The Refuge of Affections

Family and American Reform Politics, 1900–1920

Eric Rauchway

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780231506168
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Progressives—those reformers responsible for the shape of many American institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board to the New School for Social Research—have always presented a mystery. What prompted middle-class citizens to support fundamental change in American life? Eric Rauchway shows that like most of us, the reformers took their inspiration from their own lives—from the challenges of forming a family.

Following the lives and careers of Charles and Mary Beard, Wesley Clair and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Willard and Dorothy Straight, the book moves from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of Manchuria, from the trade-union halls of industrial Britain to the editorial offices of the New Republic in Manhattan. Rauchway argues that parenting was a kind of elitism that fulfilled itself when it undid itself, and this vision of familial responsibility underlay Progressive approaches to foreign policy, economics, social policy, and education.

One

DOROTHY WHITNEY AND WILLARD STRAIGHT

You marry to get married … not because you want to change the world.

—Marianne Gingrich¹

Even before it began publishing in 1914, the New Republic had become the focus of Progressive attention. The infant journal out of New York City seemed to speak for a generation of reformers ambitious to transform American society. Whatever its intellectual merits, it owed its prominence to the joint intentions and extensive connections of its married publishers, Dorothy Whitney and Willard Straight, who created it to fulfill the shared elements of their reform agendas and thus to give their marriage a public presence. These shared elements comprised a set of convictions about their duty to the benighted, who were in this case a public that required education on political matters so that it could manage its own affairs and become truly self-governing. While the Straights were planning the venture, they gave it the politically purposeful subtitle A Journal of Liberal Democracy (which later became the blander Journal of Opinion). The original subtitle revealed their intentions: within the framework of liberalism, the only legitimate role for the powerful was the adoption of the powerless as their temporary charges, to encourage their independence. Elites had to foster democratic self-government, though it meant ultimately undermining their own privileged standing. In this respect they behaved like proper liberal parents, the legitimacy of whose authority rested on their willingness to see to its eventual dissolution. The Straights shaped the New Republic as an institution and as the source of an ongoing critical social commentary to serve these purposes. Their confidence in this mission attracted and inspired innumerable Progressives precisely because the ideas they expressed echoed and amplified the experiences of their generation.

Like many of their contemporaries, both Dorothy Whitney and Willard Straight had, when younger, tried to change the world they knew, and they both succeeded within limits. Both established reform projects that addressed the relations between powerful and powerless classes of people and aimed at the ultimate independence of dependent classes. Neither found the limits on their activities satisfying and so both sought new ways of achieving the changes they desired. They found that marriage to each other afforded them, if only for a time, the chance to forge a partnership dedicated to the transformation of social relations.²

THE BENEVOLENT METROPOLIS

Dorothy Whitney was born in 1887 to a pair of singularly agile social climbers. William Collins Whitney married one fortune (in the person of Flora Payne) and then promptly made another of his own. He did both easily, and then unlike so many of his peers he turned his attention away from money to things he enjoyed: remaking the Metropolitan Opera House into a showplace for Manhattan society, remaking muddy Saratoga into a mecca for the horsey set, and making and remaking Grover Cleveland into the President of the United States. Throughout it all, Flora served as his partner by playing hostess to society, for that was how social climbers cemented their gains: through invitations made and accepted. Their marriage worked publicly, though privately it was (in his words) a “failure” that they kept up “for the sake of the children and society.”³

Their concern for their children and their concern for society coincided, because for the upwardly mobile the plateau never comes unless the next generation can feel at home on the family’s new height. Thus their attention to proper schools for boys; proper finishings, debuts, and betrothals for girls. In light of this pattern, which seems bound to create a conservative generation of offspring, biographers of Dorothy Whitney have puzzled over why she should have become so singularly socially active. Women of her time and place were supposed to join the Junior League and do good works to occupy their time before and after marriage. They were not supposed to allow the pursuit of good works to take the place of marriage. But Dorothy put her energy wholly into her good works for a time: she put off marriage and devoted herself instead to what she called her “social”—as opposed to her society—“obligations.”⁴

As an early and constant member of the Junior League, Whitney belonged to a group of women who identified themselves chiefly as debutantes and who knew that so far as their families were concerned, they existed principally to ornament their fathers’ and husbands’ checkbooks. As one of her peers wrote anonymously in the Junior League Bulletin, the Leaguers’ summer stream of consciousness probably sounded something like this:

