Mabel Dodge Luhan

New Woman, New Worlds

Lois Palken Rudnick

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 1987
• Print ISBN: 9780826309952
• eBook ISBN: 9780826325877
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

She was the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe. So claimed a Chicago newspaper reporter in the 1920s of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who attracted leading literary and intellectual figures to her circle for over four decades. Not only was she mistress of a grand salon, an American Madame de Stael, she was also a leading symbol of the New Woman: sexually emancipated, self-determining, and in control of her destiny. In many ways, her life is the story of America's emergence from the Victorian age.

Lois Rudnick has written a unique and definitive biography that examines all aspects of Mabel Dodge Luhan's real and imagined lives, drawing on fictional portraits of Mabel, including those by D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and Gertrude Stein, as well as on Mabel's own voluminous memoirs, letters, and fiction. Rudnick not only assesses Mabel as muse to men of genius but also considers her seriously as a writer, activist, and spirit of the age.

This biography will appeal not just to cultural historians but to any woman who has loved and lived with men who are artists and rebels. Both as a liberated woman and as a legend, Mabel Dodge Luhan embodies the cultural forces that shaped modern America.

Chapter 1

Background

The year is 1887, the place New York City. Grandfather Cook stands imposingly at the top of the staircase in his gloomy Fifth Avenue mansion. At the bottom of the stairs, looking up at his six feet some inches with awe, is his eight-year-old granddaughter, Mabel Ganson. To the child, he is “like a noble bird of some kind—the real American eagle.” He moves slowly down the staircase, a self-assured Victorian priest of finance capitalism. When he arrives at the bottom of the staircase, he reaches “his bloodless, clawlike hand” into his pocket and withdraws a shining silver coin. “Here . . . Here is a silver dollar for you! Look at it! Now take it and never forget it!”¹

This memory epitomized the substitution of power for love that Mabel attributed to the American upper classes into which she was born. Her response to her grandfather’s votive offering was a mixture of respect and rage: admiration for the weight of the past he symbolized, matched by revulsion for the kind of life and living he stood for. She felt a “deep veneration” for her grandfather, “a glad reverence that he was mine and his words were law . . . a willingness and a submission to this symbol, yes, a desire to be prostrate to it because of that noble man, my lawgiver.” Mabel’s desire to submit to her grandfather’s authority warred with an equally strong desire to ridicule it because of the inferiority of its power base: “So while I almost wanted to kneel down and accept that silver dollar from him like a sacrament, at the same time I wanted to cry out: ‘Oh, nonsense! What do I care for your old dollars!’ ”

Scenes like this one crystallized D. H. Lawrence’s view of Mabel’s memoirs as “the most serious ‘confession’ that ever came out of America, and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or will be produced. . . . Life gave America gold and a ghoulish destiny.” Mabel became the center of that destiny in Lawrence’s American fiction, as her family had been central to it in fact. She could not have chosen a more appropriate set of forebears to provide authentic background for her development as “a twentieth-century type.”²

Mabel’s great-grandparents partook in the founding and building of the American nation. They were pioneers and sturdy yeomen, the kind of people Thomas Jefferson asserted were the backbone of the young republic. Her grandparents belonged to the first generation of wealth created by the burgeoning trade and manufacturing associated with the rise of modern capitalism in the Jacksonian period. By middle age they had achieved the social and economic prominence earned by the financiers of the Industrial Revolution. They were preeminent representatives of the life-styles and values of the upper classes in the “Gilded Age.” Mabel’s parents’ social and economic prominence was based solely on what they inherited. Their unfulfilled lives and unhappy marriage reflected a decaying Victorian gentility.

On Mabel’s mother’s side, the Cook family were pioneer settlers of western New York whose original ancestors came to America from Dorset, England in the seventeenth century and settled in Rhode Island. Great-grandfather Constant Cook settled in Bath. As Mabel put it, the Cooks “were” the town of Bath. When Cook could no longer “keep his dollars occupied” in his Bath bank, he moved to New York City, where he built his Fifth Avenue mansion.

