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(Excerpt from The Story of a Lover
But then, with returni...)
Excerpt from The Story of a Lover
But then, with returning strength, there came metaphysical skepticism. These great strue tures of philosophy seemed to me to be houses of cards, toys for imaginative children. And at the same time there burst upon me, with re newed intensity, the world of sensuous art, the direct, disturbing force of Nature, the mysteri ous appeal of Woman. Philosophy had pre pared me for a greater absorption in life than would otherwise have been possible. It helped to make me incapable of what men call prae tical life, and made me attach values only to significant things.
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The Spirit of the Ghetto; Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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This non-fiction narrative is an entertaining look at l...)
This non-fiction narrative is an entertaining look at labor struggles, anarchist politics, and proletarian culture in Chicago, the heart of the radical labor movement in the turn-of-the-century United States. Through the story of its central character, anarchist carpenter Anton Johannsen, The Spirit of Labor pulls the reader into a vibrant, gritty world inhabited by unionists and scabs, anarchists and socialists, hoboes and tramps, radical reformers, shady politicians and corrupt policemen, workers equipped with "ready fists and honest souls" and by business leaders bent on crushing the city's militant labor movement.
The book also reflects the uncomfortable fit between the worlds of the bohemian intellectual and the radical worker. Immediacy and humor make it a particularly appealing candidate for classroom use, and James R. Barrett adds a useful new introduction and extensive notes providing a historical and scholarly framework for the story.
Hutchins Hapgood was an American journalist and writer. He served as a journalist for the New York Commercial Advertiser, drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post, and as editorial writer for the New York Evening Post, the Press, and the Globe.
Background
Hutchins Hapgood was born on May 21, 1869 in Chicago and reared in Alton, Illinois. He was the second of three sons and four children of Charles Hutchins Hapgood and Fanny Louise Powers. His father, a prosperous plow manufacturer and admirer of the freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll, was a native of Petersham, Massachussets; his mother was a native of New York City.
Education
Hutchins spent a year at the University of Michigan and then three years at Harvard, from which he graduated with honors in 1892. After a year and a half of world travel and casual study in Germany, he returned to Harvard, where he served for a year (1896-1897) as assistant to Professor George Pierce Baker and took a Master of Arts degree in 1897.
Career
In 1897 Hapgood became a reporter on the New York Commercial Advertiser, where his brother Norman was already employed. As a staff member on the Commercial Advertiser, where city editor Lincoln Steffens had recruited a talented group of "personal journalists" to capture the drama and color of New York life, Hapgood wrote impressionistically of the varied and picturesque peoples of the city, including the "new immigrants" of the post-Civil War decades.
In 1902 a selection of these articles appeared in book form as The Spirit of the Ghetto. In these vivid portraits of Jewish life on New York's Lower East Side (a life to which he had gained access through his friendship with Abraham Cahan, a fellow Commercial Advertiser reporter), Hapgood rejected both moralizing and stereotyping in favor of sharp and sensitive delineations of specific individuals. The work was illustrated by Jacob Epstein, then an unknown ghetto youth, who went on to a distinguished career as a sculptor.
The next several years brought a variety of activities and places of residence. Hapgood left the Commercial Advertiser in 1903 and, after several months in Italy, joined the New York Morning Telegraph, a paper specializing in sports news. About 1910, after an interval in Chicago as drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post, another stay in Italy, a year in Indianapolis as a salesman for a conserve company owned by his younger brother, William, and a stint as an editorial writer with Oswald Garrison Villard's New York Evening Post, he returned to the New York Globe (the old Commercial Advertiser under a new name), where he remained until 1914.
His journalistic subjects were diverse: a "warm spring day, a French girl, a picture at Stieglitz's, an inspired bum in a saloon, a suffrage meeting, an interview with Bill Haywood, or a strike. " In this period Hapgood also produced The Autobiography of a Thief (1903), The Spirit of Labor (1907), An Anarchist Woman (1909), and Types from City Streets (1910), another collection of newspaper vignettes. In 1912 he contributed an introduction to the Prison Memoirs of the anarchist Alexander Berkman. These books, as the titles suggest, drew heavily upon his friendships in radical and anarchist circles and reflected a desire to explain "the far-reaching revolutionary tendencies of the labor movement. "
The Hapgoods lived at this time in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in a large house purchased for them by Hutchins Hapgood's father. Increasingly, however, Hapgood's creative potential was dissipated. Involvement with artistic and bohemian circles, extended travels in Italy and France, and hours spent in romantic intrigues, late-night rambles, and barroom conversations with marginal people produced many rich friendships - with Josiah Flynt, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Mabel Dodge, Bernard Berenson, Gertrude and Leo Stein - but little in the way of literary or journalistic accomplishment. Already in his forties, he was powerfully attracted by the youthful cultural revolt of the prewar years, with its emphasis on free, uninhibited self-expression. In 1915 he was one of the original Provincetown (Massachussets) Players, thereby adding George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and Eugene O'Neill to his circle. He and his wife wrote and performed one of the group's early plays, Enemies (1916), a dialogue between a man and a woman.
Meanwhile, politics and social movements touched him less and less. The turning inward occasioned by the death of his son Boyce in the influenza epidemic of 1918 merely accentuated a tendency already well under way. His anonymous The Story of a Lover (1919) expressed his intense, personal view of life and his mystic idealization of erotic experience. Not steadily employed after 1914, Hutchins Hapgood found himself spiritually adrift following the First World War. In the conformist climate of the 1920's, it became clear that neither individual liberation nor working-class revolution could be counted upon to redeem American society as Hapgood had hoped. Though he could count numerous friends among old-time Progressives such as Lincoln Steffens and exemplars of the modern temper like Ernest Hemingway, their social and intellectual frames of reference provided him with neither new themes nor interested editors.
In 1922 he sold the Dobbs Ferry house, and after two years in Europe the family divided its time between Provincetown, a summer place in Richmond, New Hampshire, and Key West, Florida. Having speculated with his inheritance in the 1920s, Hapgood was left by the crash of 1929 "a man with many responsibilities, with a very small income that he was trying continually to augment by some spectacular literary success that never came. " Overshadowed all his life by his older brother, he was also outdistanced by Lincoln Steffens, whose Autobiography he sought to emulate with his own prolix Victorian in the Modern World (1939).
He died in Provincetown of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-five; he was buried in the East Cemetery in Petersham, Massachussets.
Hapgood was sensitive and introverted while a student.
Connections
In June 1899 Hapgood married Neith Boyce, a journalist on the same paper. They had two sons, Boyce and Charles, followed by two daughters, Miriam and Beatrix.