Freepedia is a series of free encyclopaedias. We currently specialize in history but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about Floyd Dell.

Floyd Dell was born on 28th June, 1887 in Pike County, Missouri. His father, Anthony Dell, found it difficult to find regular work and the family experienced a great deal of poverty.

At school Dell developed a love of reading. He later claimed that it was books by William Morris and Frank Norris helped convert him to socialism. At sixteen, he joined the Socialist Party and gave speeches on street-corners about his political beliefs. He also produced material for a small Socialist monthly, Tri-City Workers' Magazine.

After a spell as an apprentice candy-maker Dell worked as a cub-reporter for the Davenport Times. He later moved to the Chicago Evening Post and by 1911 was editor of the newspaper's Friday Literary Review. Over the next few years Dell promoted the work of writers such as Frank Norris, Jack London, Charles Edward Russell, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. Dell believed that the everyday life of the middle and working classes provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment. Dell valued authenticity and accuracy of detail and welcomed those like Russell and Phillips who wanted to use literature to bring about social reform.

 

 

While editor of the Friday Literary Review Dell also promoted the work of writers such as George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.

In 1914 Dell moved to New York and joined Max Eastman in helping edit the radical journal, The Masses. Dell wrote articles on several issues including support for Margaret Sanger and her birth control campaign. He also recruited promising writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Day and Carl Sandburg to write for the journal.

In 1916 Dell became involved in the Provincetown Theatre Group. Dell's King Arthur's Socks was the first play to be performed by the group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Eugene O'Neill, George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell, John Reed, Louise Bryant and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Dell, like most of the people working with The Masses, was opposed to USA involvement in the First World War. After the USA declared war on the Central Powers in 1917, The Masses came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.

In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young, Boardman Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp had violated the Espionage Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918, after three days of deliberation, the jury failed to agree on the guilt of Dell and his fellow defendants.

The second trial was held in January 1919. John Reed, who had recently returned from Russia, was also arrested and charged with the original defendants. This time eight of the twelve jurors voted for acquittal. As the war was now over, it was decided not to take them to court for a third time.

In 1918 the same people who produced The Masses, including Dell, Max Eastman, John Reed, Art Young, Robert Minor and Boardman Robinson went on the publish a very similar journal, The Liberator (1918-24).

After the war Dell published the best-selling autobiographical novel, Moon-Calf (1920). Other novels such as The Briary-Bush (1921), Janet Marsh (1923) and Runaway (1925), were less successful.

As well as writing for the left-wing magazines such as the New Masses (1924-39) Dell produced several non-fictional works including Upton Sinclair (1927), Love in the Machine Age (1930) and an autobiography, Homecoming (1933). Floyd Dell died in 1969.

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Floyd Dell

 

 

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(1) In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd Dell recalled how he discovered he was poor.

I didn't go back to school that fall. My mother said it was because I was sick. I stayed cooped up in the house, without companionship. That year my father and mother didn't say a word about Christmas. And once, when I spoke of it, there was a strange, embarrassed silence; so I didn't say anything more about it.

I knew why I hadn't gone to school that fall - why I hadn't any new shoes - why we had been living on potato soup all winter. All these things, and others, many others, fitted themselves together in my mind, and meant something.

Then the words came into my mind and I whispered them into the darkness: "We're poor!" That was it. I was one of those poor children I had been sorry for, when I heard about them in Sunday school. My mother hadn't told me. My father was out of work, and we hadn't any money. That was why there wasn't going to be any Christmas at our house.


(2) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)

There was a little boy whose father worked in the bank; I liked him until he asked me distastefully, "Why do you smell the way you do?" I answered, "I guess it's because I eat potato soup so often" - and after that I avoided him.

There was a nice little girl, with whom I walked to school every day for a week or so - a dark-eyed, quiet little girl. But when I was gently teased about my 'little sweetheart', I stopped. Having a sweetheart meant, I knew, buying candy for her; and I had no money to buy candy with.

