Peter Hulme

The Liberal Club and its Jamaican Secretary

© Peter Hulme, March 2017 (rev. December 2021)

Historians of New York agree on the centrality of

the Liberal Club to the first modern wave of
Greenwich Village bohemianism, usually dated as
1913 to 1918. This was, as Henry May notes, an age
of innocence, eventually brought to an end
through divisions caused by the First World War;
but, while it lasted, the club at the heart of
Greenwich Village offered a meeting place where
writers, intellectuals, anarchists, socialists, artists,
syndicalists, and students mingled and talked and
danced.1 Emma Goldman, Eugene O’Neill, John
Fig. 1 W. Adolphe Roberts in 1917. W. Reed, Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Sanger, Floyd
Adolphe Roberts Papers. National Library Dell, Max Eastman, Alfred Kreymborg, Edna St
of Jamaica MS353.6.1. With kind
permission of the National Library of Vincent Millay, and Lincoln Steffens were just
Jamaica. some of the famous names who frequented the
Liberal Club in those halcyon days for radicalism.2
However, given the recognised importance of the place, the bedrock of research
about the Liberal Club turns out, on closer inspection, to be surprisingly skimpy. The
records of the club have not survived, so reconstruction of its history has been
difficult. The only large-scale study is Keith N. Richwine’s 1968 University of
Pennsylvania PhD thesis and most subsequent scholars take this as their direct or
indirect source.3 Richwine drew in part on the memories of surviving members,
most importantly Floyd Dell. He also spoke to two previous historians of the period,
Albert Parry and Allen Churchill. Parry’s study was broader than Greenwich
Village, but Churchill had himself interviewed some surviving members.4 All three

1Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1959).
2In recent years this centrality has been underlined in a series of impressive studies of the culture of early twentieth-
century New York bohemia: Arthur F. Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and
Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976); Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in
Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911-1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Steven Watson,
Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991); William B. Scott and Peter M.
Rutkoff, New York Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Christine Stansell, American Moderns:
Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000); Gerald W.
McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York Neighborhood, 1898-1918 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2001); Emily Kies Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002);
Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003); Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010);
John Strausbaugh, The Village: A History of Greenwich Village (New York: Ecco, 2014).
3Keith Norton Richwine, “The Liberal Club: Bohemia and the Resurgence in Greenwich Village, 1912-1918”,
Ph.D. thesis. University of Pennsylvania, 1968.
4Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America [1933] (New York: Dover Publications,
1960); Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians: A Re-creation of Greenwich Village in its Heyday (New York: E.P. Dutton

1
writers obviously also drew on a series of published memoirs and fictionalised
accounts of the period by Dell (who wrote several), Egmont Arens, Harry Kemp,
Clement Wood, Charles Grand Pierre, Lawrence Langner, Hutchins Hapgood,
Alfred Kreymborg, Lincoln Steffens, Malcolm Cowley, Anna Chapin, Orrick Johns,
Alyse Gregory, William Zorach, and Edmund Wilson. George Seldes’s came late but
was worth waiting for.5 Richwine rather suggests that his informants’ recollections
were not always clear or accurate, perhaps because only Seldes was under 80 years
old at the time of their contact with Richwine. He notes that Dell’s accounts are
“impressionistic”, offering “little in the way of documentation and detail”.6 He also
notes errors in Parry’s and Churchill’s accounts, neither of which comes with
references. After the disintegration of the club in 1921 many members went on to
other careers, according to Richwine quickly forgetting or consciously suppressing
their pre-war Village radicalism and, in their memoirs, giving what he implies are
deliberately misleading accounts, although he makes an exception for Lawrence
Langner’s The Magic Curtain.7 After all this, Richwine produces a list of ninety-one
members by aggregating all the names mentioned by people who had spoken or
written about the club. Other scholars have subsequently augmented this list.8
One member—briefly mentioned by Richwine as a Liberal Club spokesman
and “one of the young radicals”,9 although puzzlingly not then included in his list of
members—was Walter Adolphe Roberts, who was interviewed by the New York
Times in 1913 at a moment when the club was about to begin its bohemian phase in
its new Greenwich Village location. Forty years later, Roberts wrote about his
involvement with the Liberal Club in an autobiography which remained

