Louise Bryant denied passport, Part II
THE SECOND OF A TWO-PART REPORT ON BRYANT’S ATTEMPT TO ACQUIRE TRAVEL DOCUMENTS. (SEE THE APRIL 15 POST HERE.) AS THE YEAR GOES ON, WE WILL HAVEE NUMEROUS POSTS FOCUSSING ON THIS UNSUNG HERO OF EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY RADICALISM
One hundred years ago today ... An April 16 memorandum by the Division of Foreign Intelligence explained why Louise Bryant was being denied a passport. If she left the country, it claimed, she would probably “reengage in Bolshevik propaganda aimed directly or indirectly against the United States…. To issue this passport might set a precedent for the issuance of passports to others equally radical whose activities might prove embarrassing to this Government" (qtd. Dearborn, 155).
Bryant ca. 1920. Wikicommons.
Bryant’s reasons for applying for a passport are explained in yesterday’s post; one motivation was her plan to visit her husband John Reed, who had been in Russia and then Finland for over half a year.
Reed’s absence had a strong effect on Bryant in the early months of 1920. She expressed her desire to be reunited with him in “Russian Memories,” a poem she published in the prestigious literary journal The Dial.
The poem turns Reed into an “ikon”–alluding to the reverence and tactility of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Dial 1 May, 1920, Cover, masthead, pp. 565-6. The Dial Vol. LXVII, No. 5. Google Books.
Bryant’s poem placed her in the company of literary luminaries such as Sherwood Anderson and e.e. cummings, among others.
The Dial had been around in various forms since its founding as a transcendentalist journal in 1839. In 1920 it had been recently relocated to New York, housed at 152 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village (the building still stands), and recently rededicated as a literary journal, one of the many “little magazines” that helped make NYC a literary capitol of modernism.