Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive

by David W. Levy

Overview

Here is the first full-length biography of Herbert Croly (1869-1930), one of the major American social thinkers of the twentieth century. David W. Levy explains the origins and impact of Croly's penetrating analysis of American life and tells the story of a career that included his founding of one of the most influential journals of the period, The New Republic, in 1914 and his writing of The Promise of American Life (1909), a landmark in the history of American ideas.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612690
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #53
Pages:	362
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

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Herbert Croly of the New Republic

The Life and Thought of an American Progressive

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By David W. Levy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04725-6

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CHAPTER 1

"Jenny June" and "The Great Suggester"

Herbert David Croly was born on January 23, 1869, in New York City. He once confided (mistakenly) to Edmund Wilson that he had been the very first child in the United States to be "christened" into the Religion of Humanity, Auguste Comte's curious attempt to apply the principles of science to the religious needs of mankind. The outmoded deity of western religion, Comte had argued, was no longer credible; the only proper object of worship was the Goddess Humanity, a female symbol representing all the people of the earth — those already dead, those now living, those yet to be born. The first "sacrament" of the Religion of Humanity was called "Presentation," and Herbert Croly, probably sometime during the first year of his life, received it.

In the ceremony of Presentation, "the mother and the father of the new scion of Humanity come to present it to the priesthood, which receives from them a solemn engagement to prepare the child properly for the service of the Goddess." The parents, the child's two sponsors, the congregation of witnesses gather to affirm that "private life is in the normal conception subordinate to the public," and to promise that the child will be instructed to undertake a life of unselfish service to the human community. Suitable addresses are made and suitable hymns sung:

How many souls of strongest powers
To selfish solitude consign'd
Have whiled in idleness their hours,
Nor nobly sought to serve mankind.

Unhappy, who, himself to please
Forsakes the path where duty lies,
Either in love of selfish ease
Or in contempt of human ties.

Properly consecrated, then, to the heavy task of serving Humanity all of the days of his life, Herbert David Croly was carried back to his home at 119 Bank Street. Not that any average New Yorker who happened to witness that novel ceremony could have doubted it, but the home to which "the new scion of Humanity" returned was one of the most interesting and unusual in the United States.

I

Herbert's mother, Jane Cunningham Croly, was among the best known women in the country. She had been born in 1829, the fourth child of Joseph H. Cunningham, the Unitarian minister at Market Harborough, Leicestershire. In 1841, when Jane was eleven, the family came to America and settled in Poughkeepsie and finally in New York City. Miss Cunningham was sent to Southbridge, Massachusetts, to live with her brother John, now a Unitarian minister himself. "Here it was," John reported, "that her remarkable capacity for journalism first developed itself." She and a co-worker prepared a semimonthly newspaper which was read aloud in the church.

In 1855, when she was twenty-six, Jane Cunningham felt ready to venture into that restless center for aspiring journalists, New York City. She was a delicate girl, small in stature and slight in figure. Despite her lips, which were a trifle too thin and a trifle too wide, she was not without a certain attractiveness. She had deep-brown hair and sparkling blue eyes, and an inner energy which imparted vivacity in her youth and a reservoir for endless work in her later years. She spoke low, in a sweet voice, but she was tough.

Her first New York article was accepted by the great Charles A. Dana, then assistant editor of the Tribune. She quickly gained a position with the Sunday Times and Noah's Weekly Messenger, and — like the proper Victorian she would always be — she modestly disguised her identity with the pseudonym "Jenny June." Her marriage to David Croly, a young reporter for the Herald, rather than ending it, quickened her career. Encouraged by her husband's rapid rise, and by a series of editors anxious to attract the ever-increasing numbers of female readers, Jane Croly, always writing as Jenny June and always devoting herself entirely to subjects of interest to women, advanced to the front rank of American women in journalism.

Her output over the next forty years was simply prodigious. In 1860 she became the editor of Demorest's Illustrated Monthly, a position she held for twenty-seven years. She was also connected from time to time with Godey's Lady's Book and The Home-Maker. She created Cycle, the clubwoman's magazine, and she owned it. When that journal was merged with The Home-Maker, she became the sole editor. She wrote the fashion department of Graham's Magazine and for Frank Leslie's Weekly and Monthly. She contributed to The Democratic Review and was an associate editor of the Messenger and of the Weekly Times(where she did the dramatic and literary departments and one-third of the editorial page). In New York she worked for the World, the Times, the Messenger, and the Daily Graphic. She is generally credited with being the first writer to syndicate columns, and for over thirty years she sent her letters to a collection of from twenty to twenty-five journals. Between 1869 and 1898, she wrote or compiled nine books.

In 1891 one reporter described Herbert Croly's mother as "the best known writer on fashions and social topics of any in the country." He estimated that "she has had millions of readers every month for over thirty years." Her brother thought that she had "affected the social life of more women, perhaps, than any other single controlling factor in the same period," and T. C. Evans, in the New York Times, contended that her pseudonym was "a beloved household word throughout the land, perhaps more widely known than that of any lady journalist." Her friend Margaret Ravenhill thought that "probably no woman of her generation has done more or better work"; and Cynthia Westover Alden, a fellow clubwoman, regarded her as "one of the greatest benefactors of women in literature."