Mabel’s description of her Grandmother Cook’s life in Bath is a wonderful evocation of a well-to-do countrywoman’s life in mid-nineteenth-century America:

Grandmother was always superintending the kitchen, helping to prepare the splendid country meals, training the young country maids, overseeing the preserving, the many complicated puddings and cakes and pies, the roasting of the big joints and fowls, and attending to the thousand details of a hearty, comfortable living. Besides, she was always “bringing up” her four handsome girls while their father, down in the village, spun the whole countryside out of himself. Horse-shoeing, banking, judging, railroad-building, house-building, town-building!³

Grandfather spun so well that Grandmother Cook was deprived of her duties after they moved to New York City. There her days were filled by writing minutely detailed instructions to her daughters about how to run their households. Much later, in New Mexico, Mabel tried to re-create her grandmother’s way of life in Bath. She hoped to regain the physical and psychological health she associated with the preindustrial America that men like her grandfather helped to destroy.

Great-grandfather Ganson left Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century and settled in Vermont. A captain in the Revolutionary War, he was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill. After the war, he settled in Le Roy, a frontier town in western New York state. Captain Ganson’s second son, John, was educated at Harvard, passed the bar, and was elected to the Senate in 1862 as a Democrat. A close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, he supported all of Lincoln’s war measures, including emancipation. Mabel was brought up with the rumor that her great-uncle “would have been President if—.” John’s older brother, James, who was Mabel’s grandfather, made his fortune in banking. Mabel remembers him as a “severe, humorless man” who spent most of his days in his downtown bank. The Ganson family was associated with Buffalo from the beginning of its industrial growth.⁴

Buffalo

The Buffalo the Ganson family moved to in the 1830s was a tightly knit, relatively homogeneous community of about eight thousand, with a strong sense of social cohesion. Few people lived on unearned increment. Property owners were usually the managers of their holdings, while the working class was made up mostly of artisans who served a small and well-known clientele. The social classes were not geographically segregated. Until the mid-1840s, Buffalo had only one paid policeman. It was the kind of small-town America that post–Civil War writers would remember with nostalgia.

By the late 1860s, Buffalo had become a major center of trade and commerce in America, second only to Chicago in shipping because of its strategic location at the “foot” of Lake Erie. In one generation, it began its growth from a village into an urban giant, whose flour, steel, and lumber mills, oil and sugar refineries, and breweries brought it both enormous wealth and poverty. According to a recent study, the city began to lose its social cohesion in the 1840s, as class lines solidified with the increasing “power of the ruling elite.”⁵

Helping to support the city’s wealth and its precipitous growth (the population tripled from 81,000 in 1861 to 244,000 in 1890) was the arrival of thousands of Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Polish immigrants. Alongside native workers, they labored in the mills and railroads, often for as little as ten and twenty cents an hour. Injuries, fatalities, and unemployment were a fact of their daily lives. By the turn of the century, 4,000 workmen a year were injured at the Lackawanna Railroad yards. In 1900, Buffalo had an unemployment rate of 19 percent and a class of chronic indigents who were supported through poor relief. Strikes and wage cuts went hand in hand with the economic recessions that occurred from the 1870s through the 1890s.⁶ The Mabel Ganson who grew up in the high noon of the Gilded Age had only the remotest awareness of this “other America” that would become one of her focal points in the radical world she later joined in Greenwich Village.

An 1870 lithograph of Delaware Avenue gives a clear sense of how beautiful and secluded life was in the Buffalo Mabel knew as a child. Looking downtown from North Street, one sees princely estates hidden behind dignified rows of uniform trees. Thin wisps of smoke and blurred matchbox houses in the far background convey the only indications of industry and of the working classes. By the 1890s, there were sixty millionaires in Buffalo. The wealthy owners of the mills and refineries lived only two or three miles from the industries, wharves, row houses, and slums of the inner city. Yet socially and psychologically they were much further removed, for they lived in the city with the baronial splendor of a landed gentry.

In 1869, the same year that Mark Twain moved to Buffalo, America’s foremost landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, was commissioned to design a park system for the city. The parks and parkways he created covered one thousand acres. Spacious tree-lined avenues 100 feet across and boulevards 200 feet across, lined with six rows of trees on each side, were the product of his labors. The boulevards were designed to be the spokes of a wheel that would provide access for people from all over the city to a rural park four miles from downtown Buffalo. The park and parkways were, in fact, used primarily by the wealthy whose homes lined them.

