Social Significance of the Modern Drama, The.
An Intimate Inscription From Emma Goldman
To Fellow Radical
John Reed
Goldman, Emma. The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Boston: Richard Badger, [1914].
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of a pondering Emma Goldman, hand on chin; publisher’s advertisements for other Goldman books and other radical political publications bound in at rear; pages faintly yellowed, essentially fresh and bright; brown cloth, stamped in dark brown; covers used, lightly soiled; all in all a handsome copy of an extremely scarce work. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank in the year of publication: To my Comrade/John Reed/in Appreciation/for his masterly/pen picture/of the Red State/in Colorado/ Fraternally/Emma Goldman/July 1914. Goldman’s book was one of her attempts at literary and dramatic criticism, not the forte for which she would become known. It is pretty much what it proclaims to be: a study of modern drama, though from a leftist-feminist perspective. Goldman’s inscription refers to Reed’s chronicle of the terrible strike against the Colorado Fuel & Power Company, otherwise known as the “Ludlow Massacre” (to be discussed in more depth below.)
What is so spectacular here is not so much the contents of Goldman’s book but the association and the content of the inscription. Emma Goldman and John Reed were two of the most controversial and infamous figures of their time. Each made a name both through their words (their literary canon) and their actions. Goldman’s literary canon is well documented in this catalogue. Reed was not only an energetic and cantankerous social activist but also the author of many leftist tomes, the most famous among them being his laudatory chronicle of the Russian Revolution, the classic Ten Days That Shook The World (1919).
Goldman and Reed knew each other from the leftist-anarchist circles each traveled in when each lived in NYC’s Greenwich Village early in the century. Their mutual friends included Walter Lippman, Max Eastman, Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne and Waldo Frank, Alfred Kreymborg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Crystal Eastman, Susan Glaspell, Alexander Berkman (Goldman’s collaborator and sometime lover), George Bellows, Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Eugene O’Neill, and Margaret Sanger (an especially close friend of Goldman’s). Goldman and Reed had a long and complicated history as activists and as friends; but this history was in a way initiated by the incident referred to in Goldman’s inscription.
In 1913, 10,000 miners struck against the Colorado Fuel and Power Company, controlled by John D. Rockefeller. On April 10, 1914, 33 people, including women and children related to strikers, were slaughtered by the National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado. This tragedy, soon termed the “Ludlow Massacre,” attracted nationwide attention amongst labor leaders and humanitarians. Later on the same day of the massacre, John Reed and Max Eastman left New York for Colorado to help organize workers and chronicle the auspicious events. In July 1914, Reed’s long article “The Colorado War” appeared in Metropolitan magazine. This was his one and only published work on the harrowing activities in Ludlow.
A biographer of Reed later described the influence the Ludlow tragedy had on Reed:
…he [Reed] left New York to hasten off to Ludlow, Colorado and a new assignment. There had been a Nasacort of striking miners and their families in Ludlow on the morning of April 10, 1914. Thirty-three people, more than half of them women and children, had been either machine-gunned or burned to death by a state militia made up of recently sworn-in policemen….
When he arrived on the scene, he found “stoves, pots and pans still half full of food that had been cooking that terrible morning, baby carriages, piles of half-burned clothes, children’s toys all riddled with bullets, the scorched mouths of the tent cellars…all that remained of t
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