& Co., 1959). Richwine spoke to or corresponded with Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Louis Untermeyer, Jean Starr
Untermeyer, and Gilbert Seldes; Churchill with Egmont Arens, Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Joseph
Freeman, Walter Marshall, Scudder Middleton, and Ruth Pickering Pinchot.
5 Floyd Dell, Looking at Life (London: Duckworth, 1924); Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village [1926] (Freeport, NY:
Books for Libraries Press 1970); Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography [1933] (Port Washington NY: Kennikat
Press, 1969); Floyd Dell, “Rents Were Low in Greenwich Village” [1947], in The Greenwich Village Reader: Fiction,
Poetry and Reminiscences, 1872-2002, ed. June Skinner Sawyers (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 257-266;
Egmont Arens, The Little Book of Greenwich Village: A Handbook of Information Concerning New York’s Bohemia (New
York: E. Arens, 1918); Harry Kemp, Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (New York: Boni and Liveright,
1922); Harry Kemp, More Miles: An Autobiographical Novel (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926); Clement Wood, The
Greenwich Village Blues (New York: H. Harrison, 1926); Charles Grand Pierre, Rambling through Greenwich Village,
Washington Square, Lower 5th Ave. (New York: The Greenwich Village Weekly News, 1935); Clement Wood, The Glory
Road: An Autobiography (New York: Poets Press, 1936); Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1951); Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1939); Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957); Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of
Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931); Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey
of the 1920’s [1951] (New York: Compass Books, 1962); Anna Alice Chapin, Greenwich Village, with illustrations by
Alan Gilbert Cram (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917); Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My
Father and Myself (New York: Stackpole, 1937); Alyse Gregory, The Day is Gone (New York: Dutton, 1948); William
Zorach, My Life: The Autobiography of William Zorach (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1967); Edmund
Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952);
George Seldes, Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Random
House, 2011).
6 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 116.
7 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 116.
8 See Appendix below.
9 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 103.

2
unpublished at the time of his death in 1962. Finally, in 2015, These Many Years,
Roberts’s autobiography, was published in Jamaica, offering to shine some new
shafts of light on the history of the Liberal Club.10 Further glimmers are seen in
documents of his found elsewhere: a letter signed by Roberts on Liberal Club
writing paper and a poster for a Liberal Club event.
Roberts’s route to Greenwich Village was similar to that of at least some of his
fellow Liberal Club members: he was a free-lance journalist drawn to New York to
try his luck as a writer. In the fall of 1913 he was 26 years old and his journalistic
career was just beginning to get established thanks to his role as assistant editor on
the Semi-Monthly Magazine Section, which had national syndication. He was a regular
at Petitpas’ restaurant on West 29th Street, where J. B. Yeats (father of W. B.) held
court and, though a writer by trade, he was good friends with several artists such as
John Sloan, Robert Henri, and George Bellows, and knew many of the political
radicals of the area through his membership of the Socialist Party’s no. 1 branch. He
lived in the famous ‘House of Genius’ at 61 Washington Square South, previously
home to the likes of Adelina Patti, Frank Norris, and Gelett Burgess, and currently
also of the poet Alan Seeger.11 And – in the best Village traditions – he had a lively
love life, which would later include affairs with two of the most prominent women
associated with the Liberal Club, Edna St Vincent Millay and Margaret Sanger. In
other words, W. Adolphe Roberts was a typical denizen of the bohemian part of
Greenwich Village in 1913. However, whereas most of that ilk—at least those
without degrees from Harvard or Princeton—would have had mid-western
backgrounds, Roberts came from the West Indian island of Jamaica. Born to a white
family in genteel financial decline, and brought up in a rural backwater near the
town of Mandeville, Roberts had been educated at home by his father and
encouraged from an early age to write. After learning his journalistic trade in
Kingston, he had travelled extensively in North America, working for a railroad
company in Northern Mexico and freelancing in San Francisco before settling in
New York in the summer of 1909. Roberts was prominent in the Liberal Club’s
relocation to Greenwich Village and its establishment there in the fall of 1913, but he
left for Paris in January 1914, eventually becoming a correspondent in the city for the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He returned to New York in January 1916, and so was also
present during the club’s final years, although by that time he was largely
unsympathetic to its changing character.

*
Most accounts of the high point of bohemian Greenwich Village begin with the
moment when the Liberal Club moved premises from the tony Gramercy Park area
to a down-at-heel house on MacDougal Street between West 3rd and West 4th Streets,
just south of Washington Square—a significant “shift of cultural power”, as

10W. Adolphe Roberts, These Many Years: An Autobiography, ed. Peter Hulme, Kingston: University of the West
Indies Press, 2015.
11The landlady was Mme Catherine Branchard (1856-1937) – often now mistakenly referred to as Blanchard. She
had been born Katharina Ruede Branchard in Sulz bei Laufenburg, a Rhine Valley town, and came to the USA in
1901. See “Madame Branchard and her ‘House of Genius’”, American Notes & Queries, V, no. 1 (April 1945), 3-7, for
which W. Adolphe Roberts supplied much of the information.

