American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Paperback)

Stansell succinctly defines bohemia as the "revolt against bourgeois convention," and she writes that New York's bohemia was widely believed to be peopled with "youthful libertines who despised bourgeois respectability and material success." One respect in which bohemia rejected middle-class certainties was to permit innovation in gender relations, and the appearance of the "New Women" in New York beginning in the 1890 is among the most important events Stansell describes.

What Stansell characterizes as the "dissent from bourgeois life" took many forms, and it is difficult to generalize without oversimplifying, but her chapter on political radical Emma Goldman begins with the important point that modernism tended to merge "disparate phenomena." According to Stansell, Goldman "championed modern dance and modern drama, free love, homosexuality, and martyrs of the labor movement," and she was a forceful advocate of "militant anticapitalism." I would recommend this book solely for Stansell's multi-part sketch of Goldman.

Stansell's discussion of changes in the publishing industry also is excellent. According to Stansell established publishes were increasingly criticized as "aging, smug, priggish, stodgy," attributes which probably could have been assigned to middle-class leaders of all facets of turn-of-the-century American society. In contrast, Stansell writes, independent publishers, "mostly well-off German Jews," marketed literature with a political nature, as well as "birth control information, pornography, and papers advocating free love." Stansell incisively observes that the frequent battles of this era concerning censorship laws were part of a broader "contest for cultural authority..., a battle over who was to determine the content of literature," and censorship opponents "were delighted to find themselves free-speech heroes."

Stansell's discussion of the political and cultural content of the revolt against middle-class America demonstrates the complex interplay of ideas, as does the section of her book entitled "The Human Sex." According to Stansell, the moderns rejected the "crippling convention of their parents' generation [that] had set the sexes against each other by segregating people into separate spheres." It probably is not surprising that, in addition to advocating sexual democracy, radicals of this era often supported women's suffrage. Furthermore, Stansell writes, "controversy over contraception often "turned into a free speech issue." Stansell's bohemians had liberated attitudes toward sexual activity, and she notes that "free love" also signified talking and writing about [sex], a lively discourse of sexual conversation and revelation."

I suspect that Stansell goes to far when she asserts that there was a "crisis of the bourgeoisie" beginning in the 1890s. Indeed, I would argue that there have been few periods in American history when middle-class values were more dominant. But Stansell is absolutely correct that the New York bohemians' resistance to bourgeois hegemony challenged numerous conventions of American society and culture, and many members of the American middle-class considered themselves to be under assault.

Most of the books I read concern military or political history, but Christine Stansell's American Moderns was fascinating, and I recommend it without qualification.

Given the sheer magnitude of her subject, Stansell is necessarily sketchy in places, and the book suffers on occasion from an overly wordy, academic style. But she does provide a succinct look at the era's most important activists: especially Emma Goldman and also Randolph Bourne, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Mabel Dodge and many others. The book doesn't pretend to be a biography of any of them but does whet the reader's appetite for learning more about them all. The same is true of the events it describes, particularly the successes and failures of the labor movement and the evolution of the feminist movement beyond advocacy of women's suffrage. (A particularly fascinating part of Stansell's story is the tension between labor and feminism, a division that stymied the left back then much as it does now.) Stansell ends her narrative with a brief assessment of the Red Scare and the quick end it put to the radicalism she delineates earlier in the book. She doesn't really examine the social progress of the otherwise-conservative 1920s and beyond or demonstrate how the radicalism of the 1910s laid the groundwork for it; but the case for that is quite clear after reading this.

The book contains little contextual information regarding the societal conditions of the preceding decades and almost none for the following ones, so Stansell's argument is easier to appreciate if you already have some knowledge of those times. Still, it is a good overview of an underappreciated bridge between two well-documented eras, the people who got us across that bridge, and the environment they lived in. If you want to learn about America in the 1910s, this book may or may not tell you all you want to know. But if not, it will definitely lay the groundwork for understanding whatever event or person you're most interested in.