Three letters. Fine. Let’s see—from Mary—she’s going to Canada to go into camp is she? Oh! She says Laura’s gone to California—I hate the train so. Poor thing I’m sorry for her—she’ll miss the tournament. Hm—Oh! Well, Mary never did write anything interesting. Who’s this? Jack Eustis, engaged, and to that little Irwin girl! She hates to dance and never goes out. Oh! Well, that’s one more gone. Kitty does use the worst paper, I hate these passionate purple linings. Hm—hym—hm I don’t believe it.⁵

They could only defend themselves against the triviality of these concerns with a plaintive credo: “That all the money and time which has been spent on us is not a lost investment to the world, that we are worth something in life … we want to be of some real use, no matter how small.”⁶ To make themselves really useful, they organized sewing circles and theatrical benefits and undertook home visits to the poor. The Junior League had originally been called the Junior League for Neighborhood Work, and the Leaguers voted themselves the principal duty of acting as teachers to the mothers among their poorer neighbors, not only through lectures and other group projects but through home visits. The Leaguer also

visits for the teacher who through lack of time is unable to do this for herself the home of any child who has either been absent for any length of time or who in the schoolroom has seemed to be either mentally or physically below the standard, and discovers whether or not the fault is due to home influence, ill-treatment, or perhaps lack of sufficient nourishment.⁷

To be sure, these visits might well, to their half-willing, harassed immigrant hosts, have felt more like home invasions, as a debutante Leaguer swept through the family tenement of a troubled child, censoriously seeking critical lacks in cleanliness, nourishment, or cultural environment. The Leaguers’ adoption of this teacherly, parental role reflected their unflattering opinion of the immigrant poor—what one historian calls the inevitable “unexamined assumptions” of the reformer.⁸ But this condescension was essential to the intellectual architecture of a reformer’s imagination—if the poor of other cultures were not somehow deficient, then nothing could justify the intervention of an untrained debutante whose advantages came to her by virtue of her birth and upbringing, rather than by hard experience.

The most important way in which Dorothy Whitney differed from her fellow Leaguers was in her willingness to devote herself fully to a career of reform and not to worry about suitors. An advantage of misfortune permitted her this freedom: her mother, then her stepmother, and finally her father died while she was still a minor, leaving her in 1904, at the age of seventeen, legally in the loose care of her brother Harry and his wife Gertrude, which for all practical purposes meant she was left to herself: Harry and Gertrude had their own problems. William Whitney’s will gave Dorothy an annual income of $50,000 a year (she would take full control of her capital on her majority at twenty-one) and, at least as important, he saw that she had a guardian, Beatrice Bend, whom the estate paid an additional $10,000 a year. When Dorothy looked back on her life from the vantage point of her old age, she wrote, “One event and one personal relationship were the determining factors of that period, and to a great extent, influenced the rest of my life.” The death of her father gave her money, and also independence from parental concerns as to whom she might marry. The friendship of Bend gave her guidance “along a somewhat unorthodox road,” as she wrote. She was dramatically, and awfully, free to do almost anything she liked.⁹

Bend was the daughter of a financier who improvidently died during a financial downturn. She helped Whitney to get a more serious education than she otherwise might, moving her from a socially prominent to a more intellectually rigorous school, and she accompanied her as she toured Europe, acquiring the American version of high culture (that is to say, European culture). She helped Whitney to test herself safely against received opinion. Dealing intellectually with works of art, Whitney worried alternately that she was “unoriginal in her tastes” for conforming too much to canonical judgment and then “felt ashamed to admit that I don’t care for Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration,’” and other presumably important pictures, artificial and natural alike: “I don’t understand why it is called the blue Danube for it is really a dirty greenish color. Perhaps I haven’t got an artistic eye!” As she saw more and thought more she grew surer in her judgment, and she dismissed masterpieces she did not like as “stupid.”¹⁰ Throughout her education, her relationship with Bend was the foremost fact of both their lives. She called Bend “Sister” and Bend called Whitney “Angel.” When they parted, however briefly, Whitney missed her greatly: “I have never felt so lonely in all my life. What shall I do without her!” When they fought (over issues Whitney did not record), it depressed her. Bend was Whitney’s closest early influence; she wanted to see her young charge do something useful with her moneyed life—and she had, in her own later words, “a prejudice against matrimony.”¹¹