3
Richwine calls it.12 This move marked, in the words of Floyd Dell, the beginning of
the “seventh Village”, a seventh heaven before it began its inevitable decline into a
tourist blackspot in the 1920s, assisted by the new subway stop at Sheridan Square.13
Richwine depicts an older generation of New York reformers, socialists, social
gospellers, and philanthropists running a genteel lecture and discussion group
called the Liberal Club based at 132 East 19th Street, just south of Gramercy Park,
presided over by Rev. Percy Stickney Grant of the Church of the Ascension on Fifth
Avenue.14 Some members of the Liberal Club also belonged to Grant’s congregation
and were known as Ascensionites.15 Founded in 1907, the club’s initial officers were
Lincoln Steffens (President), Franklin H. Giddings (1st VP), Charles E. Russell (2nd
VP), J. G. Phelps Stokes (Treasurer), and Darwin J. Meserole (Secretary). Other active
members included Morris Hillquit, Edmond Kelly, Ernest Poole, Waddill Catchings,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Samuel Merwin.16 (No mention of Percy Stickney
Grant, who is often, even by Richwine, said to have been its founder.)
By the summer of 1913 the club had a slew of younger and more radical
members from Greenwich Village. Richwine notes two cracks in the fabric: the
blackballing of Emma Goldman when her name was put forward for membership by
Hutchins Hapgood and some internal strife reported by Lawence Langner “over the
question of whether Negroes should be admitted”.17 Neither of these supposed
cracks is entirely straightforward. The blackballing of Goldman results from
Richwine’s misreading of Hapgood’s story. According to Hapgood, when he
returned to New York (around 1905) he became “a charter member” of the Liberal
Club:

But my membership was terminated abruptly by an attempt on my part to test its

liberality. I suggested Emma Goldman as a member. She was blackballed by the Club;
upon which I promptly resigned. I knew, of course, that Emma was not a liberal, but I
thought her rejection was a sign of illiberality on the part of the organization. I have been
resigning from everything ever since. Other charter members of the Liberal Club were
Lincoln Steffens, Gilbert Roe, and Theodore Schroeder. 18

The date, and the presence of the free-thinkers Roe and Schroeder strongly suggest
that Hapgood was referring not to the East 19th Street Liberal Club but to its

12 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 89.

13 Dell, Homecoming, 2.
14Percy Stickney Grant (1860-1927) was an American Protestant Episcopalian clergyman born in Boston and
educated at Harvard. In 1893 he became minister of the Church of the Ascension of New York City, well-known
for his socialist opinions and for his Sunday-might open ‘forum’ for the expression of all views. He was later
involved in various controversies with his Bishop and eventually resigned his rectorship. See James William
Kennedy, “The Social Gospel: Percy Stickney Grant, 1893-1924”, in his The Unknown Worshipper, New York:
Morehouse-Barlow Co. for the Church of the Ascension, 1964, 77-92.
15 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 90.
16 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 22, 1909, 17.
Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 94-95; referencing Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, 277 and Langner, The
17

Magic Curtain, 67.

18 Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939, 277.

4
predecessor, the Manhattan Liberal Club.19 In fact, New York had four Liberal Clubs
over a 50-year period, which has led to serious confusion, exacerbated by the fact
that some members belonged to two or three of the organizations. The Manhattan
Liberal Club, closely associated with the Freethought movement and the National
Liberal League, was a splinter group from the original New York Liberal Club
founded in 1869 by Horace Greeley. The Manhattan Liberal Club originally met in
the German Masonic Hall on East 15th Street, although in its latter years it became
peripatetic before petering out around 1909, not long after the East 19th Street Liberal
Club started up in 1907.20
Langner’s story is clarified by Ronald Steel in his 1980 biography of Walter
Lippmann when he refers to a letter to Lippmann from Caroline Dexter, secretary of
the East 19th Street Liberal Club, rejecting his proposal of W. E. B. Du Bois for
membership. According to Du Bois himself, Lippman had argued unsuccessfully for
Du Bois’s admission against Franklin Giddings.21 Since no African Americans are
listed among the Greenwich Village Liberal Club membership, this hardly appears
to have been an issue that exercised the radicals.
However, according to Richwine the most immediate cause for the rift in the
Liberal Club was the behavior—or at least concern over the publicity surrounding
the behavior—of the feminist campaigner Henrietta Rodman, a teacher who was in a
series of running battles with the New York Board of Education, most recently (in
March 1913) over her failure to report to the Board her marriage to Herman de
Fremery, a requirement she found discriminatory. Most East 19th Street Liberal Club
members would have been supportive of her stand, but more worrying, according to
Richwine, were the rumors that she was involved in some type of shockingly illicit
“modern free union” in which the married couple lived with de Fremery’s
“common-law wife”.22
In discussion with Richwine, Floyd Dell clearly disagreed that Rodman was to
blame, while accepting that newspaper publicity may have scared the Ascensionites,
thereby, as Richwine points out, contradicting his own earlier account in the first
version of his memoirs, Love in Greenwich Village, which waxes lyrical about the

19Justin Kaplan has Goldman blackballed when Steffens was president of the Liberal Club in 1909-10. Even if true,
this could hardly have precipitated a crisis more than three years later, but Kaplan’s credibility on the issue is in any
case undermined by his reference to this Liberal Club as a “Greenwich Village” association, something it didn’t
become until late 1913 (Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 173).
20The Manhattan Liberal Club and the East 19th Street Liberal Club are certainly confused in one apparently
authoritative publication about Emma Goldman’s appearance at the former on 8 October 1902: “The New York
Liberal Club, also known as Manhattan Liberal Club, had been founded in 1869 as an open forum for political
discussion on all issues… Founding members include Rev. Stickney Grant, socialist Charles Edward Russell, and
muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens” (Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume One:
Made for America, 1890-1901, ed. Candace Falk et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 572). In 1869
Grant and Russell were both nine years old, Steffens only three. They all in fact belonged to the East 19th Street
Liberal Club.
21Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 39; W. E. B. Du Bois, In the
Battle for Peace: The Story of my 83rd Birthday (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.
22Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 97, quoting New York Times, September 12, 1913, 7. On Rodman’s activism, see
Patricia A. Carter, “Henrietta Rodman and the Fight to Further Women’s Economic Autonomy,” in Leading Women:
Educational Lives and International Networks, 1900-1960, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Smyth (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 152-178.

