I saw from the hospital window children going by with
books in their arms. I was so sad that young Dr. John Conboy stopped to ask
what was wrong.
“I was going to start high school today,” I told him
through my tears. “Now I’ll be behind the rest in Latin.” For Latin was the
subject I had looked forward to most of all; it was to me the symbol of a real
education.
That afternoon Dr. Conboy brought me the Latin grammar
he had used in college and promised to help me. I promptly started to work at
it.
During the time I was in the hospital I was registered
as a Catholic but I never saw anyone from my Church. Occasionally a priest came
through the ward, but I was too shy to call to him. However, Dr. Clendenning
and Gabrielle came, and they wrote me letters. Once Dr. Clendenning brought me
a little book of religious poems and sayings. On the white cover were flowers,
and the frontispiece was a reproduction of “The Gleaners” and the title:
Palette d’Or. I read and reread this book.
When it was evident that the surgical operations were
resulting in nothing but pain, Mother decided to take me home. I spent the next
six months on the farm and Mother nursed me. I went about on crutches until an
apparatus could be fitted to my toot. A general practitioner came to our house
to treat me once a week, for the operation had not been well done and the wounds
healed slowly. I spent most of my time reading and writing poetry and
developing my friendship with my mother. I was so glad to be away from the
hospital that I felt almost content.
During this period our family suffered losses by death.
My sister Katie lost her second baby and not long afterward she herself died in
the influenza epidemic. Mother suffered terribly and her brown hair became
white. It pained me to see her suffer so. Her sons were married and gone from
home; one daughter was dead, the other an invalid.
During that time at home I spent most of my time
reading. My mother brought me books from the local library, and I read the
accumulation left in our house by the Munns. Since that family had been
Methodist, the books included a variety of hymnbooks, old Bibles, and
commentaries, and the sermons of John Wesley. There was also a copy of a book
by Sheldon called In His Steps which made a profound impression upon me.
The old Bibles had fascinating illustrations over which
I pored. I liked the sermons of John Wesley. Even today his sturdiness
comforts me, so firm and straight like the English oaks under which he stood to
talk to his congregation.
There was, of course, a great deal of the Gospel
simplicity in these old worn books and out of them I distilled a little prayer
of my own which never left me. Even when I did not believe any more, I would
often repeat the words as one does a favorite poem. This prayer which I worked
out of the books of John Wesley was: “Dear God, save my soul and forgive my
sins, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”
CHAPTER THREE
IN THE FALL
of 1917 I started at Evander Childs High School although my condition had
improved little and I had to use crutches. Mother encouraged my going, and
often she told me of saints who had endured physical deformity. She made me
feel I could accomplish anything I set my heart on, despite my physical
limitation.
So I began my high-school years armed with crutches and
high hopes. I walked the ten blocks to school and took my place with my class.
From the beginning I asked no favors, and teachers and classmates soon realized
how I felt and respected my independence.
That winter I got my first apparatus for walking. It
was not very good, but it was better than the crutches. Now I really began to
enter into school activities. I tried to do everything the other students did,
even to going on hikes. I joined the Naturalists’ Club and went with members to
the Palisades, hunting flowers and spotting birds. If I got tired, I sat down
for a while till the others returned.
During those days, despite my difficulties, I was a
happy girl. I loved life dearly and found pleasure in many little things.
Sometimes, when outdoors, I would stop to listen, for I felt the whole world
whispering to me. The spring wind seemed to talk of things far away and
beautiful. Sometimes at night, when the moon shone through the chestnut tree
beside my window and I could smell the iris and lilacs and lilies of the valley,
I felt tears in my eyes and I did not know why.
The student body at Evander Childs High School then
numbered more than a thousand boys and girls. They were mostly the children of
Americans of Scottish, Irish, and German extraction but there were also some
children of Italian, Russian, and other European peoples. We were of all faiths
— Protestant, Catholic, Jewish. We were alike in that we were children of
parents in modest circumstances, neither rich nor poor. No one attempted to
accentuate our differences or to exploit them.
One day a girl from the East Bronx with whom I had
talked about politics, a subject which was beginning to interest me, brought me
a copy of a paper I had never seen before. The Call was a Socialist
publication. That paper gave a new turn to my thinking. I sought other
copies. I felt my heart beat with excitement as I read the articles on social
justice. Even the poetry on the conditions of the poor, on the inequalities of
their lives, held my interest. In fact, for the first time I felt a call, a
vocation. Unconsciously I enlisted, even if only emotionally, in the army of
those who said they would fight social injustice, and I began to find the
language of defiance intoxicating. A stubborn pride developed in my own ability
to make judgments.
At high school I could not take the usual
physical-education courses so I was allowed a study hour with Miss Genevieve
O’Connell, the gym teacher, who gave me courses in anatomy and hygiene. She was
the only religious influence I encountered in high school. When she learned I
was a Catholic, she invited me to attend with her the meetings of a girls’ club
at the Cenacle of St. Regis in New York City. On Saturday afternoons she and I
met a small group of girls and went to the convent at 140th Street and Riverside
Drive.
Once there we sat in a circle and sewed simple garments
for the poor while a nun read to us. I was not interested in the books read,
but the simplicity, the calm, the acceptance of something real and unchanging,
did affect me.
The Cenacle did not give direct answers to the questions
I was beginning to ask, perhaps because I did not ask them aloud. But I went to
several week-end retreats and I was so attracted by the atmosphere of the house
that I asked to come for a private retreat. This proved a failure. I was so
untaught in things spiritual and so ignorant of matters of the Faith that I
could get no meaning from the spiritual readings given by the nun assigned to
guide me.