There was a little boy that year who bought some candy and shared it with me as we were walking to school; a few days later, he asked me when I was going to 'treat back'. I went to my mother in shame, hating to ask her for money, and resolved never to get into that trap again. With her nickel I bought some candy, gave the other boy half, and grimly ate my own half. Next time I would know better. I had no real friends, no chums, no one I trusted or let myself care for.


(3) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)

My mother was always particular about whom I played with, and I sought to understand her discriminations. Politeness, neatness and lack of profanity seemed to be the chief points in her social decisions. But one Sunday I found a nice little coloured boy out in front of the house, who was very polite, and quite neat, and used no bad words; moreover, he had a pocket full of coloured chalks with which pictures could be drawn on the sidewalk. Nevertheless, my mother called me back into the house. I could not understand why, and demanded fretfully, "He's a nice boy, isn't he Mamma?" My mother looked embarrassed and ashamed, and did not reply.

This ashamed silence of hers somehow threatened the moral fabric of my universe. From the window I could see the little coloured boy, after waiting a while, gather up his chalks, turn his back on the house, and slowly walk away. "Why, Mamma? Why can't I play with him? No answer. at least, she had the grace to be ashamed.

She did not know that at school I had kept the laws of her Ideal Universe which she was playing fast and loose with. There, at a double desk, I had sat with a little coloured boy, whom the other boys didn't want to sit with. How did my teacher know that I did not regard girls or Negro boys as my inferiors? Anyway, she was right. I took seriously the story about my father having fought and suffered in the war to set free the slaves.


(4) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)

Frank Norris's novel, The Octopus stirred my mind. And that spring, down in a small park near my home, I heard a man make a Socialist speech to a small and indifferent crowd. Afterwards I talked to him; he was a street-sweeper. I believe William Morris has a street-sweeper Socialist in News from Nowhere; but this was not a literary echo, this Socialist street-sweeper in Quincy - he was real. And my long-slumbering Socialism woke up. I went to a meeting of the Socialist local, a group of only seven or eight who met in the back room of, if I remember rightly, a jewelry store. And between that and the next meeting I converted my friend - conversion is a task which friendship makes extraordinary easy - and brought him in triumph to the back room. We both joined the local and paid our dues; this was irregular, because eighteen was the lowest age for membership in the Party, and I was barely sixteen now, and my friend but a year older.


(5) Floyd Dell wrote about discovering the work of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser while the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post.

I met Carl Sandburg, and he read some of his poems from manuscript. They were all impressionistic, misty, soft-outlined, delicate; I remember liking particularly the one about the fog that "comes on little cat feet". Carl Sandburg had not struck yet the note he was soon to strike in Chicago Poems.

I saw something of Theodore Dreiser, who was in Chicago for a while; he said I was the best critic in America; but I had said he was a great novelist, so it was only natural for him to think well of my critical powers.

A new, hitherto unknown novelist swam into my ken, Sherwood Anderson, with the manuscript of a novel, Windy MacPherson's Son, which I immediately admired; it had things in it about the Middle West which had never got into fiction. Sherwood Anderson worked in an advertising agency, and loathed it.


(6) In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd Dell wrote about joining The Masses in 1914.

I was paid twenty-five dollars a week for helping Max Eastman get out the magazine. My job on The Masses was to read manuscripts, bring the best of them to editorial meetings to be voted on, send back what we couldn't use, read proof, and 'make up' the magazine - all duties with which I was familiar; and also to help plan political cartoons and persuade the artists to draw them. I could submit my stories and poems anonymously to the editorial meetings, hear them discussed, and print them if they were accepted.