5
disruptive radicalism of ‘Egeria’, his name for Henrietta Rodman.23 This is Dell’s
original account:

The old Liberal Club was a respectable, well-meaning up-town club, composed mainly of
polite old-fashioned believers in the gradual improvement of mankind by going to
lectures. Egeria entered it, and it went into a ferment, and presently there was an
explosion. The immediate cause of the explosion, oddly enough, was Egeria’s marriage.
She couldn't even do with so conventional a thing as get married, without creating a
terrific sensation and getting headlines in the yellow journals. People took sides fiercely –
they were always taking sides, whenever Egeria did anything! – and then the more
shocked half of the membership resigned. Egeria took the other half, her faithful friends
and followers, and led them into Greenwich Village.24

One of the difficulties with this account is that, as he himself notes, Dell arrived
in the Village just as the reorganized club was opening on MacDougal Street and so
did not witness whatever happened at East 19th Street: his account is at best second-
hand, despite having often been taken as authoritative. Another difficulty is that
there is no evidence of anything unorthodox about Rodman’s domestic
arrangements other than her decision not to take her husband’s name, although she
sometimes called herself Henrietta Defrem—a version of De Fremery. He had been
relatively recently divorced from his first wife, the poet Jane Gordon. He had met
Rodman in the spring of 1912, so the idea that they set up home in spring 1913 with
his “common-law wife” seems far-fetched. A final difficulty is that the newspaper
scandal which supposedly put the wind up the Ascensionites seems to amount to
the report in the New York Times on September 12, 1913: in other words—as we shall
see shortly—the very report which tells of Stickney’s resignation. There may have
been speculation in the popular press: that New York Times article mentions an earlier
article in an evening newspaper—but no historian has actually produced this story
in evidence or noted that four days later the New York Times published a retraction,
saying that upon investigation it had found the statements published by the evening
newspaper to be “without foundation”.25
Recent writers tend to adhere to the idea that Rodman’s actions were the
catalyst for the move. Stansell sees Rodman’s “spirited ways” as the breaking point,
noting that “[t]he New York Times reported that Rodman was living in a free-love
ménage and the scandal seeped into the Liberal Club, where she was a highly visible
member”, although this report came after the split and therefore could not be
responsible for the scandal seeping into the Liberal Club.26 Stansell adds that “[a]
Columbia professor whose wife also belonged even blamed Rodman for his divorce,
charging that she and her friends had so lowered the moral tone at the Liberal Club
that his marriage was irreparably damaged”,27 a seriously mangled version of what

23 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 100.

24Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 18-19. And in his 1933 autobiography, Homecoming, Dell notes that “the moving
spirit of the Liberal Club was Henrietta Rodman, a high-school teacher, and a very serious young woman, who had
an extraordinary gift for stirring things up” (246-247).
25 “De Fremery Marriage: The Times Finds Details Are Erroneous”, New York Times, September 16, 1913, 21.
26 Stansell, American Moderns, 79-80.
27 Stansell, American Moderns, 79-80.

6
the newspaper trail reveals. Since Richwine also relies heavily on this New York
Times report, it is worth looking at it—and other press accounts—in more detail.
While obviously not authoritative, they at least offer contemporary versions of
events, sometimes giving the words of participants.

*
In September 1913, the president of the East 19th Street Liberal Club, the Rev. Percy
Stickney Grant, had suddenly resigned and the press was trying to understand why.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle took the moral high ground under the headline “Too
Radical for a Rector”:

The explanation is that the majority had come to be more radical than the rector of the
Church of the Ascension could approve… The Rev. Percy Stickney Grant… had got into
bad company. We are glad he has escaped. The alliance between the Church and social
conservatism, the existing social order, is historic, normal, inevitable. Any clergyman
who does not see this clearly has an important lesson to learn.28

Grant himself was reticent in his public statements, so any more investigative
story would have to rake up previous scandals. Under the sub-head “Pastor Who
Founded It Said to Object to Notoriety Members Have Brought Upon It”, the New
York Times struggled to put together a coherent account. Since Dr Grant himself was
saying nothing, the reporter had to content himself with the words of the resigning
Secretary, Mrs Edith Hulbert Hamilton, which only tended to increase the density of
the fog surrounding the resignation, despite her grand classical analogy:

Like all Gaul, the Liberal Club is, or was, divided into three parts – the Greenwich
Villagers, who are the extreme left; the Socialists and the Ascensionites… But the
Greenwich Village faction is not to be construed in any geographical sense; as a matter of
fact, most of the Greenwich Villagers in the club live outside of Greenwich Village. Some
of the members thought that the club was quite liberal enough; they did not want it to
become any more radical. The principal cause for the friendly disagreement in the club
was because the members could not get together on any common ground. Honest effort
was made by some members to waive their differences and to unite on this highly
desirable ground, but there did not seem to be anything on which we could all unite. We
never did have any definite policy except social justice, whatever that means. Oh, yes,
there was absolute tolerance, too, but some don’t like that, some members were inclined
not to tolerate all kinds of views and morals and manners.29

This is where W. Adolphe Roberts, who was soon to replace—or possibly already
had replaced—Mrs Hulbert Hamilton as club secretary, makes his one appearance in
the public record of the club’s affairs. “Walter Adolph Roberts, a writer, who belongs
to the ultra-liberal wing, said last night: ‘Some of us are theoretical, philosophical
anarchists. I don’t know just along what radical lines we will work; that must come
in the future as a result of discussion. We are parting with Dr. Grant in perfect good
friendship, grateful for him for what he did for the club. He used to make fine

28 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 12 September 1913, 6

29 “Dr Grant Quits Liberal Club”, New York Times, 12 September 1913, 7.

7
speeches, and attracted a great many persons to the club who never came before. We
could not get each other’s point of view, that is all.’”30
The two statements are of course very revealing in their own ways of the
divisions within the club. What common ground can there be between philosophical
anarchism and a vague belief in social justice, “whatever that means”? Between an
“absolute tolerance”, which quickly looks rather intolerant, and a determination to
work along “radical lines”, there was obviously a huge gulf. Mrs Hulbert Hamilton
was determined not to speak ill, though she could not resist a barb about those
Villagers who were not really Villagers, whereas Roberts was surely enjoying a
quietly ironic triumphalism in his praise for Dr Grant’s successful strategy of
recruiting new members—precisely the members who were now causing him to
resign. But the phrase of the moment, which surely had to enter the story
somewhere, the reporter just knew, was ‘free love’. Roberts demurred: “Free love
never came up for discussion in the club officially, but while I believe that the club
would be strongly against condoning immorality, officials of the club would not be
justified in having anything to say about private morality. While ours is partly a
social club, it was organized primarily for open discussion—to be a forum, as it
were.”31
This was clearly not shaping up into much of a story, so the reporter relegated
these statements to the second half of the article and kicked off by recalling some
rather juicier items associated with the club, helped along by extensive use of
innuendo’s principal tool, the passive voice:

As a result, it is said, of the unpleasant notoriety to which the Liberal Club has been
subjected by some of its members, the Rev. Dr. Percy Stickney Grant, rector of the
Church of the Ascension, has resigned as President of the club, and his retirement, it is
said, will be followed by the withdrawal of all his sympathizers in the organization…
[the club’s officers and three couples are named]. The wholesale resignations threatened
the existence of the club, but at a special meeting held last night at the club rooms, 132
East 19th street, it was decided to reorganize it, making it not only more liberal, but “a
radical fighting organization” as one member expressed it.
Dr. Grant’s resignation was unexpected. He had done more than any other person
to build the club up to its present paid membership of 100… It was said that he implied
that his reason for withdrawing was the undesirable publicity to which the club had
been subjected.
It was recalled that when the troubles of Prof. Arthur Livingston of Columbia and
his wife were aired last July in divorce proceedings, Mrs Livingston mentioned the
Liberal Club as one of the influences that disrupted her home. Prof. Livingston was a
member of the Liberal Club and Mrs. Livingston was not. It was believed that, owing to
the publicity given to the club at the time, Dr. Grant was subjected to criticism by some
of his parishioners for his official connection with the club.
Earlier in the year more notoriety came to the club, following the publication of a
story in an evening newspaper to the effect that Mrs. Herman de Fremery, who was
Henrietta Rodman, a teacher in the Wadleigh High School, had married another member
of the club, with the full consent of his common-law wife, who had come to the home of
the bride and bridegroom to live. 32

30 “Dr Grant Quits Liberal Club”, New York Times, 12 September 1913, 7.
31 “Dr Grant Quits Liberal Club”, New York Times, 12 September 1913, 7.
32 “Dr Grant Quits Liberal Club”, New York Times, September 12, 1913, 7.

