PART 1 OF 3 MAY 12 - 15, 2019 "THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD" THE YEAR 1919

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

May 12-15 , 2019

"THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD"

ABOVE -- The lake behind Kent's cabin on Fox Island on June 5, 2006. The silence at this place can be deafening. "These are the times in life -- when nothing happens --," Kent writes in Wilderness about this spot, "but in quietness the soul expands." This was the core of the "quiet" adventure that Kent experienced in Alaska. Capra photo.

…the centre cannot hold…

Rockwell Kent’s (and Rockie’s) drawings at the Knoedler Gallery exhibit are a stunning success. All four of Rockie’s sell as well as most of Rockwell’s. The drawings showed our way of life, Kent wrote in his autobiography, a father and his little son’s; they showed, or hinted at, the natural splendors of the world that we had lived in and revealed to some degree how it had moved us. They showed us at our simple daily chores; they showed the happiness our daily lives afforded us. They showed a life that was consistent with the soul of Man, his innate goodness, his deep love of peace. Yes, in a world envenomed with the bitterness that war had bred, they spoke of peace. And the thousands who saw the drawings knew their voice to be a true one, for it was as an echo from their own primordial past.

Like a religious mystic or a monk, Kent transforms all the negative energy he dumped upon Kathleen in his letters into what he describes above -- the wholesomeness and simplicity of living embedded within natural splendors -- the resulting happiness and peace. And if there ever was a time in American history when this country craved these values, it was in 1919. It is no surprise his drawings resonated deeply with the art world and the American public. There are historical moments that coincide with personal events for artists and writers, crucial times when their works overlap the public consciousness. This was one of those momentous periods for Rockwell Kent. Both the drawings in 1919 -- and the next year, Wilderness and the Alaska paintings -- reverberated within the hearts and souls of an America longing for a lost world. It’s no accident that the W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming, was published in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

BELOW – Warren G. Harding was elected President on a promise that he’d get the country back to normal. That’s what much of the public wanted. As a new world is born and former values and beliefs are demolished, there’s a tendency for nostalgia. When Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska was published in 1920, a critic commented upon one of its drawings, titled Meal Time. As the social and political gyre widened, people were grasping to hold on to the center.

The Great War was over and the influenza epidemic raged on. The world would never be the same. Like airborne seeds, most new ideas that stirred debate, violence and excessive reaction after the war had been disbursed earlier. Some were so radical for the times that they demanded a purging before they could find fertile ground. The Great War in many respects wiped the slate clean of the 19^th century. In his Columbia University Phd. Dissertation, Uphill All the Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism, 1919-1929, Kevin C. Murphy wrote: The failures at Versailles and the rejection of the League of Nations would have been enough to send a generation of progressives into a slough of despond. But these foreign policy events, disillusioning as they were, did not happen in a vacuum. They took place during what was, aside from the Civil War and arguably the late 1960’s, the most tumultuous two-year period in American history. From strikes and bombings to raids, race riots, and repression, America erupted into confusion and hysteria in 1919 and 1920. Those hoping for a progressive post-war reconstruction saw their plans, and their nation, disintegrate into chaos.

In Our Times, his classic five-volume history of the U.S. between 1900 and 1925 (written between 1925 and 1935) journalist Mark Sullivan has difficulty explaining how people felt after the Great War. Using an expression of the times to say the world was now cock-eyed, just didn’t do it. Even Shakespeare’s the time is out of joint wasn’t enough. It was more as if the world was half-blind, half-deaf, and chronically dazed. Using a term that came out of that devastating war itself came closer to the truth. The world was shell-shocked. The earth’s psyche had gone over the top metaphorically, to face a barrage of machine gun fire, heavy artillery, and poison gas. As Sullivan struggles to explain, he says the world was wounded, but permanently. He says it was a fundamental alteration from which we would never go back. 

Gender roles were rapidly changing and many men were uneasy. The women’s suffrage movement had been active for decades. With numerous men involved with the war after the U.S. entered in April 1917, women experienced new freedoms in the workforce. Some women themselves had direct roles in the war effort with the Red Cross, as Army nurses, or has “Hello Girls” (telephone operators). The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote had been passed by Congress on June 4, 1919 and ratified on August 18^th.  With a Presidential election coming up in 1920, how would all these new voters influence the outcome? No one knew for sure, which created insecurity and tension. On Nov. 24, 1919 the Seward Gateway editorialized: Women are likely to decide who shall be President in 1920. Hence the politicians wail about the “uncertainty” of all things. This was said with much irony – for Alaska had given women the vote in 1913.