Despite this failure I know that those week ends at the
Cenacle did give me something valuable and lasting. I sensed there the deep
peace of the spiritual life and I was moved by the Benediction service which I
attended for the first time in my life. The brief prayers, the incense, the
monstranced Host uplifted, the music, were a poem of faith to me who loved
poetry. Many, many times in my later wanderings, at odd moments there stole
back to my mind the Tantum ergosung by the nuns in that lovely little
chapel.
But though my heart wanted to accept that which I felt
stirring within me I could not, for I already had an encrusted pride in my own
intellect which rejected what I felt was unscientific. In this I reflected the
superficial patter, prevalent in educational circles of that time, about science
being opposed to religion.
During my four years at Evander Childs I received good
marks in English history and science, and I won a state scholarship which helped
me to go to college. On graduation day I held tight to my diploma and to the
copies of Shelley and Keats which were my prizes for excellence in English.
Proud as I was of the prizes, my chief pride was that I had been chosen the most
popular girl in my class.
In the autumn I entered Hunter, the New York City
college for women. I had decided to become a teacher. I started with a
determination to learn. There were many fields I wanted to explore. I lived at
home and traveled back and forth each day on the new Pelham Bay Subway, recently
extended to our neighborhood.
My first college wardrobe consisted of two dresses, a
blue voile and a gingham, a black skirt, two sweaters knitted by Mother, and a
large collection of starched white collars which I wore with my sweaters. Today
the wardrobe of a girl in college, no matter how poor, undoubtedly would be
larger, but I was never conscious of an inadequate wardrobe. That was a feature
of Hunter College, for the students, even those from well-to-do homes, were more
interested in things of the mind.
College proved different from high school and at first
seemed duller. The coeducational high school had been more challenging. Hunter
College was at that time in a state of transition, passing from a female academy
for the training of teachers into a real college. Although accredited to give
degrees, the atmosphere and the staff were still the same as when it had been a
genteel teacher-training institute.
Because of this difference there was an undefined sense
of distance between faculty and students accentuated by the fact that some of
the staff members constantly reminded us that we were getting a free education
from the city and should be grateful. There was a current of resentment among
the students who felt we were getting only that to which we were entitled.
Dean Annie Hickenbottom was a fine woman, middle-aged,
gracious, and well-bred, herself a graduate of Hunter Normal School. We girls
loved her, but in a patronizing way. We listened to her politely more with our
ears than our minds when she told us, as she often did, how important it was for
Hunter girls to wear hats and gloves and to speak only in low and refined
voices.
Though the staff was chiefly made up of the old
Protestant Anglo-Saxon, Scotch, and Irish Americans, there were a few
exceptions. There were several Catholics in the Education Department, and a few
Jewish teachers, among them Dr. Adele Bildersee, who taught English and who
often talked to her pupils about the beauty of the great Jewish holidays and
read aloud to us the ancient prayers and writings in a voice that showed how she
loved and admired their beauty and believed in their truth.
The gentle lady who taught medieval history, Dr.
Elizabeth Burlingame, was considered overly sentimental by some of the staff.
Perhaps she was. Yet I owe her a deep gratitude for the appreciation of the
Middle Ages which she gave me. From her came no cold array of facts but a warm
understanding of the period. She gave me a love of the thirteenth century and a
realization of the role of the Catholic Church in that era. Unfortunately her
teaching was of a past we considered dead.
The teacher who affected me most as a person was Sarah
Parks, who taught freshman English. Her teaching had little of the past; it was
of the present and the future. She was different from the rest of the
well-mannered faculty members. More unorthodox than any of the students dared
to be, she came to school without a hat, her straight blond hair flying in the
wind as she rode along Park Avenue on her bicycle.
Evidently Dean Annie Hickenbottom said nothing about it
to Miss Parks. Nevertheless we students knew well what she would have said had
she seen us riding down Sixty-eighth Street on a bicycle and hatless ! She
would have been scandalized. I am certain she would have been more scandalized
by some of Miss Parks’s advanced social theories. But in this period at Hunter
the classroom was the teacher’s castle and no one would dare intrude. Miss
Parks’s social theories were to me both disturbing and exciting.
During my first year at Hunter I joined the Newman Club,
only to lose interest in it very quickly, for aside from its social aspect all
its other activities seemed purely formal. There was little serious discussion
of the tenets of the Faith and almost no emphasis on Catholic participation in
the affairs of the world. In my young arrogance I regarded its atmosphere as
anti-intellectual.
The faculty adviser of the Club was a dear little lady
who seemed to me to be so far removed from reality that she could not possibly
span the wide gap between the cloistered isolation of her own life and the
problems facing the students. After awhile I gave up making suggestions for
discussion and no longer tried to integrate myself in the Newman Club, even
though it still seemed the reasonable place for me to be. I was finding it
difficult to determine where I belonged. For the first time I began to feel
uneasy.
I drifted into another circle of friends, girls with a
strong intellectual drive permeated with a sense of responsibility for social
reform. My best friend was Ruth Goldstein. Often I went to her home where her
mother, a wise, fine woman with an Old Testament air about her, fed us with her
good cooking and gave us sound advice.
On the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashana and the Passover
Mrs. Goldstein invited me to meals and the family services. The age-old
ceremonies impressed me; it was inspiring to see how this family remained true
to the history of its people, how in this new land they strengthened their sense
of oneness with the past by prayer. As I watched the candles glow and heard the
Hebrew prayers I was conscious of the fact that my family was not so bound
together, and now did not seem to belong anywhere. In spite of our devoted
parents, we children seemed to be drifting in different directions.
At Hunter College there were also the children of many
foreign-born people. I became friendly with several girls whose parents had
been in the Russian Revolution of 1905. They had grown up hearing their parents
discuss socialist and Marxist theories. Though they sometimes laughed at their
parents they were the nucleus of the communist activities to come, full of their
parents’ frustrated idealism and their sense of a Messianic mission.