Olmsted planned Delaware Avenue as one of the central arteries. Even today one can see remnants of its grandeur in the few remaining mansions that are being renovated and restored. While Mabel was growing up, the street was home to prominent bankers, lawyers, doctors, to the president of Lackawanna Steel and to the founder of Wells Fargo. The mansions built to display their fortunes were a mélange of architectural styles: imitation Tuscan villas stood next to English country houses of stucco and timber. French mansards rubbed shoulders with Queen Anne; Georgian Revival vied with Greek and Tudor. Such prominent architects as Stanford White and H. H. Richardson designed these mansions of marble and gingerbread that housed the splendor and the clutter of the Gilded Age.

In the 1880s and 1890s, most middle- and upper-class Buffalonians would have agreed with an author of New England Magazine that “The Queen of the Lakes” had “in store a mighty future.” Buffalo was a microcosm of the burgeoning economic power of the nation: not only an important center of commerce, but of political power as well. In these decades, its reform mayor was sent to the White House. Grover Cleveland was the ideal president for the golden age of laissez-faire capitalism. His sound money policies and conservative political philosophy were firmly grounded in a faith that business would take care of the country’s needs. In 1901 Buffalo achieved its apotheosis when it hosted the Pan-American World Exhibition, a lavish and costly symbol of America’s coming-of-age as an imperial power after the Spanish-American War.⁷

The street on which Mabel lived housed the social, economic, and political elite of Buffalo. Delaware Avenue was host to four presidents. Here Millard Fillmore built his Tudor Gothic mansion in the 1850s, where Lincoln came to visit as president-elect. In 1901, President McKinley was carried to a Pompeian brick mansion, where he died after having been shot by the anarchist Czoglocz. Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president across the street from Mabel’s Delaware and North Street home, on the front steps of the Wilcox House, where she played frequently as a child.

The Rumseys and Carys, friends of the Gansons, set the social tone in late-nineteenth-century Buffalo. The Rumseys’ lavish estate included a large lake for boating in the summer and skating in the winter. Horse-racing down Delaware Avenue was a favorite sport. There were elaborate costume balls; private theatricals; sleigh rides and strolls around Delaware Circle, lit with ornate gas lamps and banked with flowers; and vacations in the Berkshires, Newport, and Europe in the summers. There were elaborate dinner parties with numerous courses, for which Mabel’s mother was famous.

The wealthy were building themselves a civilization: raising funds for music halls, a symphony orchestra, libraries, and a historical society to solidify their culture and their past.⁸ The houses of worship they built were as lavish as their homes. As a child, Mabel attended Trinity Episcopal Church, just a few blocks from her home. It is a magnificent example of Gothic Revival, its dark, rich woods and velvet pews illuminated by stained-glass windows representing some of the finest work of America’s master craftsmen John La Farge and Louis Tiffany. The rich also died lavishly. Forest Lawn Cemetery was a Delaware Avenue neighborhood, designed as a beautiful park with elaborate funeral statuary graced by lush grass and trees. Here, in 1890, an anonymous lady gave tribute to the earliest occupants of the land by paying $ 10,000 to have a statue erected of Red Jacket, a famous orator who was chief of the Wolf tribe of the Seneca. The young Mabel Ganson who picnicked in Forest Lawn would have missed the import of the monument’s inscription. But it may have impressed upon her an early image of the American Indians whose savior she later tried to become: “When I am gone and my warnings are no longer heeded, the craft and avarice of the white man will prevail. My heart fails me when I think of my people, so soon to be scattered and forgotten.”

Delaware Avenue was meant to stay an Anglo-Saxon preserve. When a German immigrant, who had recently made his fortune, moved onto it in the 1890s, his daughters were snubbed. It was whispered that they had not “ ‘come out’ like the other girls—they just ‘came over.’ ” Mabel remembered her childhood milieu as a gilded wasteland, whos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Background (1879–1905)
• Chapter 2: European Experiences (1905–1912)
• Chapter 3: Movers and Shakers (1912–1915)
• Chapter 4: Art, Nature, and Mind-Cure (1915–1917)
• Chapter 5: Edge of Taos Desert (1917–1926)
• Chapter 6: Sybil, the Phoenix, and the Queen Bee: The Luhans and the Lawrences
• Chapter 7: The Other Side of Paradise (1926–1929)
• Chapter 8: Intimate Memories (1930–1940)
• Chapter 9: Epilogue (1940–1962)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index