In 1919 four million workers nationwide were involved in a wave of strikes. Returning soldiers competed for jobs with laborers advocating for unions, many of whom were foreigners. A series of race riots and lynching’s occurred that summer as the Ku Klux Klan revived. J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer campaigned against foreigners and left-wing associations. Unions everywhere were suspect. In the spring of 1919 the teachers’ union in the District of Columbia had to defend itself for calling its organization a council because the Bolshevists in Russia used that word in their propaganda.  The fact that there were many town and city councils nationwide didn’t seem to matter. As Rockwell Kent welcomed in the new year on Fox Island, if he could have read the daily newspapers, he would have noticed one word filling the headlines: “Strike!” 

Jan. 9 – New York harbor workers strike.

Jan. 21 – 35,000 young female garment workers in New York strike demanding a 44-hour work week and a 15 percent pay increase.

Feb. 6 – Call for a general strike in Seattle in support of striking shipbuilders, an action that was sure to hurt Alaska.

Feb. 17 – 86,000 packers threaten to strike.

March 12 – Rather than face violence, at 6 p.m. officials shut down all public rail transportation for 141 New Jersey cities and towns after their 4500 workers walked off the job at 4 a.m.

April 11 – Railroad workers demand higher pay.

July 17 – 30,000 cigar makers strike in New York City.

July 18 – 30,000 construction workers locked out in Chicago.

August 1 – 70,000 Chicago railroad shop men walked out. Public transportation partially paralyzed when street-car, elevated and subway workers strike in Boston and Chicago.

While Kent is anxiously awaiting Olson’s return from Seward with the mail (between Jan. 2 and Feb. 11) the New York Times on Feb. 7 notes the labor situation in Seattle. Because of the International Workers of the World (I.W.W., nicknamed Wobblies) the city has become a hot-bed of insurrection on the West Coast.  Wobbly labor leaders sponsored a series of “lightning strikes” during the war. The government tried to work with labor -- content workers were needed for mobilization. The Unions made many gains during that time, but after the war business owners wanted to get back to the way it was. The unions, however, weren’t about to give in. Now they wanted even more. Most of their demands are considered standard fare today.In Seattle on January 16, 1919, forty-six Wobblies were convicted of “attempting to obstruct the American war effort.” Five hundred I.W.W. protesters were dispersed by 20,000 police followed by five cars with police armed with carbines leading a platoon of police with clubs. On Jan. 21, 25,000 shipyard workers struck and the Seattle Central Labor Council voted for a general strike. This was the first general strike in the nation’s history. It included everyone from theatrical workers to school janitors, elevator operators to truck drivers, barbers to newsboys – and it terrified Americans. Was this the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution in this country? Labor had shut down Seattle – and any Seattle crisis like this was bound to affect Alaska in many ways. Kent would perhaps only learn of this even when he eventually read the Seward newspapers in late February. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson called in the army. Within twenty-four hours, 800 troops occupied the city. Thirty miles away in Tacoma two more battalions and a machine-gun company waited for orders. A thousand extra police soon joined the forces and Mayor Hanson threatened to hire ten thousand more.  The mayor, the army, the press and the public all agreed that “the strike was a Red plot to establish a Bolshevik beachhead in America.” By Feb. 8^th – 75,000 workers had joined the general strike and faced soldiers with fixed bayonets and machine guns. By Feb. 10^th, the movement had disintegrated and strikers went back to work. Mayor Hanson quickly became a national hero. Seattle’s general strike represented the opening salvo in a year of similar work actions that continued through the winter, spring and summer. People were suspicious of anything foreign or what would broadly be considered un-American.

Just as Rockwell Kent arrives home, during April and June 1919, several bombings shocked the nation. Anarchists like Luigi Galleani wanted to instigate revolution not only by encouraging class warfare but also through violence. They targeted leaders like John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. These activities melded in the public’s mind with strikes and labor unions. Any kind of progressive movement came under suspicion as Bolshevik inspired. A poem by Edmund Vance Cooke circulated wildly in various 1919 publications captured how many felt:

                  You believe in votes for women? Yah!

                  The Bolsheviki do. And shorter hours? And land reforms?

                  They’re Bolshevistic, too.

                  “The Recall” and other things like that,

                  Are dangerous to seek; Don’t tell me you belive’em or I’ll

                  Call you Bolshevik!

                  Bolshevik! Veek! Veek!

                  A reformer is a freek! But here’s a name to stop him, for it’s

                  Like a lightening streak! 

PART TWO

IN THE NEXT ENTRY