My friends at Hunter College were from all groups. I
was received by all but felt part of none. I spent many hours in discussions
with different groups. Down in the basement of the Sixty-eighth Street building
was a room which we had turned into an informal tearoom and meeting place.
There we developed a sort of intellectual proletariat of our own. We discussed
revolution, sex, philosophy, religion, unguided by any standard of right and
wrong. We talked of a future “unity of forces of the mind,” a “new tradition,”
a “new world” which we were going to help build out of the present selfish one.
Since we had no common basis of belief, we drifted into
laissez-faire thinking, with agnosticism for our religion and pragmatism
for our philosophy. There were religious clubs at Hunter at this time. The
group I traveled with regarded them as social clubs which you could take or
leave, as you chose. A few among us dared say openly, “There is no God.” Most
of us said, “Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.”
There were a few communists on the campus at the time,
but they were of little importance. They were a leather-jacketed,
down-at-the-heels group, who showed little interest in making themselves
understood or in trying to understand others. Their talk was chiefly about the
necessity of ending the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few families,
and a glorification of the Russian Revolution. They were also interested in
good music and European literature and read the “opinion” magazines, such as
The Nation and The New Republic.
My own religious training had been superficial. As a
child I had gone to church with Mamarella. I had been taught to say my
prayers. In our house hung various holy pictures and the crucifix. But I knew
nothing of the doctrines of my faith. I knew much more of the dogmas of English
composition. If I held any belief it was that we should dedicate ourselves to
love of our fellow man.
Sarah Parks spurred us on to the new and the untried.
From her I first heard favorable talk about the Russian Revolution. She
compared it with the French Revolution which she said had had a great
liberalizing effect on European culture, something which the revolution in
Russia would also one day accomplish. It was she who had brought to class books
on communism and loaned them to those of us who wanted to read them.
During my first year with her as my teacher I wrote two
term themes, one on how to grow roses, the other on monasticism. She gave both
good grades, but the one on monasticism bore the ominous little order, “See me.“
She was too honest not to give a good grade if the work was well done, but she
also had to speak her mind on the subject matter.
When I came in, she seemed sympathetic and asked how I
came to choose such a topic. I tried to tell her about my reading in the
medieval history course and how impressed I had been with the selfless men and
women of the Middle Ages who served mankind by putting self aside.
“And does that seem a normal manifestation of living to
you, a seventeen-year-old girl?“ she asked scornfully.
It was a question I could not answer, and her clever
scorn raised doubts in my mind.
At the end of my freshman year I decided that I must
earn money to help with expenses for the next year. So I got a job selling
books, a rather daring choice since I still had difficulty in walking any great
distance without pain.
The book I sold that summer was called the Volume
Library, a tome filled with facts and items of information for children. It
cost from nine to fifteen dollars, depending on the binding. My sales area was
a section of Westchester County. Since it was some distance from home, I rented
a room in the home of a farmer’s family near Mt. Kisco.
All summer I sold books, and I proved a good agent. It
was tiring work but I made enough money that summer to keep myself in clothes
and pocket money and for my school expenses the following year.
In the autumn I returned to Hunter. I was a different
girl in many ways from the one I was when I entered college the year before. In
a year my thinking had changed. I now talked glibly of science and the
evolution of man and society and I was skeptical of religious concepts. I had
drifted into an acceptance of the idea that those who believed in a Creator were
anti-intellectual, and that belief in an afterlife was unscientific. I was
tolerant of all religions. They were fine, I said, for those who needed them,
but for a human being who was able to think for herself there was no need of
something to lean on. One could stand erect alone. This new approach to life
was a heady thing. It caught me up and held me.
That second year I did not have Sarah Parks as a
teacher. But I often talked with her, for she invited some of us to her
apartment, and we sought her advice as if she were a kind of unofficial dean.
To us who loved her Sarah Parks brought fresh air into a
sterile, intellectual atmosphere where scholarship sometimes seemed pointless
and where Phi Beta Kappa keys were garnered by grinds. We began to speak with
contempt about grades and degrees. I remember we held one discussion on whether
a true intellectual should accept keys at all, since they were based on marks
and used to stimulate the competitive instinct of the rabble and often did not
represent true intellectual worth. We held that we must be moved by a desire
for real learning and for co-operation with other scholars, and not by a spirit
of competition.
Miss Parks led a busy life because so many of us wanted
to consult her. She was an important factor in preparing us to accept a
materialist philosophy by mercilessly deriding what she called “dry rot” of
existing society. I am sure she did help some students, but she did little for
those who were already so emptied of convictions that they believed in nothing.
These could only turn their steps toward the great delusion of our time, toward
the socialist-communist philosophy of Karl Marx.
She questioned existing patterns of moral behavior and
diverted some of us into a blind alley by her pragmatic approach to moral
problems. In that sex-saturated period of the twenties, the intellectual young
were more interested in the life around them than in the promises of the
spirit. It was the day of the “flapper,” of bobbed hair, of fringed skirts and
shapeless dresses, of spiritual blight, and of physical dominance. We
considered ourselves the intelligentsia and developed our own code of behavior.
Contemptuous of the past and nauseated by the crudeness and ugliness of the
period, we regarded ourselves the avant-garde of a new culture.
In my junior year I was elected president of my class.
Several of my friends and I became involved with student self-government. It
was another opportunity to achieve a sense of importance, to express impatience
with our elders, and at the same time to feel we were doing something for our
fellow students to exhibit that sense of social mission. To Student Council
meeting bright young girls brought in all sorts of dazzling proposals and I,
ready to support the experimental and the new, listened eagerly to them all.
Our little group grew vocally indignant as we read of fortunes amassed by people
whose hardest labor was pulling the ticker tape in a Wall Street office. It was
a period of ostentatious vulgarity in the city, and our group became almost
ascetic to show its scorn of things material.