8
The club cited as co-respondent in divorce proceedings and two members setting up
a ménage-à-trois: this was clearly more like it. Rodman’s marriage arrangements were
dealt with earlier; now we get to the Columbia professor who, according to Stansell,
“even blames Rodman for his divorce”.
There were at least two newspaper accounts of this court case involving
Professor Arthur Livingston and his wife, Mrs Laurie Manley Livingston, although it
was actually an alimony suit, not a divorce case.33 As so often, the article heads and
sub-heads gave a misleading, or at least sensationalised version of events. The New
York Tribune had “Liberal Club Ideas Cause Separation Suit”; The Sun followed
“Wife Says Columbia Professor Beat Her”, with “Mrs. A. A. Livingston Asserts
Husband Frequents Free Love Club”.34 In an affidavit to the court, Mrs Livingston
did indeed finger the Liberal Club. Her husband had joined in November 1912 and
had forced her to attend with him: “From what I heard and saw of the class of
members I can assure the court that most of the members are a lot of people who
believe in free love and have no conception of the sanctity of marriage. The club is
frequented by a good many worthless scamps, people how do not earn their own
living, but live on the other members.” She named Griffin Barry, whom her husband
had invited to their apartment to board with them for two weeks. (Ten years later
Griffin Barry would have two children with Dora Russell, eventually breaking up
her marriage to Bertrand.) Livingston said that he thought reconciliation was
possible if his wife’s mother and sister would leave the house. He accused them of
assaulting him. The judge denied Mrs Livingston’s claim for alimony on the grounds
that there was no probability that she would succeed in her divorce suit.
So—pace Stansell—Henrietta Rodman was not mentioned in the ‘divorce
proceedings’ (which were an alimony suit) and the Columbia professor did not
blame her for the break-down of his marriage. Accusations of belief in free love were
levelled by his wife, but at the majority of the members of the East 19th Street Liberal
Club. Some members—particularly the Ascensionites, who included several
millionaires among their number—may have been upset by the casting of this
aspersion, and may indeed have pressed Grant to resign his presidency on account
of it, but Rodman was not involved and, in any case, the accusations of a wronged
wife provide shaky ground for historical explanation. Predictably enough,
Livingston became an active member of the Greenwich Village Liberal Club.
More recent explanations of the Liberal Club rift tend to stick to the same story.
Scott and Rutkoff plump for the Henrietta Rodman marriage arrangement, as does
McFarlane.35 Harris goes further in giving Rodman the leading role in the move as

33Arthur Livingston (1883-1944) was a distinguished Professor of Romance Languages at Columbia University.
During the First World War he worked with the Foreign Press Bureau of the Committee on Public Information and
then, in partnership with Paul Kennaday and Ernest Poole, founded the Foreign Press Service, an agency that
represented foreign authors in English-language markets, including Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Benedetto Croce, André
Maurois, Alberto Moravia, and Luigi Pirandello. He also translated extensively from Spanish and Italian. Prior to the
marriage, Laurie Manley Livingston had been a teacher at Wadleigh High School, where Henrietta Rodman also
taught.
34 New York Tribune, July 18, 1913, 9; The Sun, July 18, 1913, 1.
35 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 73; McFarlane, Inside Greenwich Village, 199.

9
well as being the reason for the split: she “formed the Liberal Club on MacDougal
Street” and “located the club’s quarters at No. 137”. He even refers to it as “Henrietta
Rodman’s Liberal Club”.36 Strausbaugh goes well beyond any evidential base in
claiming that “Rodman’s strident advocacy of free love split the Liberal Club in half
in 1913”.37 Most of these explanations are based, at best, on rumour and innuendo,
but just over a century later we finally have an account written by one of the
protagonists.

*
Adolphe Roberts recalled events in this way:

There existed in New York an organisation called the Liberal Club, headed by the suave,
aesthetic rector of the Church of the Ascension, Percy Stickney Grant, who enjoyed some
fame as a minor poet. He had good social connections, preached in a mood of graceful
but prudent scepticism, and his women parishioners adored him. The Reverend Mr
Grant conducted the Liberal Club as a forum where any subject could be debated
decorously. The atmosphere was pleasant if you had no strong convictions one way or
the other.
A fairly large number of us were inspired to join the Liberal Club with the express
intention of capturing it and turning it into a revolutionary club. True to their precepts,
the old membership received us and allowed us to operate as we pleased. We soon won
seats on the board of directors. Then was launched a ruthless heckling of Grant which
the elegant clergyman could not endure. He and his supporters resigned. 38

So Richwine’s generational cum political explanation holds sway, rather than

the more sensational accounts which have Rodman at their centre, but Roberts
underlines the ruthlessness of the Village bohemians who deliberately backed Grant
into a corner: this was clearly a putsch on the part of a younger and more radical set.
This is then the bulk of Adolphe Roberts’s account of the move to Greenwich
Village after Grant’s resignation:

Ernest Holcombe was elected president, Leigh Holdredge treasurer, and Berkeley Tobey
a member of the board. Holcombe, jaunty and hirsute, looked like a moral dissenter,
while the short round-faced Holdredge did not. Both were businessmen who withdrew
in time from our suspect company. Tobey, bald and snub-featured as a gnome, wearing a
long chin beard, was to be an amusing minor rebel for many a year. I mention them all as
a contribution to the marginalia of New York history because they, along with myself – I
having been chosen secretary of the Liberal Club – became inadvertently the founders of
Greenwich Village in its present incarnation.
This is what happened. The club was functioning in a fourth-storey apartment,
where it could not become the large social centre that we wanted it to be. We decided to
move to a house in some picturesque quarter. Washington Square was favoured on
account of its artistic traditions, but some other downtown neighbourhood would have
been acceptable. Holcombe, Holdredge, Tobey and I were authorised to look for a place.
The underground telegraph spread the news and Paula Holladay, better known as Polly,
called to see us. She was a robust young woman with prominent eyes and chin, a

36 Harris, Around Washington Square, 188, 190, 190.

37
Strausbaugh, The Village, 81.
38Roberts, These Many Years, 131. Roberts wrote this part of his autobiography in the early 1950s, so around 40 years
after the events he describes.

