Three Midwestern Playwrights

How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre

Marcia Noe

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780253061836
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253061850
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

In the early 1900s, three small-town midwestern playwrights helped shepherd American theatre into the modern era. Together, they created the renowned Provincetown Players collective, which not only launched many careers but also had the power to affect US social, cultural, and political beliefs.

The philosophical and political orientations of Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell generated a theatre practice marked by experimentalism, collaboration, leftist cultural critique, rebellion, liberation, and community engagement. In Three Midwestern Playwrights, Marcia Noe situates the origin of the Provincetown aesthetic in Davenport, Iowa, a Mississippi River town. All three playwrights recognized that radical politics sometimes begat radical chic, and several of their plays satirize the faddish elements of the progressive political, social, and cultural movements they were active in.

Three Midwestern Playwrights brings the players to life and deftly illustrates how Dell, Cook, and Glaspell joined early 20th-century midwestern radicalism with East Coast avant-garde drama, resulting in a fresh and energetic contribution to American theatre. 

1

Three Midwestern Playwrights Discover the New

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very Heaven!

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

“IN THE YEAR 1911 there were signs that the world was on the verge of something,” wrote Floyd Dell. “Something was in the air. Something was happening, about to happen—in politics, in literature, in art. The atmosphere became electric with it.”¹ Six years earlier, Albert Einstein had developed his theory of special relativity; three years earlier, Sigmund Freud had brought his theories of the mind to Clark University. Nine years later, National Women’s Party leader Alice Paul would see the fruits of over one hundred years of feminist activism when American women won their constitutional right to vote, and eleven years later, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake would kick off the Harlem Renaissance with their musical, Shuffle Along. Just two years after Dell’s landmark year, George Gershwin would sit down at his brother’s piano and begin a career in musical innovation that would give the world some of the greatest compositions of the Jazz Age, and visitors to the postimpressionist art exhibited at New York City’s Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory would react with shock, anger, and ridicule to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase because they could find neither a nude nor a staircase in the painting.

Dell and his contemporaries—the writers, painters, and activists who wintered in Greenwich Village and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts—believed that the “something” that was on the way was nothing less than a new social order. Indeed, the word new was on the lips of many as they wrote about and discussed the revolutions in thinking, painting, writing, composing, and organizing society that were changing minds and changing America. Adam Hochschild describes the period that Dell found so transformative: “It was a remarkable moment that saw a flood tide of new immigrants, a flourishing of new forms of art, a zenith of crusading journalism, and dramatic strikes and demonstrations as working people and women demanded their rights. It was also a moment when many believed that on the horizon was a revolutionary upheaval that would wipe away forever the barriers of class, race, and inequality that so marred America’s promise.”²

Susan C. Kemper situates the founding of the Provincetown Players within the cultural moment that Hochschild delineates above: “That transitional period in American history which Henry F. May has identified as ‘the end of American innocence.’”³ In this 1959 study, May traces the beginnings of the New to the early twentieth-century demise of commonly held beliefs in the inevitability of progress and the inviolability of Victorian values and aesthetic standards.⁴ John Galsworthy’s Victorian throwback Soames Forsyte, bumbling through the modern world, epitomizes the conflict between the Old and the New that characterized the early twentieth century. An entire worldview that posited a God-created-and-ordered universe with clearly defined conventions and values gave way under the influence of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, whose theories had the cumulative effect of displacing the human person from the center of the moral and cultural universe. Dell portrays this seismic cultural shift in his third novel, Janet March (1923), in the words of theatre impresario Vincent Blatch:

The nineteenth century, Janet dear, was a time when everybody believed in law and order. That’s why it seems such a queer time to us now—and why we can’t read its books or admire its great men, they seem so foolish. They saw law and order everywhere—in the movements of the stars and in the colors on a butterfly’s wing. They had discovered the laws of progress. . . . There were to be no more wars. Machinery was to do away with human labor. Everyone was to be happy and virtuous. There was a solution to every problem.⁵

This intellectual revolution profoundly impacted Dell and his colleagues. “The old world was finished, they believed—the world of Victorian America, with its stodgy bourgeois art, its sexual prudery and smothering patriarchal families, its crass moneymaking and deadly class exploitation,” writes Christine Stansell. “The new world, the germ of a truly modern America, would be created by those willing to repudiate the cumbersome past and experiment with form, not just in painting and literature, the touchstones of European modernism, but also in politics and love, friendship and sexual passion.”⁶