As I look back on that febrile group, so eager to help
the world, looking about for something to spend themselves on, our earnestness
appears pathetic. We had, all of us, a strong will to real goodness. We saw a
bleak present and wanted to turn it into a wonderful future for the poor and the
troubled. But we had no foundation for solid thinking or effective action. We
had no real goals because we had no sound view of man’s nature and destiny. We
had feelings and emotions, but no standards by which to chart the future.
Later in my junior year I attended with Mina Rees, the
Student Council president, an intercollegiate conference at Vassar College.
Vassar made us feel at home during the five days we were there. The days and
evenings at the dormitories where we stayed were filled with good talk and an
exhilarating exchange of ideas.
Many things were discussed at the conference, among them
sororities and their possible abolition. Not belonging to a sorority had never
troubled me. Now, listening to sharp criticisms of them by a group of
delegates, I felt that I had not been too alert regarding this problem. I had
always considered them rather infantile but the conference seemed to consider
them a social problem.
We discussed the importance of an honor system under
student supervision. In line with discussion of the honor system we talked
about the question of the punishment of crime: was it to be considered a penalty
or a deterrent? The dominant group thought it should be considered only as the
latter. But I spoke up and said that surely it should be considered both.
In my senior year I was elected president of Student
Council. That year I led the movement to establish the honor system at Hunter.
Also in that year I brought politics into student self-government by conducting
the first straw vote in the presidential elections. A little later I upset Dean
Hickenbottom by insisting on a series of lectures on social hygiene. I was
supported by a group of school politicians and I learned the value of a tightly
organized group and was exhilarated by the power it gave.
During the previous year Professor Hannah Egan, who
taught in the Education Department, stopped me one day in the hall. “Why don’t
you ever come to the Newman Club?” she asked.
I tried to find a polite excuse as well as a valid one.
Noting my confusion, she said sternly, “Bella Visono, ever since you were
elected to Student Council and became popular you have been heading straight for
hell.”
I was flabbergasted. This, I thought, seemed very
old-fashioned. But I was dismayed too. I consoled myself by repeating a line
from Abu Ben Adhem: “Then write me as one who loves his fellow men.” That
idea cheered me considerably. I threw off the personal responsibility Miss Egan
was trying to load on me. The important thing, I said, was to love my fellow
man.
This was the new creed, the creed of fellowship, and it
was clear the world needed it badly. It was a fine phrase which kept some of
the significance of the Cross even while it denied the divinity of the
Crucified. It was a creed that willingly accepted pain and self-immolation; but
it was skeptical of a promised redemption. I kept reassuring myself that I did
not need the old-fashioned Creed any more. I was modern. I was a follower of
science. I was going to spend my life serving my fellow men.
In June 1925 I was graduated with honors. Commencement
had brought the necessity of thinking about my immediate future. I had already
taken the examinations for teaching in both elementary and high schools in New
York City and because of the scarcity of teachers I was certain of a position.
The day after commencement I was at Ruth Goldstein’s
home. We had both enrolled for the summer session at Columbia University,
intent on getting masters’ degrees, and her older sister Gertrude startled us
both by asking why we were going to Columbia at all. “Now that college is over,
you girls must get a job — and also a man,” she said.
Ruth and I smiled at her words. They did, however,
start a chain of thought. During my years at college I had been a student, a
politician, a reformer. Now, with time to think, I realized that I was also a
woman. I realized also that my education had done little to train me as a
woman.
For some time I had known that I must have further
surgery on my foot. Now that I was free from school work I made a sudden
decision. I went to St. Francis Hospital in the Bronx. Why I chose that
hospital I do not know. To the nun who appeared to interview me I said I needed
surgery on my foot and I wanted the name of the best surgeon connected with the
hospital. She gave me the name of Dr. Edgerton and his office address on Park
Avenue. I went immediately to see him.
Dr. Edgerton was a man well over six feet tall and he
looked so big and capable that I had confidence in him immediately. I showed
him my foot and asked, “What do you think of it?”
His answer was direct and emphatic. “It’s a rotten
amputation,” he said.
“Can you do anything for me?” I asked timidly.
“Of course I can,” he said. “A clean-cut amputation and
you’ll be able to walk easily. I promise you that you will be able to dance and
skate six weeks after you leave the hospital.”
There was a further important matter to discuss. “How
much will it cost?” I asked. He named what was no doubt a modest sum for his
services. With a self-confidence that surprised even myself I said, “I have no
money at all now, Dr. Edgerton. I’m just out of college but I’ll get a job as
soon as I am well and then I’ll pay you as fast as I can.”
He smiled at me. “I’ll take a chance,” he said, and
made arrangements for me to enter St. Francis Hospital the next morning.
I was in excellent hands. The Franciscan nurses in
charge were competent and so were the lay nurse assistants. When I entered the
hospital and was questioned as to my religion I said I had been a Catholic but
was now a freethinker, making the statement no doubt with youthful bravado.
As I look back on that time I think it was a pity that
no one paid attention to my statement regarding religion. The nuns went in and
out of my room and were efficient and friendly. Once or twice I saw a priest go
by, but none came in to talk to me. No one spoke to me of religious matters
while I was there. Had they done so, I might have responded.
Six weeks after I went home I was walking well, as Dr.
Edgerton had promised. I soon obtained a position as a substitute teacher in
the History Department of Seward Park High School which, with discipline at a
low ebb, was considered a hard school. I was to have six classes in medieval
and European history.
When I appeared on the scene the students had been
without a teacher for weeks and were at the chalk-and-eraser-throwing stage. I
came to my teaching with a sense of reverence for the task and a determination
to keep to my ideals, but like all young teachers I had to learn that there is a
wide gap between theory and practice. It is in the classroom that a teacher
learns how to teach. All courses given on methods of teaching are but
guideposts to a basic objective.
The boys had evidently decided to test me. On my second
day of teaching I came in to find a fire at the back of the room. I walked over
to the smoking debris, put out the fire, and collared the four nearest boys.
