Louise Bryant denied passport, Part I
THE FIRST OF A TWO-PART REPORT* ON BRYANT’S ATTEMPT TO ACQUIRE TRAVEL DOCUMENTS, AND OF WHAT WILL BE NUMEROUS POSTS FOCUSSING ON THIS UNSUNG HERO OF EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY RADICALISM
* *Part II is here.
One hundred years ago today ... Louise Bryant, journalist, poet, and activist, was trying to travel to Russia, and the US State Department was not letting her.
Louise Bryant, 1919. Courtesy the Socialist Review.
Bryant’s travel plans were both personal and professional. Her husband, John Reed, had left New York for Russia the previous Fall (an illegal journey, as Russia was under embargo), but by April of 1920 was imprisoned in a Finnish jail, having been arrested for smuggling. Bryant wanted to come to his aid either there or in Russia. She also had an offer to report from Russia for the International News Service.
The first official record regarding the passport is an April 10, 1920 State Department memorandum indicating that the request should be rejected on the grounds of her pro-Bolshevik testimonial before the Overman Committee that was investigating revolutionary Russia for the US Congress, because of her association with Reed, and also because, the memo claimed, the last time she had been issued a passport it had been on the condition that she not engage in “political agitation”—a condition on which she had reneged (Dearborn, 154).
In Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louis Bryant, biographer Mary Dearborn surmises that the denial was supported, if not insisted upon, by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (and prime architect of the Palmer Raids). However, the State Department, headed by Bainbridge Colby, had good reason to fear Bryant’s subversive influence.
Bryant, born 1885 in Nevada, started a career as an artist and writer when in her 20s, living in Portland, Oregon. In 1914, she met Reed, inspiring her to leave Portland and her then-husband and move to Greenwich Village, where she launched herself as a creative force, writing poetry and plays, and as a radical voice, publishing in The Masses. She was a founding member of the “Provincetown Players,” theater group that became a huge influence in US drama, as exemplified by its most famous member, Eugene O’Niell, with whom Bryant would have a lengthy and complicated relationship based in both work and sex.
With Reed, she travelled to Russia in 1917, and, working for the Hearst newspaper syndicate. wrote a series of articles lauding the Bolshevik Revolution, later published in the volume Six Red Months in Russia (1918). After World War I, she became an outspoken advocate for the ideals of socialism and communism in general and the Bolsheviks in particular. She and Reed started the journal The Voice of Labor in 1919 as a forum for their activism; she would take over as editor after his departure for Russia.
During Reed’s absence Bryant could follow his progress only through rumors in the press. On April 10, news came that he was executed in Finland; she soon learned that these were false reports. Dearborn says that Colby himself made sure she knew (150).
New York Tribune, 10 April, 1920, p. 4. Newspapers.com.