The anarchists seldom initiated anything, because they did not have the personnel or the equipment, but when something else was started which appeared to have any good in it, they came right in. This they did with the Ferrer School on Twelfth Street near Fourth Avenue, in the founding of which Hutch, with the liberal journalist, Leonard Abbott, and the author, Manuel Komroff, were moving spirits. The object was to provide a form of education more progressive than that offered by the public schools, and its name was intended to perpetuate the memory of the recently martyred Spanish libertarian, Francisco Ferrer, who had established modern free schools in Spain in which science and evolution had been taught.
Lola Ridge, intense rebel from Australia, was the organizing secretary, Robert Henri and George Bellows gave lessons in art, and a young man named Will Durant was chosen to direct the younger children, combining in his teaching Froebel, Montessori, and other new methods. Under him we enrolled Stuart.
Will Durant was of French-Canadian ancestry. His mother had worked hard to put him through a Jesuit seminary, but just before taking the vows he had abandoned the priesthood. While he had been studying he had read Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and was prepared to acquaint New York with the facts of sex psychology. Sitting nonchalantly to deliver his lectures, which evidenced scholarly background and research, he advanced to his small but serious audience practically the first public expression of this intimate subject.
The young instructor created rather a problem for the directors by unexpectedly marrying a pupil, Ida Kaufman, commonly called Puck. I remember one Saturday when she was romping with Stuart, and my laundress said to her, “Why, you’re so young to be married. Do you like it?”
Puck replied, “Oh, I don’t care, but I’d much rather play marbles.”
Intellectuals were then flocking to enlist under the flag of humanitarianism, and as soon as anybody evinced human sympathies he was deemed a Socialist. My own personal feelings drew me towards the individualist, anarchist philosophy, and I read Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Fourier, but it seemed to me necessary to approach the ideal by way of Socialism; as long as the earning of food, clothing, and shelter was on a competitive basis, man could never develop any true independence.
Therefore, I joined the Socialist Party, Local Number Five, itself something of a rebel in the ranks, which, against the wishes of the central authority, had been responsible for bringing Bill Haywood East after his release from prison. The members—Italian, Jewish, Russian, German, Spanish, a pretty good mixture—used the rooms over a neighborhood shop as a meeting place and there they were to be found every evening reading and discussing politics.
Somebody had donated a sum of money to be spent to interest women in Socialism. As proof that we were not necessarily like the masculine, aggressive, bulldog, window-smashing suffragettes in England, I, an American and a mother of children, was selected to recruit new members among the clubs of working women. The Scandinavians, who had a housemaids’ union, were the most satisfactory; they already leaned towards liberalism.
Grant, who was as yet too young to go to school, wholeheartedly disapproved of my political activities. Once when I was about to depart for the evening he climbed up on my lap and said, “Are you going to a meeting?”
“Yes.”