“Who lit the fire?” I demanded. They denied having
anything to do with it. There was nothing more to do at the moment. The fire
was out, so the lesson in European history continued. I decided to solve my
problem without calling either the head of the department or the assistant
principal. I asked one of the older boys for help.
“Evans,” I said, “you are older than the rest. Help me
with this problem.”
Evans scratched his head and said thoughtfully, “Listen,
Miss Visono, what you have to do is show them that you can take their gaff.
After that they’ll settle down.”
It was good advice. I worked hard to stimulate interest
and they did settle down. The rest of the term passed without any more violent
demonstrations.
I tried, in line with my acute interest in politics, to
interest my young students. I made them bring newspapers to class and I started
lively discussions. Most of the boys brought the tabloids and when I spoke of
this choice with some annoyance, one of my students, young Morris Levine, said
to me, “Aw, Miss Visono, what do you want me to read — the Times ? I
don’t own any stocks and bonds.”
The school term at Seward Park was to end at the
beginning of February. Sometime after the turn of the new year in 1926, Dr.
Dawson, the chairman of the Political Science Department at Hunter College,
called and offered me a post at the college. I began teaching at Hunter College
in February 1926.
CHAPTER FOUR
THAT SPRING
of 1926 I had a full teaching program of fifteen hours a week in freshman
political science. Classes were large, and we were crowded for space.
Dr. Dawson, chairman of the department, a Virginian, had
been my teacher in all my classes in political science. I knew his temper and
his methods. He was a well-mannered gentleman whose method of teaching was
unusual, for he simply directed his students to the library and told them to
read. In class he never got excited or expressed any passionate opinions. He
had taught at Princeton when Woodrow Wilson was president there. He was a
Wilsonian Democrat and uncritically supported Wilson and the League of Nations
and he believed that the International Court at The Hague was the beginning of
international stability. He was a persuasive propagandizer for such reforms as
a city manager system, direct primaries, and executive budgets. I had found it
easy to accept his beliefs and to make them my own. Never once did we reach
fundamental questions on government; all our talk was of superficial
formalities.
I had been one of his favorite students because, while
many students did little work when given freedom of working, I had thrown myself
heart and soul into endless hours of reading in the library, especially the
works of De Tocqueville, Lord Bryce, and Charles A. Beard, which gave me an
interest in American government and an appreciation of the fundamentals of the
Constitution. Because Dr. Dawson was a Virginian, perhaps, we got more than we
would otherwise on the subject of states’ rights.
I was a teacher myself now, but I had no clear
perspective as to the objectives of teaching. I did not know what I expected
from my students. In lieu of this I tried to stimulate them, to make them think
and argue about public questions, and I hoped to have them ready to take action
on these in later life. I wanted to have them learn through practical
experience as well as through the textbook.
Ruth Goldstein, Margaret Gustaferro, and I became
assistants to Dr. Dawson. In 1926 the avalanche of freshmen found the college
unprepared. Facilities were inadequate. We three taught our classes at the
same time in different sections of the auditorium which had been used as a
chapel. We three young teachers had been close friends at college. Now we
worked together, developing curricula, bibliographies, and new techniques. All
of us enrolled in the graduate school at Columbia University for graduate work
in political science.
At that time many professors were slanting their
teaching in the direction known as muckraking. Some professors contended
publicly that the war had not been fought to make the world safe for democracy
and that Germany had been shamefully treated by the Versailles Treaty. It was
also a time when Columbia professors fresh from the London School of Economics
and from the Brookings Institute were discovering the importance of current
activity in political parties and practical politics. Some were beginning to
enlist in local political battles. These sent students through the city,
climbing stairs and ringing doorbells, to teach them the democratic process by
actual research.
We entered on this new kind of laboratory work with
zest. We dissected and analyzed local political bosses with the cynicism of old
hands, and then we began to push on into political clubhouses to learn still
more of this fascinating profession.
One of my courses at Columbia that year was a study of
the United States Senate and its treaty-making powers. Some of the professors
wondered audibly why Lindsey Rogers, who taught it, regarded this topic
important enough to devote an entire course to it. It was then only six years
after the Missouri v. Hollanddecision based on a treaty relating to
migratory birds — and the pattern of treaty law had not yet become apparent to
many. I was fascinated by the subject and its implications.
There were other refreshingly new courses that year and
new professors, among them Raymond Moley, not yet a Roosevelt brain truster.
There were courses on the press and on public opinion. We young people were
intrigued by the possibilities of participation in government control and the
various means of achieving this.
In our enthusiasm we passed on to our students at Hunter
what we had learned. We challenged the traditional thinking they had brought to
college with them. We sent out girls to political clubs, too. Soon political
leaders began to call Hunter to find out what the idea was of sending the “kids”
to their clubs.
We did not stop it, however. We sent them in pairs to
visit courts and jails, legislatures and institutions. When a socialist student
asked if groups could visit the socialist clubs, too, we accepted the
suggestion. We encouraged them to mix with all groups. Before long we were
saying — and not yet realizing it was merely a rather meaningless cliché — that
the radicals of today are the conservatives of tomorrow, that there could be no
progress if there were no radicals.
In the days that have gone since we enunciated these
statements so confidently I have had many occasions to see that this cataloging
of people as either “right” or “left” has led to more confusion in American life
than perhaps any other false concept. It sounds so simple and so right. By
using this schematic device one puts the communists on the left and then one
regards them as advanced liberals -after which it is easy to regard them as the
enzyme necessary for progress.
Communists usurp the position of the left, but when one
examines them in the light of what they really stand for, one sees them as the
rankest kind of reactionaries and communism as the most reactionary backward
leap in the long history of social movements. It is one which seeks to
obliterate in one revolutionary wave two thousand years of man’s progress.