If the first preoccupation of Herbert's mother was journalism, her second was the woman's club. In 1856, the first year of her marriage, she called the first Woman's Congress, an organization that met annually to discuss the changing role of women in society. In 1868, when Charles Dickens re-visited the United States and all the women were summarily excluded from his reception dinner, Mrs. Croly promptly responded by forming Sorosis, the first important woman's club in America. The idea of women's clubs for self-improvement and sisterhood, for education and community service, spread rapidly. In 1889, when Mrs. Croly called for a "general federation" to commemorate the twenty-first birthday of Sorosis, ninety-seven clubs were in existence. By 1896 there were over fourteen hundred and by 1901, 800,000 women belonged to the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In the same year that she organized the General Federation (the year, incidentally, of her husband's death), Mrs. Croly also founded the Woman's Press Club of New York, serving as its president or honorary president until the day she died. Finally, encouraged by the success of the General Federation, she organized a New York State Federation in 1894. The last ten years of her life were devoted to her twelve-hundred-page History of the Woman's Club Movement in America.

Nothing that affected women in late nineteenth-century America escaped Jane Croly's pen. She wrote about fashions, budgets, diets, the seasons, children. She wrote about duties, manners, cooking, courtship, recreation. But one searches her writing in vain for a consistent viewpoint or an unambiguous philosophic stance. Even on those questions which occupied her centrally for forty years, Jenny June was hopelessly inconsistent. The vast majority of her work concerned itself with a cluster of issues centering around the problem of women's proper "sphere" in society. But in the end she failed to offer her readers any sure and unshakable position even on those issues.

Regular readers of Jenny June, for example, found much in her work (contrary to the example afforded by her own career) that supported the traditional notion that women were happiest when they married, raised families, and remained at home where they belonged. "All women should have homes and children, and should be taught that therein is their life work," she wrote. "A woman is not a woman until she has been baptized in her love and devotion to home and children." "If the wife goes out to earn money ...," wrote Mrs. Croly, who consistently earned more than her husband, "the interests of the family must suffer."

As unequivocal as these statements seemed, they did not represent the entire range of her feelings about women and the world outside the home. She also espoused the opposite view, warmly supporting the efforts of women to forsake a life of marriage and to strike out bravely on their own. Marriage, she sometimes argued, was not the joy that most girls imagined. Men possessed absolute authority and "from the moment a woman becomes a wife she is in a state of subjection." Sadly, moreover, men were usually despotic seekers after personal pleasure and amoral tyrants, indifferent to the needs, the longings, the agonies of their wives: "Men accept difference of [sexual] function as evidence of inferiority, and practically act upon the proposition, that, not being able to contend for them, women have no rights that men are bound to respect." Given the unhappiness of modern marriage, Mrs. Croly sometimes argued, women had no choice but to turn to professions outside the home. "The silly pride which makes a virtue of helplessness, which considers money given better than money earned, is fast disappearing, and the pace becomes accelerated with every financial success achieved by women on their own account." Indeed, "it is a crime in parents to compel their daughters to look forward to marriage as the only prospect for occupation, position, or livelihood." Herbert's mother seemed sufficiently supportive of the idea of women in business to prepare an entire book, Thrown on Her Own Resources; or, What Girls Can Do, designed to be a handbook for women in search of careers.

When Jane Croly was consistent, she was consistently conservative. She was an excellent example of Victorian gentility — that unique, middle-class mixture of complacency and fear, which characterized so much "respectable" opinion in the late nineteenth century. Social reform of a certain sort was permissible of course, and she unhesitatingly supported such genteel movements as those to improve education, ensure international peace, preserve natural resources, or establish a Central Park where New Yorkers might take their leisure. But Mrs. Croly was ultimately more significant for the "dangerous" and "radical" reforms she opposed. Under no circumstances were the poor to be aided directly by the government or by private citizens — to do so would be to undermine habits of independence and self-reliance. The immigrant (immigrant Croly argued) was "an unlettered, ignorant man, who has seen nothing, who knows nothing, who has read nothing, who has drifted between his potato patch and his cabin until he found himself in the hold of a ship, the most unclean part of its cargo...." Citizenship was conferred too easily on these newcomers and should be earned. Mrs. Croly opposed the admission of Negro women into Sorosis.

In typical genteel fashion, moreover, Jenny June despised the world of politics. In 1877, when Herbert was eight years old, she repeated her distaste for political life: "Assured position in science, in literature, or in art is infinitely higher than any position in politics, ... I should like my boy to be distinguished in literature, science, art, or journalism, but if neither of these were possible, I would infinitely rather he were a first-class farmer, or engineer, or printer, or carpenter, than one of the large army of legal politicians depending upon street fights and bar-rooms for their constituency and support."