Stansell also points out that “in part, the association of art and life came from anarchist beliefs in a self whose creative powers were unleashed by revolutionary ferment.”⁷ This book takes Stansell’s assessment as its premise in relating the experiences of three proponents of the New—Floyd Dell, George Cram (Jig) Cook, and Susan Glaspell—and argues that their involvement in cultural and political activities spawned by the New in early twentieth-century Davenport, Iowa, significantly informed not only the plays that they would later write for the Provincetown Players but also the aesthetic and theatre practice of the company itself. Their commitment to leftist ideals such as free speech, feminism, Socialism, and pacifism, expressed through their writing and also through their life choices, would become a force for change in early twentieth-century America. Dell, Cook, Glaspell, and their friends lived their politics through their art, professing a belief in a seamless joining of art and life. As Veronica Makowsky notes, “Glaspell and her fellow artists operated under the premise that art and life were inextricably linked.”⁸

Immersed as they were in the New, Dell, Cook, and Glaspell were not blind to the extremes to which it could be taken or to the ways in which the New could be embraced by those more interested in performing radical chic than in authentically committing themselves to progressive ideas and causes. Over time they became cognizant of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in their subjects, and their plays reflect this awareness. Dell’s Provincetown comedy King Arthur’s Socks (1916) juxtaposes the early twentieth-century Greenwich Village present with medieval times to create a sense of universality as it enacts the complexities of gendered power dynamics. Glaspell and Cook’s one-act comedies Suppressed Desires (1915) and Tickless Time (1918), as well as Cook’s one-act comedy Change Your Style (1915), turn on a series of reversals to poke fun at proponents of the New who have taken their enthusiasms to extremes. Glaspell’s Close the Book (1917), The People (1917), and Chains of Dew (1922) are comedies in which characters who regard themselves as progressive are confronted with the limitations of their enlightened minds. The New Woman, the New Art, the New Psychology, the New Politics, and the New Science inspired and informed the plays of Dell, Cook, and Glaspell, which reflect the cultural milieu in which they lived and wrote and enact a critique of that culture.⁹

In 1894, the New Woman came striding out of Sarah Grand’s essay in the North American Review to contend with the pious, pure, domestic, and submissive True Woman who reigned in the American cultural imaginary.¹⁰ Often pictured wearing a divided skirt, smoking a cigarette, or riding a bicycle, the New Woman was educated, athletic, independent, socially conscious, and professionally active. Although some were fearful that the New Woman would become mannish and crude, her image was more commonly evoked by Charles Dana Gibson’s lovely Girl, who reflected an early twentieth-century reality that saw an exponential growth in female matriculation in colleges and universities, numerous jobs and professions newly opened to women, and social movements for women’s suffrage and birth control legalization led by fierce female champions.

In this early twentieth-century reality, the New Woman manifested as Rose Pastor Stokes lending her oratorical gift to the birth control movement; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn waving the red flag to rally striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey; Henrietta Rodman fighting for the rights of female teachers in New York City; and Ida B. Wells crusading against lynching across America and throughout the world. In the fiction of this period, the New Woman appeared as Willa Cather’s Thea Kronborg singing grand opera, Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy working for social uplift, Elia W. Peattie’s Kate Barrington hauling abusive husbands into family court, and Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney breaking feminist ground in the business world—first as a traveling saleswoman and later as a corporate executive.¹¹

The Greenwich Village and Provincetown that Dell, Cook, and Glaspell inhabited were replete with New Women who sought to free society from its bourgeois shackles, thus reflecting the New Woman’s role in bringing about, in the words of Martha H. Patterson, “the synthesis of the personal and the political for a transformation politics.”¹² Glaspell was a charter member of the Lucy Stone League and of Heterodoxy, a feminist lecture and discussion club for “unorthodox women who did things and did them openly” that met for lunch biweekly.¹³ She was prosuffrage, as were Dell and his coeditor on The Masses, Max Eastman, who co-founded the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of New York State in 1909. In 1913, Dell published Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism, a book that profiled ten New Women, among them Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman. Modernist New Women in Greenwich Village included Eastman’s sister, Crystal, and his wife, Ida Rauh, both lawyers; poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; and Mabel Dodge, whose salon welcomed proponents and practitioners of every variation of the New. As Ellen Kay Trimberger concludes, “The New Woman in the early twentieth-century United States was a central player in a modernist movement stressing the opening of the self to levels of experience that could be fused into a new and original whole.”¹⁴

Among the New Woman characters in the plays of Dell, Cook, and Glaspell are a birth control activist, a free speech advocate, an experimental botanist, a proponent of free love, a Freudian acolyte, and a pacifist. Of the three playwrights, Dell was the most enthusiastic about feminism; through his Socialist lens, he saw gender equality primarily as a way to fight capitalism. However, the feminist Holy Trinity of that day—free love, legal birth control, and companionate marriage—was anything but a deal breaker for Dell, who cut quite a swath through the lovely ladies of Davenport, Chicago, and Greenwich Village before marrying the love of his life in 1919. He remained a lifelong feminist, and New Women can be seen in much of his oeuvre, ranging from the bohemian Egeria in Love in Greenwich Village (1926) to the eponymous protagonist of his tenth novel, Diana Stair (1932).