During my thirteen years of teaching at Hunter I was to
repeat this semantic falsehood many times. I did not see the truth that people
are not born “right” or “left” nor can they become “right” or “left” unless
educated on the basis of a philosophy which is as carefully organized and as
all-inclusive as communism.
I was among the first of a new kind of teacher who was
to come in great numbers to the city colleges. The mark of the decade was on
us. We were sophisticated, intellectually snobbish, but usually fetishly
“democratic” with the students. It is true that we understood them better than
did many of the older teachers; our sympathy with them was a part of ourselves.
During the afternoons and evenings I continued my work
at Columbia. I had Carlton J. H. Hayes on “The Rise of Nationalism.” I studied
closely A. A. Berle and Gardiner Means who wrote of the two hundred corporations
that controlled America at the end of World War I. I read widely on imperialism
and began to be critical of the role my country was playing. I discovered the
John Dewey Society and the Progressive Education Association. I became aware of
the popular concept of the social frontier. I also repeated glibly that we had
reached the last of our natural frontiers and that the new ones to be sought
must be social. There would be, we were told, in the near future a collective
society in our world and especially in our country, and in teaching students one
must prepare them for that day.
As a result of that year’s study of American history and
national politics, as well as in the direct experience of my students and myself
in local politics, I now began to tear apart before my students many respected
public groups -charity, church, and other organizations -that were trying to
better conditions in old-fashioned ways. This sort of talk had a destructive
effect on myself, I now realize, and it had an even worse effect on my more
sensitive students. If they followed where I led, there was nothing left for
them to believe in. I had tried to wreck their former ways of thought and I had
given them no new paths to follow. The reason was simple: I had none myself,
because I really didn’t know where I was going.
Later when, in the Communist Party, I met one of these
former students of mine, it was always with the feeling that I was responsible
for her present way of life; it was through me that they had accepted this cold,
hard faith they lived by.
But in 1926 I had little thought of the communists
except that I did not preclude theirs as a solution of problems. I was merely
goading my pupils and myself on to feel that we must do something to help set
aright the things wrong in the world. When I became emotional in my talks it
was because I was angered at those who had money without working for it and who
did not help to lessen the increasing misery of the working population.
There were lighter moments in my days, of course. We
met for parties and good talk and sometimes went to the bistros of that era of
prohibition. Once I took one of the elderly professors at Hunter to a
speakeasy, partly as a lark and partly as a kindness, thinking to show her life.
But Bessie Dean Cooper took the evening in her stride.
She was a hardy old lady who taught history and gave the whole department
color. Her eleven cats were a legend. That evening she asked me if she could
leave one of them with me while she went to Europe; friends were taking over the
rest. I promised, and turned the cat over to my mother, along with the food and
medicines and careful directions and the cat’s blanket and pillow. Mother took
a look at all this paraphernalia and said briefly, “ I feed cats like cats,” and
did so until their mistress returned. Some years later Miss Cooper retired from
Hunter and took the eleven cats to live on the French Riviera.
Frequently during this period I went to Teachers College
at Columbia. I was always impressed by the large enrollment of teachers from
nearly every state in the union. I watched them as they gathered round the
trees which bore the shields of their states. I, too, realized what a powerful
effect Teachers College could have on American education with thousands of
teachers to influence national policy and social thinking.
That year I learned that George Counts, an associate of
John Dewey, like him a philosopher and theorist on education, had gone to
Russia. He had, of course, been there before. In fact, he had set up the
educational system of the revolutionary period for the Russian Government. He
had translated the Russian Primer into English and was eager to have the
American teachers study it carefully. He promised a report on Russian schools
when he returned.
At this period I was influenced by many institutions
around the campus at Columbia as much as by the classes I attended. I became a
frequent visitor at International House, to which I was first invited by an
economics student from the Philippines. There I met among a great many other
people Albert Bachman of the French Department who had taught at Tagore’s school
in India and who introduced me to handsome students from the Punjab, like myself
young and agog over ideas. We met on a level of equality and tolerance and with
the hope that a world could be created by the young men and women of all nations
in which all people could live and work on free and equal terms. We were not
aware of the tight web of power which set the stage for molding our opinions.
That summer gave me my first opportunity to talk to
people of other countries and to learn that they, too, were filled with a
passionate desire to better their own countries and the world. I began, under
the impetus of such talk, to feel in me a desire to be a citizen of the world.
It was a desire that made it easy and natural for me to accept communism and its
emphasis on internationalism.
As for the past, when I felt a twinge of regret for what
I was putting behind me, I ignored it. I accepted the present, with all its
undirected selfishness, but I could not really adjust myself to it. More and
more I wanted to talk and act only in terms of the future, of a future that
would have none of the corruption of the present. It depressed me that people
close to me could accommodate themselves to such a present. Only people I did
not know, the great mass of unknown human beings, began to awaken in me a
poignant sense of kinship. In fact, I began to transfer my personal feelings to
this wholly unknown defeated mass. And so it came about that I began to seek my
spiritual home among the dispossessed of the earth.
A teacher cannot help but transmit to her students
something of what she is and what she believes and I know I did much damage.
But the saving grace in my destructive teaching of that time was that in my
personal relationships with these students I retained within me something of the
essence of what God had meant me to be — a woman, a mother. I loved my
students, all of them, the dull, the weak, the strong, the conniving, the
twisted. I loved them because they were young and alive, because they were in
the process of becoming and had not yet been frozen into a mold by a cynical
society or by a conniving power.
I have always enjoyed teaching, for there is in teaching
a continual renewing, and in that renewal there is always the promise of that
freshness which brings us nearer to perfection. To me freshmen were always a
delight as students. They came to college with high resolve, many of them
caught by a sense of dedication to learning, and they were not yet pressured by
practical considerations of jobs and careers, not yet having to accommodate
themselves to the status quo. They were like acolytes just learning the
ritual. If I had been able, during these years, I would have prayed hard for
the retention of this flame in my students. For the flame is there always. It
is in them all, but whether later it bursts into a fire that destroys, or
flickers to nothing, depends in great measure on the teacher and the goals and
standards she sets.
