[Alumni-chat] Antiochiana/ Elbert Hubbard

[Sistersara at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/9/2007 9:48:07 P.M. Central Daylight Time,  sjr5 at nyu.edu 
writes:

That's  interesting about Eleanor Roosevelt. I'm in the midst of 
reading J.D.  Dawson's memoir of his Antioch career, broken up briefly 
by a stint  working for Arthur Morgan when Morgan ran the beginning of 
the TVA. It  seems FDR invited Morgan to be head of the TVA board, and 
he had heard of  Morgan, according to Dawson, because Eleanor read 
"Antioch Notes" and  passed them on to FDR. Morgan, according to 
Clark's "Distinctive College,"  did a terrific job of proselytizing 
for Antioch in the '20s, which must be  how the New Yorkers for 
Antioch Committee came  about.



Actually Morgan's connection with Eleanor Roosevelt came about as a result  
of ER's very close friendship with Clarence Pickett, then head of the American  
Friends Service Committee.  Eleanor did a number of things together with  
Pickett -- they were both interested in Appalachia and one of the first new deal  
programs established was the Homestead program in which Eleanor deeply 
involved  herself.  This was a project of moving families out of shacks and into  
proper housing with running water, toilets and all, but on enough land to grow  
crops for a subsistence living.  The project was started by AFSC on a small  
scale before FDR came into office, but then Eleanor sold FDR on taking it over  
very early in 1933.  Pickett knew Morgan through Quaker circles -- and he  
introduced ER to both Morgan and Antioch.  Indeed, he may have put ER on  the 
mailing list for Antioch Notes.  ER's papers do have copies of the  notes on 
which she made some marginal notes.  
 
I ran into this while researching ER's interest in an arts focused somewhat  
Utopian community at Dartington in England.  The owners of the New Republic  
(Whitney Family) married into the Straight Family -- minor titled family in the 
 1920's, and together they turned an old manor complex into a combination 
farm,  art school and experiment in adult education.  They hired a wide array of  
artists, mostly in classical music, dance and the plastic arts, to establish 
the  school -- and then when Hitler took over in Germany, they became a real 
place of  refuge for German Artists -- adding to the array of arts associated 
with the  school.  Dorothy Whitney Straight was an old friend of ER's, and she 
avidly  kept up with the school's progress.  Anyhow, when she got involved 
with the  Subsistence Homestead program, she wanted to copy aspects of the arts 
program as  it had been established at Dartington.  She hosted Dorothy at the 
WH along  with Clarence Pickett during the first month FDR was in office -- if 
you know  the characters, you just have to imagine her "production" for FDR 
and Louis Howe  at that time.  Anyhow, she got Harry Hopkins all excited about 
it all --  who was in the first term much closer to ER than to FDR -- and 
eventually he  made about half of what they had in mind happen.  ER got in trouble 
with  the program because she insisted the houses needed to have both bathtubs 
and  fridges -- and Congress thought that most extravagant.  
 
Dorothy Straight may have been the first person ER talked with about  
refugees from Nazi Germany -- particularly the various artists who needed a  place to 
resettle.  ER apparently promised Dorothy that she would try to  get places 
and proper visas for people Dorothy referred to her -- and there was  lots of 
personal correspondence about details over the years.  
 
Willard Straight's son by his first marriage, Michael Straight, was the  
family radical -- joined the British CP, but also married into the Churchill  
Family, and the couple ran off to Spain to fight in the Spanish War.  He  
eventually migrated to the US, went to work on some sort of State Department  Project, 
and was propositioned to spy for the USSR, which he eventually was able  to 
push back on -- he eventually got into the Whitney Family business of editing  
at the New Republic.  Some years back, Michael Straight wrote a fascinating  
autobiography regarding his own trek through the wilds of 30's politics,  
including his very short experience passing off odd stuff to the USSR agents --  
and through his stepmother, his relationship with the ER circle in the WH.   
Michael had gotten most of his FBI file, some of which was wildly wrong, but it  
certainly indicated that Hoover was bound and determined to try to link ER 
with  the CP via this connection, but was a little befuddled by the Whitney 
Family  connections, and the Winston Churchill ones.  
 
Anyhow, Morgan's introduction to ER was part of this  whole milieu.  Eleanor 
was very attracted to people who had "out of  the box" ideas that they had 
actually tried to institute, and the AFSC was one  avenue through which she found 
many -- and one of those led her to Morgan.   Strangely, I don't think Morgan 
ever invited her to visit Antioch, and I don't  believe she ever did visit.  
 
Anyhow, I tracked all this down at Hyde Park in the ER papers when I was  
looking for correspondence between Dorothy Straight and ER about getting Marc  
Blitzstein out of a Belgium Jail in 1933 when he got caught meeting with  
anti-Nazi Composers in Belgium, and the Germans made note of the meeting, and  got 
the Belgium Government to make the arrest.  Marc was not actually in  the CP 
till the late 1930's, but in 1933 he was very involved in various  activities on 
behalf of the German Left Artists caught in the new Nazi  regime.  Eventually 
Marc and his family would sponsor Bert Brecht's  refugee visa, and ER was 
their contact to get it done, Denmark to Sweden to  Finland to the USSR, a long 
trip on the Trans Siberian, and then a long boat  trip from the Soviet East to 
Hollywood.  Blitzstein would also end up  working for Jock Whitney in London 
during WWII, eventually doing the propaganda  music program beamed into Nazi 
Germany on the American Network -- Marc spoke  fluent German, and had been a 
Schoenberg student in Berlin in the 1920's, where  he met both Brecht and Weill, 
Eisler and many others who also benefited from  this strange connection.  What 
delighted me in reading ER's papers is that  it is all "there" -- if you know 
external things about all these connections,  you can track what she did 
through her papers.  She didn't eliminate  any of the materials that showed her 
various connections with lefties who were  in the dog house during the McCarthy 
era.  
 
One benefit to Antioch -- Well when asked for rights to do the first  
production of Blitzstein's adaptation of ThreePenny Opera in the late 1950's  aside 
from the long-running off-Broadway production, Blitzstein selected Antioch  for 
that honor from many requests in large measure because Morgan's Antioch had  
been helpful to him back in the 30's when he was trying to get his friends out 
 of Germany.  While Blitzstein was murdered in early 1964 by a Gay Basher,  
he did leave notes to his agency not only approving the rights, but giving his  
reason why Antioch got First Rights.  It went back to Morgan making  hires, 
or recommending hires when few others would not do it, and that was done  as 
part of the strange Straight-ER-Morgan relationship system.   He  also respected 
aspects of Antioch's substantial opposition to McCarthyism.   



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