The New Art gained a strong foothold in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a finger of land curving three miles into the Atlantic Ocean that beckoned to pirate and pilgrim, to playwright and boatwright, and, most especially, to artists because of the quality of its light. As Leona Rust Egan explains, “Following the arrival of the railroad in 1873, Provincetown became a motherlode for palette and pen.” In the early twentieth century, Provincetown had become well known for its art schools; by 1916 there were five such institutes enrolling a total of six hundred students. Chief among them was Charles Webster Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art, founded in 1899, an academic art school that enrolled 110 students who painted on the beach. Among Hawthorne’s opposite number were Charles Demuth, B. J. O. (Bror) Nordfeldt, and Marguerite and William Zorach, avant-garde artists who also became charter members of the Provincetown Players.¹⁵

The academic and avant-garde art schools embraced competing aesthetics. The former, endorsed by the National Academy of Design, emphasized composition and the human figure, prioritized drawing over color, and venerated past models. The latter eschewed the traditions that academic artists revered, abandoning realism for a more presentational style that challenged the status quo in art and culture: “This was a guerilla war waged against the bourgeois class and its domination,” contends Martin Green, “its representatives in the ateliers, its Renaissance traditions, and its Greek and Roman heritage.”¹⁶ It was this aesthetic conflict that inspired Jig Cook’s one-act comedy Change Your Style.

Although a similarly rebellious group of realists, the Ashcan school, was also dominant at this time, the representational aesthetic of its artists—George Bellows, Robert Henri, John Sloan, and their colleagues—failed to spark the excitement of the truly radical practitioners of modern art and their admirers that was first engendered by the exhibitions of artists such as Rodin and Matisse and later by the display of thirteen hundred postimpressionist works in the Armory Show. The politics of the New also supported avant-garde art: “One of the reasons the New Art attracted so much attention around 1915 was that aesthetic radicalism then seemed allied to political radicalism,” argues Green.¹⁷

Alfred Stieglitz, who called himself a revolutionary, saw art as a tool for social change. Like the Greenwich Village radicals who were immersed in the New and aimed to integrate their art and their politics with their daily lives to remake the world, Stieglitz believed in the liberating power of art, arguing that “only competing art forms, diverse means of expression, alternative life-styles, a reintroduction of the sacred into the modern life, and new relationships between men and women could lead to meaningful change.”¹⁸ Perhaps the best example of the marriage between art and politics was the 1913 Paterson Pageant, organized by John (Jack) Reed and Mabel Dodge to raise funds for the striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. To dramatize the strike and its effect on workers’ lives, hundreds of silk workers marched down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Garden, where they enacted scenes from the strike.

As John C. Burnham observes, “In 1915, a New Psychology meant mostly the teachings of Sigmund Freud and what he called psychoanalysis.”¹⁹ In 1909, Freud himself came to the United States to give a series of lectures at Clark University, and in 1913 his book The Interpretation of Dreams was translated into English and published in the United States. Also at that time, Mabel Dodge was psychoanalyzed, first by Smith Ely Jelliffe and later by Dr. A. A. Brill, the chie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Three Midwestern Playwrights and the Provincetown Players
• 1. Three Midwestern Playwrights Discover the New
• 2. Three Midwestern Playwrights Arrive in a Romantic and Miraculous City
• 3. Floyd Dell Embraces Feminism in Port Royal
• 4. George Cram Cook Runs for Congress in the Red City of Iowa
• 5. Susan Glaspell Fights for Free Speech in Freeport
• 6. Three Midwestern Playwrights Found a Theatre Company
• Conclusion: Three Midwestern Playwrights Venture beyond P-Town
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Manuscript Collections Consulted
• Sources for Chapter Epigraphs
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Classified Primary Source Bibliographies Compiled by Tyler Preston: George Cram Cook
• Susan Glaspell
• Floyd Dell
• Index