During my first two teaching years I spent endless free
hours in the Columbia Library and in Room 300 at the New York Public Library.
For my dissertation for the master’s degree I chose the subject: “Is Congress a
Mirror of the Nation?” My paper came to no conclusions. In fact, when I read it
over in typed form, I had the unhappy feeling that Congress was somewhat like
those Coney Island mirrors which now exaggerate, now underplay, the real.
During my work on this paper I read hundreds of the
brief biographies in the Congressional Directory, from the foundation of
the Republic to the present, and I found one pattern repeated many times: that
of the men who rose from humble beginnings and who struggled to acquire an
education. I was impressed by the number who were at first schoolteachers, then
put themselves through law school, and later entered politics.
I myself was growing impatient with abstract
scholarship, for it seemed to lead nowhere. I hated the emphasis placed in the
school system on getting degrees. An M.A. was necessary to hold certain jobs
and a Ph.D. was essential for a promotion and an increase in salary. I
questioned the value of the many dissertations filed away in the archives. The
topics chosen for dissertations seemed more and more inconsequential. And my
eager youth longed for significance, for meaning, for participation.
I did not realize what I now know, and have come to know
through much turmoil of spirit, that significance is all about us and that it
comes from order. There was no order in my life. I had no pattern by which to
arrange it. I was moved by feelings and emotions and an accumulation of
knowledge which brought me no joy of living.
After I had delivered my dissertations and received my
Master of Arts degree in the summer of 1927, Ruth Goldstein and I, both tired
out from the year’s hard work, decided to take a cottage for the summer and get
away from New York. So, with Beatrice Feldman, also a Hunter College freshman,
we rented a cottage on Schroon Lake, in the Adirondacks.
I was happy to be back in the country. I had not
realized how much I missed the land until I found myself back on it. A few
years before our own home had gone, taken by the march of progress. During my
years at college and of teaching the community around Pilgrim’s Rest had altered
greatly. In place of the straggling countryside of my childhood there was now a
bustling community, with apartment houses and subways. We had had to give up
our old house because it was dilapidated and not worth repairing. The property
was sold, the house pulled down, and the land divided into building lots.
At Schroon Lake, Ruth and Beatrice and I were alone for
days at a time. Our friends came for week ends, however, and then our cottage
was filled. We had books but we did not read much. We spent hours on the lake,
and at times Ruth and Beatrice played tennis and golf while I sat on the grass
and watched. And we talked often until late into the night, discussing many
subjects. We discussed the theories of John Dewey and of Justice Holmes, we
talked of the philosophy of education, and of practical questions about life and
love and marriage. We debated the value of many of the things our parents had
accepted without fuss or examination.
There is something idyllic about a group of young people
who seek nothing from each other except companionship. To me, who had seen my
own family disintegrate, this was like a new kind of family. Of course I was
not the only one the members of whose family had gone in different directions,
or the only one who was attaching herself instead to the social family of the
like-minded.
It was a period when houses as homes were disappearing
in our larger cities, when one-room apartments were becoming popular. Before
that, no matter how poor the family, it never had less than three or more
rooms. Now the kitchen was pushed into a tiny alcove, the bed was tucked into a
closet, and you lived in one modern room, sometimes elegant and large, but still
one room. Marriage for the intellectual proletariat became the process of
living with a man or a woman in quarters so small that release and satisfaction
had to be found outside the home, lest the walls of one room suffocate the
dwellers.
One of the pleasantest events of that summer in the
Adirondacks was meeting the Finkelsteins, Louis and Carmel, and their children,
a lovely little girl, Hadassah, and a baby named Ezra. Carmel came from a
distinguished English family and she spoke with a fascinating accent. I thought
that in appearance she and her daughter looked like characters out of the
Bible. Dr. Louis was a rabbi from the Bronx and he had the face of an apostle.
Often his brothers “Hinky” and Maurice would come to visit and I loved to listen
to them talking together, each topping the other in gay persiflage. I found
them exciting because they were not only well read, not only deeply interested
in the arts and in philosophy, but also practical men of affairs who understood
politics.
My friendship with the Finkelsteins was to continue for
years. In them again I saw the warmth of a family which was like-minded,
closely knit, and determined to stay together, impervious to the corroding
influences of a large industrial city. I asked myself why it was that other
families I knew did not have this ability to hold together. I felt that family
stability was in great part due to the cherishing of traditions, to the
continuous renewing of the memories of the past which included their friendship
with God and a boundless loyalty to each other.
One evening that summer I stayed at home with the
children. After some time I saw that Hadassah, who had been trying to go to
sleep, had begun to cry for no apparent reason. She was a detached sort of
child and I thought she did not like me, but now she let me hold her hand as I
talked quietly to comfort her. It was obvious she did not know why she was
crying, but when she looked up at me the dark eyes full of tears seemed older
than those of a little girl and there was an odd fear in the way she sat close
to me and wept. When she finally fell asleep, still holding my hand, I sat
there with a strange feeling in me, as if she had been crying over a long past,
as if two thousand years had been only one night.
That fall I made a sharp switch in my career. Tired of
the sterility of graduate work, Ruth Goldstein and I entered New York University
Law School. I taught morning and also evening classes at Hunter College and
attended my law classes in the afternoons.
The classes at law school were large, sometimes several
hundred students. The case system, which was in almost universal use then, did
not hold my interest; I found the method dreary. Despite this I liked the study
of the law; it was a discipline worth mastering
I also found the students interesting. In one class I
sat next to a young man named Samuel Di Falco who is now a Supreme Court judge.