Thus Dorothy Whitney spent her youth in a world of women that became for a while her whole world. Though she made her debut and did not lack for the standard range of importunate swains, she gave little serious thought to marriage. Instead, she spent her time taking the Junior League more seriously than the run of its members did. She became its president at the age of eighteen. On attaining her majority at twenty-one, she moved into a Manhattan apartment with Ruth Morgan, a like-minded woman of similar background. Both of them took classes at Columbia, seeking “the theory underlying social efforts.” The problems of the poor, and the circle of women, comprised Whitney’s world, and she delighted in it: “I’m living with Ruth!” she wrote in her diary, and recorded how, on snowy days, they stayed in bed to read together Maud Booth’s After Prison—What? on the rehabilitation of criminals.¹²

As president of the Junior League and a reader of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey (as well as Maud Booth), and as a student, too, of Jane Addams, Dorothy Whitney sought to turn the League toward closer engagement with urban problems—toward, as she later wrote, “social work of a more serious nature.” Philanthropy supplied temporary, and needed, balms for social hurts, but Whitney wanted to change the terms of “neighborhood work” by changing the neighborhood. After consulting with the prominent settlement-house leaders Addams and Lillian Wald, she set the League a task even more ambitious than the settlement houses: to create for working women a clean, well-appointed apartment house they could eventually run themselves.

Whitney made the Junior League House her major project between 1908 and 1911. She dealt with the practical matters of funding, architecture, facilities, location, and staff. But “the fundamental idea” (as she wrote a friend) remained the same, irrespective of the details: “to build a tenement for working girls” and to be sure that whatever its structure or location it be made ultimately “to pay” for itself.¹³ It turned out much as she hoped, opening its doors on 20 May 1911, in a handsome building in East Seventy-eighth Street, close by the East River. With a fund of $270,000, the Leaguers put up an impressive residential club, with a library, a series of reception rooms, a roof garden, tennis and basketball courts, and a room full of typewriters for the working women’s common use. More than three hundred women could live in its rooms, whose windows looked either out of the building or over a well-ventilated courtyard. Its dining room could seat them all, plus the house superintendent (a position Whitney thought particularly important: she called the supervisor “the matron,” and she herself interviewed the candidates for the job.)¹⁴ The club succeeded as an independently funded operation: by 1922, the Junior League House was self-supporting, and in it, as the Daily News would self-righteously complain, “working girls now live like the 400 [Manhattan’s supposedly most important four hundred citizens]. … The whole thing is virtually a sorority house built for self-supporting girls.”¹⁵

Thus Dorothy Whitney proved to herself and her peers that the debutantes of the Junior League could address social concerns in concrete and philosophically significant terms. Women who worked and lived in the Junior League House would not require the cultural or charitable intervention of settlement-house workers or Leaguers. They enjoyed their own facilities for entertainment and exercise and lived in a house they could pay for themselves. They attained this independence after a period of minimal, matronly supervision. Whitney would repeat this pattern in her later ventures, encouraging the objects of her reform to take control of their own lives within cultural parameters she would set; she, and her reform-minded allies, determined what was worthwhile, and encouraged—and enabled—their charges to live up to that mark.

Through this phase of her career, Dorothy Whitney had much in common with many other women reform leaders. The first decades of the twentieth century were a grand time for women’s organizations of all sorts, which together comprised the crest of a great wave of women’s political activity that had been gathering force since the middle of the preceding century and would soon—though nobody yet knew it—break, leading to a calm, if not to a decided ebb. Many of these organizations acted similarly to Whitney’s Junior League in that they pressed for social change indirectly rather than confronting controversia...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Manuscript Citations
• Introduction
• 1. Dorothy Whitney and Willard Straight
• 2. Mary Ritter and Charles Beard
• 3. Lucy Sprague and Wesley Clair Mitchell
• 4. War and the Progressive Family
• 5. The Narrative of Progress versus the Logic of Events
• Epilogue: The Rise and Fall of The Rise of American Civilization; or, A Further Parable on the Narrative of Progress and the Logic of Events
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index