[Alumni-chat] Antiochiana/ Elbert Hubbard

[Sonia Jaffe Robbins]

>
>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 -- Weill when asked for rights to do the 
>first production of Blitzstein's adaptation of ThreePenny Opera in 
>the late 1950s  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.  
>
>
>
>************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
>_______________________________________________
>Alumni-chat mailing list
>Alumni-chat at w3.antioch.edu
>http://w3.antioch.edu/mailman/listinfo/alumni-chat
>Visit http://www.Antioch-College.edu today!


-- 
Sonia Jaffe Robbins
Antioch College, '60-'62, '64
sjr5 at nyu.edu		srobbins at reedbusiness.com
http://www.neww.org.pl       http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting

*******************
"If you do not let the tie run come to the plate, you can never lose."
--Mark Harris, in one of the Southpaw novels