Jenny June's harshest words, however, were reserved for those reformers who would lead the ladies too far astray. Up to a point, of course, she sympathized with and encouraged (at least sometimes) the new yearnings and aspirations of women. After all, she was herself the product of the very forces which stirred the "new woman." But when those forces seemed to lead toward any relaxation of sexual relations, Jane Cunningham Croly unleashed the full fury of her pen. She warned young girls against the "impertinent familiarity" of men. She opposed women's suffrage in the most violent and uncompromising terms — pure women, she was sure, would have no desire to associate themselves with the sordid world of politics. And despite her own sporadic denunciations of marriage, she regarded those women who agitated for any easing of the divorce laws as nothing more than "reckless, egotistic, subversive, and insurrectionary ... social incendiaries, sowing the seeds of dissatisfaction and revolt which are the outgrowth of their own want of truth, honor, and integrity."

Perhaps the secret of Jenny June's immense popularity was the very inconsistency of her views. By arguing both sides of the fundamental questions of the day, she was able to hold a great variety of women readers — partly because she may have succeeded in touching identical ambivalences in some of them, partly because if she seemed to scold today, she would surely praise tomorrow. No doubt, some of the unsteadiness of her opinions may be accounted for by the necessity to please particular audiences and particular editors. But the fluctuations of her views can also be ascribed to a pervasive internal conflict, which she was never quite able to resolve. Herbert Croly's mother was simply a woman caught in a trap. On the one hand, she was a "pioneer" — she had successfully, even spectacularly entered the male world of New Yorkjournalism as no woman had done before her. On the other hand, she was emotionally incapable of flouting the conventions. This tension between the radicalism of her life and the gentility of her opinions helps to explain her inconsistencies. She had to defend the emancipation of women to justify her career. But she had to maintain the ideal of Victorian womanhood in order to retain respectability in an America suspicious of the "new woman," and because temperamentally she could never wrench herself away from that ideal completely.

The conflict must have been terribly painful for her, but it was one which many adventurous women in the late nineteenth century were beginning to experience. She attempted to ease the strain by vigorously defending "civilized" morality from those aggressive forces in American culture which seemed to threaten it — materialism, unassimilable immigrants and Negroes, crass politics, sex reform. She could not pursue her defense of social and sexual purity into the evil realm of political action the way some women could. But she did the next best thing by organizing thousands of like-minded women into genteel and civilized associations. Whether or not this was sufficient to release her from the contradictions and ambiguities of her life is impossible to know. But it should go without saying that the home which Jane Croly would supervise and dominate would be deeply affected.

II

Herbert's father was David Goodman Croly, the editor of the New York World. He was a handsome man with clear, deep-set eyes, strong features, and a fantastic moustache that surrounded his mouth like two long braids and hung down to shoulder level. He had been born in Cloghnakilty, County Cork, only forty-one days before Jane Cunningham's birth across the Irish Sea. His mother, Elizabeth, was of Huguenot descent. His father, Patrick, a man of wide reading and literary tastes, brought the family to New York City when David was still a small boy. Financial necessity forced young David to the silversmith trade, but an old friend from those early days recalled that "whatever of leisure was left to him after his long day's labor was turned to good account in the cultivation of his mind." He joined the Young Men's Debating Society where, from the start, he expressed "the most advanced views on all the political, industrial, and social questions of the day." He learned shorthand, taught it to others, and, with the money saved, enrolled for a year at New York University. He got a job as a reporter for the Evening Post, and began learning journalism under two superb tutors, William Bartlett and the venerable William Cullen Bryant. After a friend from the debating society introduced him to Frederick Hudson, Croly was hired by the Herald, and it was while working there that he met and married Jane Cunningham.

After a year, the Crolys were persuaded by William Gore King (who had married Mrs. Croly's sister Mary) to take over his faltering Rockford Democratic Standard. The young couple moved to Illinois, bought the publication, changed its name to the Rockford Daily News, and achieved a temporary rebirth for the paper. Despite their efforts, however, the venture failed — although it was sufficiently popular with the Douglas Democrats in the neighborhood that a group of them offered to help refinance it. "We worked night and day," Mrs. Croly remembered, "but at the end of fifteen months had sunk everything, even the proceeds of our furniture in our work." Partly because of the financial stress, partly because Mrs. Croly wanted a larger field for their endeavors, the Crolys returned to New York City and "went hopefully to work again."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Herbert Croly of the New Republic by David W. Levy. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustrations, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• 1. “Jenny June" and "The Great Suggester”, pg. 1
• 2. Harvard College versus David Croly, pg. 43
• 3. The Blank Years, 1888-1909, pg. 72
• 4. The Promise of American Life, pg. 96
• 5. “Taking on the Form of the Sun God”, pg. 132
• 6. Progressive Democracy, pg. 162
• 7. A Journal of Opinion, pg. 185
• 8. Years of “Rare Opportunity,” 1914—1918, pg. 218
• 9. Years of Despair, 1919-1930, pg. 263
• 10. Conclusion, pg. 301
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 309
• Index, pg. 327