10
 frequenter of rebel balls given by all the factions. She announced that she was going to
start a restaurant, and for the sake of mutual advantages was willing to locate it in any
building chosen by the club. We agreed that this was a fine idea.
The house, 135 MacDougal Street, just below Washington Square, was discovered
by Tobey. The rest of the committee visited and approved it. The first floor was reserved
for club purposes. A hardwood parquet floor for dancing was put down, and a player-
piano was bought on the installment plan. Polly opened her restaurant on an
exceedingly modest scale in the basement. It would have been difficult for any one to
forecast that a Latin quarter had been born. Yet so it was. The date was early in 1913. 39

Richwine, following Dell, had noted Ernest Holcombe’s role, but the gang of
four looking for new premises, Tobey finding the MacDougal Street house, and Polly
Holladay approaching the Liberal Club officers with her offer are facts previously
unknown.40 Interestingly, Roberts gives the address as 135, whereas every other
account of the Liberal Club, academic and popular, gives its address as 137. There
was a row of terraced houses on MacDougal between West 4th and West 3rd, all
owned by Mrs Jennie Belardi and available for rent. The Provincetown Theater
would soon set up in 139 before moving to the larger stable at 133. According to the
usual story, the Liberal Club rented the first floor of 137 with Polly’s restaurant
below, and the Boni brothers started the Washington Square Book Shop in 135, soon
knocking down the wall to 137 to create a larger space for discussions. There are,
however, a few references to the bookshop being at 137, the earliest an advert in
Vogue from July 1916, and Adolphe Roberts’s memory of the Liberal Club being
based at 135 is given authoritative documentary support by the Club’s full letterhead
(fig. 2), which survives—perhaps uniquely—on a letter Roberts sent to Theodore
Dreiser on December 11, 1913, informing him that his membership application had
been successful.41 Similarly, almost all existing references to the Liberal Club’s motto

39Actually the fall of 1913. Roberts, These Many Years, 131-132. The geographical point is probably relevant: Watson
(Strange Bedfellows, 155) writes that – despite the previous secretary’s animadversions about ‘villagers’ – two-thirds of
the members of the Greenwich Village Liberal Club lived within a five-minute walk of the new premises. It is not
clear where he gets this figure, but it is certainly plausible. Roberts, for one, lived on Washington Square South, only
two minutes’ walk away. Ernest Holcombe was married to Grace Potter, who had studied in Europe with Freud,
Ranke, and Jung, was a prominent member of the feminist group, Heterodoxy, which used to meet in the Liberal
Club, and was also involved in the Provincetown Players. She had previously been involved with both the
Manhattan Liberal Club and the East 19th Street Liberal Club. Berkeley Tobey (1881-1962) was a Greenwich Village
bon vivant, journalist, and business manager of The Masses. His several wives included the Catholic activist, Dorothy
Day. Born in Chicago, Paula Holladay (1890-1940) ran a series of restaurants in the Village, of which this one in the
basement of the Liberal Club was the most famous.
40 “Ernest was an engineer, whose daytime job it was to see that the wheels of the Elevated went round properly;
truth to tell, he had no imaginiation whatever. Yet had he been different, there would have been no Village to write
about. In his simple prosaic matter-of-factness, he was worth a dozen geniuses… Ernest decided that the club, to be
a success, must be run in conjunction with a restaurant. He discovered a restaurant keeper called, affectionately,
Polly. And the problem was solved” (Dell, Love in Greenwich Village, 21-22). Anna Chapin has the MacDougal Street
club opening with Polly’s already in the basement (Greenwich Village, 34) as does Richwine (“The Liberal Club”, 27).
Writing in 1918 Dell said that “I was among those present at the opening of the original Polly’s restaurant in
MacDougal Street” (Looking at Life, 125), so, since he didn’t get to New York until November 1913, Polly’s couldn’t
already have been in existence before the Liberal Club opened in Greenwich Village.
41“Shoppers’ and Buyers’ Guide”, Vogue, 48, no. 2 (July 15, 1916), 20. A 1962 interview with Albert Boni also has
the Washington Square Book Shop at 137: in Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright, Publisher of the Twenties (New York: D.
Lewis, 1970), 2. I’ve found two contemporary references to the Liberal Club address as being 135: The Sun, April 29,
1914, 2, and Bruno’s Weekly , 2 no. 6 (February 5, 1916, 439); one in a memoir (Grand Pierre, Rambling, 39); and just
one correct identification of the addresses in recent scholarship: William D. Miller, Pretty Bubbles in the Air: America in

11
refer to it as “A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas”, whereas the
letterhead has “A Social Center for Those Interested in New Ideas”.42

Fig. 2 Theodore Dreiser Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of
Pennsylvania Libraries. Ms Coll. 30. Correspondence with Theodore Dreiser, Folder 3620. The Liberal Club (New
York, N.Y.) 1913-1917.