He used to find fault with me for scribbling poetry in my notebook when I should
have been working on cases.
Ruth also found fault with my preoccupation with other
things than the law. For it was true that while the substance of the law
intrigued me, because it was a reflection of the past of society which helped me
to understand the present, I was not interested in legal procedure, which I felt
was intended to preserve an outmoded status quo. My constant
preoccupation with the need to change the status quo made me almost
impatient with much of the last year of law school. But I did not expect to
practice law. I thought of myself as a teacher.
CHAPTER FIVE
FROM THE FALL
of 1927 to June 1930 I attended New York University Law School and taught at
Hunter College. It was a period in which I was deeply involved in the
activities of the students in my own college — a period in which I was not only
instructor but served as adviser to many of them, individually and in their
group activities.
As a young instructor disturbed by the conflicting
currents among the intellectuals I turned to Sarah Parks for advice and
clarification. But the teacher I had admired when I was an undergraduate was
embroiled in controversy over salary and promotion policies in the college.
These were subjects in which I was not interested at that time, for I loved my
position as teacher so much that the salary question seemed secondary. But
Sarah was aflame over inequities of rank and salary, and for her sake I tried to
interest myself in these matters.
This was a period in which I was meeting men and women
who were talking ideas and living unorthodox lives. It was a period in which a
love of literature, the arts, and an interest in the Russian Revolution became
the excuse for leaving home and living in little, cramped apartments in
Greenwich Village. It was a period in which we spent long hours, night after
night, sitting before fireplaces in some Village garret, talking endlessly.
Sarah had been one of us, but now her absorption with
college politics had a quality of desperation. I did not feel that the
situation warranted the extremes of emotion she poured into it. I did not know
then that I, too, was to follow in her footsteps. At this time I sensed only
that a certain emptiness in her life was catapulting her violently into
everything she did. I tended to withdraw from our close friendship and to
cultivate new friends who built on the foundation she had helped to establish.
When in January 1928 she committed suicide I was thrown
into an emotional tailspin. I felt guilty at not having spent more time with
her. I thought I had failed her. I was bitter about those at the college to
whom she had turned for affection and who, instead, had shut the door upon her.
Her death had a profound effect on those of us whom she had influenced. We felt
that Sarah had the intellectual courage to believe in the new coming collective
society, but not the practical boldness required for becoming a disciplined
member of the group. We felt that she thought as a collectivist but fought and
lived as an individualist and in our twisted estimate of a human life we felt
that this was her failure. We did not recognize that life had become unbearable
to her because of the disorder of her thinking which inevitably led to
self-destruction.
Careful not to continue on the path which led to her
suicide I was to take a longer, more deceptive yet parallel road to
annihilation. I refused to retrace my steps to the point of departure into
wrong thinking. I did not know then that this could bring only disharmony,
confusion, and defeat.
The years 1928 and 1929 were replete with
confusion and ugliness. I turned more and more to the literature of despair. I
tried to write, but found that my inner confusion reflected itself in my work.
For the first time in my life I viewed the future with apprehension. I found
little pleasure in anything. My work at law school was mediocre. At Hunter
College the classes were getting larger and the students coming to us from the
high schools were not well prepared. The sense of dedication to learning was
receding.
Many came to college because they were fulfilling for
their parents the modern yearning of the uneducated who are determined that
their children must have a college education. I was conscious of an increasing
mass of young people entering college almost as automatically as they entered
grade school and high school. I was aware of the lowering of standards. There
was little thinking about the meaning and purpose of a college education and
practically no thought of the role of free municipal colleges.
During the spring of 1930 I took the Medina cram
courses and prepared for the examination for admission to the New York Bar. The
examination over, I requested a leave of absence from the college and with my
friend Beatrice left for Europe. In a foolish kind of way I hoped to find there
answers which were not forthcoming at home. I was tired and restless. I wanted
to escape from all sense of responsibility. I was young and I wanted to enjoy
life.
It was a trip rich in new contacts. With a capacity to
make friends I found people of interest in every walk of life in the different
countries we visited. It was on this trip that I was to meet my future husband,
John Dodd.
We landed in Hamburg and I found it an exciting city,
filled with merchant seamen, longshoremen, soldiers. There were the nouveau
riche with pockets bulging with the country’s wealth. There were Communists
everywhere, marching, singing, meeting. There were the decadent risqué night
spots. There were also fine old restaurants, old homes and churches, and other
evidences of an earlier day. It was a city of contrasts.
Too frequently we came face to face with middle-class
Germans with pinched, strained faces, ready, when they noted sympathy, to tell
you their troubles. The thing that struck me was their bewilderment. They
neither understood the cause of their predicament nor where they were going. We
looked at them and listened. But we were Americans with dollars in our purses
bent on having a good time.
In Berlin we saw more pinched faces and more blatant
lavishness. We were alarmed at the frank and open evidences of sexual and moral
degradation flaunted in the night spots and exhibited to the tourists
everywhere. The atmosphere o£ the city seemed charged as the air is before an
electric storm.
I found some of my friends from Hunter College at the
University of Berlin and we had the opportunity to see what was happening at the
seats of learning. We talked with university students and professors. The
university was torn with strife. Socialists, Communists, National Socialists
were battling each other and jointly undermining those who regarded themselves
as conservatives attached to their own country by the natural love of one’s
homeland. Acts of violence were common in the city and around the university.
I was conscious of the fact that here politics had
become a matter of life and death. I was conscious also that the intellectuals,
the teachers, professors, and scientists were arrogant in their pride but lacked
the inner strength to play a salutary role in that country’s hour of need. Here
were men of the highest intellectual achievements who were ready to attach
themselves to the forces of violence. I did not then realize, as I now do, that
for close to a century the educational world of Germany had been subjected to
systematic despiritualization which could result only in the dehumanization now
apparent. This made it possible for such despiritualized men to serve both the
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