At the monthly editorial meetings, where the literary editors were usually ranged on one side of all questions and the artists on the other. The squabbles between literary and art editors were usually over the question of intelligibility and propaganda versus artistic freedom; some of the artists held a smoldering grudge against the literary editors, and believed that Max Eastman and I were infringing the true freedom of art by putting jokes or titles under their pictures. John Sloan and Art Young were the only ones of the artists who were verbally quite articulate; but fat, genial Art Young sided with the literary editors usually; and John Sloan, a very vigorous and combative personality, spoke up strongly for the artists.

Nobody gained a penny out of the things published in the magazine; it was an honour to get into its pages, an honour conferred by vote at the meetings. Max Eastman and I did get salaries for editorial work; but that was regarded as dirty work, which ought to be paid for. We were actually a little republic in which, as artists, we worked for the approval of our fellows, not for money.


(7) As editor of The Masses Floyd Dell gave Margaret Sanger support in her campaign in favour of birth control.

Margaret Sanger had begun her work on behalf on women's freedom from unwanted pregnancies; she renamed the prevention of conception 'birth control', and under that name it began to get attention in the newspapers. The propaganda went on under the threatening shadow of a federal statute, passed under the influence of that strange moral monstrosity, Anthony Comstock, which classed such information as 'obscene'.

In New York City a woman police spy, pretending to be a wife desperately in need of birth control information, got a pamphlet from William Sanger, as he was arrested. The Masses published articles in defence of him and of Margaret Sanger, and the magazine was immediately flooded with thousands of letters from women, asking for information about the methods of birth control, and giving the best as well as the most heart-breaking reasons for needing such information.


(8) Floyd Dell, like most of the people working for The Masses, was totally opposed to the United States becoming involved in the First World War.

In 1917 Allied propaganda was dragging the United States into the war, in spite of the re-election of Wilson on the promise contained in the slogan, 'He kept us out of the war!" Nearly all the American Socialist leaders, from Upton Sinclair down, had joined in the pro-war hysteria. Socialism seemed a broken reed; but the Pacifist movement looked stronger and more courageous than had been expected. I had to consider whether I was a Pacifist or not; I wasn't sure - if there were hope of Revolution, I wasn't. But the masses of Europe seemed to be going like sheep to the slaughter; Revolution seemed a vain hope.


(9) Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)

The Masses harassed by the post-office authorities, was suppressed in October, 1917, by the Government, and its editors were indicted, myself among them, under the so-called Espionage Act, which was being used not against German spies but against American Socialists, Pacifists, and anti-war radicals. Sentences of twenty years were being served out to all who dared say this was not a war to end war, or that the Allied loans would never be paid. But the courts would probably not get around to us until next year; and we immediately made plans to start another magazine, The Liberator, and tell more truth; we would stand on the pre-war Wilsonian program, and call for a negotiated peace.


(10) Floyd Dell, speech in court when charged with breaking the Espionage Act (1918)

There are some laws that the individual feels he cannot obey, and he will suffer any punishment, even that of death, rather than recognize them as having authority over him. This fundamental stubbornness of the free soul, against which all the powers of the state are helpless, constitutes a conscious objection, whatever its sources may be in political or social opinion.


(11) In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd Dell explained his thoughts on being charged with breaking the Espionage Act.

While we waited, I began to ponder for myself the question which the jury had retired to decide. Were we innocent or guilty? We certainly hadn't 'conspired' to do anything. But what had we tried to do? Defiantly tell the truth. For what purpose? To keep some truth alive in a world full of lies. And what was the good of that? I don't know. But I was glad I had taken part in that act of defiant truth-telling.

Rumours began to perculate. "Six to six." Next morning the debate in the jury-room grew fiercer, noisier. At noon the jury came in, hot, weary, angry, limp, and exhausted. They had fought the case amongst themselves for eleven vehement hours. And they could not agree upon a verdict.

But the judge refused to discharge them; and they went back, after further instructions, with grim determination on their faces.

At eleven o'clock the jurors reported continued disagreement, but were sent back. The next noon, hopelessly deadlocked, the jury was discharged, with all our thanks. And so we were free.