That letterhead also indicates that by December 1913 Ernest Holcombe had
stepped down as president to be replaced by the novelist and journalist John R.
McMahon, while Holdredge and Roberts remained as treasurer and secretary
respectively.43 The first vice-president, Mrs Frank H. Cothren, Marian Cothren, was
a well-known suffragist, and the second vice-president, Robert H. Lowie, was a
student of Franz Boas and later a very distinguished anthropologist, working in
these years as Assistant Curator at the Department of Anthropology in the American
Museum of National History. His membership of the Liberal Club (along with that
of his colleague Alexander Goldenweiser) has been passingly mentioned (by

1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 87. The only other example of a Liberal Club letterhead I’ve found
is on a similar letter to Lewis Mumford from Adolphe Roberts, dated May 19, 1914, although here the club’s
officers are not listed (Lewis Mumford Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Ms Coll. 2. Letters to Lewis Mumford, Folder 2866. The Liberal Club [New
York, N.Y.] 1914). See also n. 42 below.
42See, for example, Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 145. References to the first version of the motto usually lead
back to Langner, A Magic Curtain, 68. Wertheim notes “social center” on a Liberal Club letterhead in Mabel Dodge
Luhan’s papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (New York Little Renaissance, 64
and 75n8).
43Roberts appears with his second birth name, Adolf. After he moved to France at the beginning of 1914, he
changed the spelling to Adolph and then to Adolphe.

12
anthropologists rather than historians), but as second vice-president his position was
obviously substantial.44 On the executive committee Henrietta Rodman was insisting
on ‘Miss’, despite being married to Herman de Fremery, while Jessie Ashley was
another outspoken feminist and birth-control campaigner. A Joseph Boardman Jr.
worked for the Boardman Detective Bureau located at 104 East 20th Street. It is
possible he was spying for the government though, if so, he was not exactly in deep
cover; he may of course have been a detective with cultural and political interests. Of
the fourteen people running the new Greenwich Village Liberal Club, seven were
men, seven were women. That presumably was a deliberate statement. Of the
fourteen, ten do not appear on Richwine’s list of members. Roberts continues:

At that time Greenwich Village proper, which may be defined as south of 14 th Street,
west of Sixth Avenue, and west and south of the Square, did not contain a single night
club, dance hall, tea room, or novelty shop. There were a few isolated studios in the
correct meaning of the term. The remodelling of houses into two-room flats described as
studios had not commenced. The only restaurants were a few Italian table d’hôtes, a
bakery or two, and I think one chop suey place. The population was partly middle-class
and old New York, living in houses that the families had long owned; partly Irish and
Italian immigrant.
Polly’s restaurant had more to do with the change at first than the Liberal Club
did. Her basement was a big success. Down flocked the anarchists, the more festive of
the socialists, and along with them many of a type that apparently had had no place to
go till then: students, would-be artists recently arrived in New York, and sheer
sensation-seekers. They crowded together in a thick pall of tobacco smoke, drank red
wine or coffee, and argued half the night. An invitation upstairs to dance was a highly-
regarded privilege. Other restaurants opened in competition, and that was a
development to which there has been no end.
The Liberal Club staged a number of meetings on controversial questions. How
well I recall Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, slender in her brunette beauty then, a Celt astray in
the thickets of syndicalism. She addressed us with passion on mill conditions at
Lawrence, Massachusetts, which had led to one of the great strikes of the period. A
milder programme got up by the entertainment committee of the club promised weekly
lectures and debates through the winter season, to discuss the New Drama, the New
Fiction, the New Poetry, the New Art, the New Journalism, the New Music, the New
Sociology, the New Politics – in fact, the new everything. I recall being somewhat
depressed by it. Apparently nothing was to be rated exciting or valuable unless it were
new. The members of the committee might have hesitated to affirm that the mere state of
newness made a form good, but I haven’t a doubt in the world that that was what they
subconsciously believed.
First-class minds were willing to lend themselves to the illusion. It was in the air.
Lincoln Steffens, for instance, came and talked to us pungently about the new something
or other. I cannot suppose that that keen intelligence thought his subject was having its
first workout in history. The new interest gave him a chance to ring the changes, that
was all. At the end of the club’s programme there was even a lecture on the New
Forestry, a topic so remote from the cares of that urban throng that its inclusion caused
cries of amazement. But there was a reason. The prominent female member who was
down to lecture on the New Pedagogy was having a love affair with a forester, and she

44See Sergei Kan, “The Falling Out between Alexander Goldenweiser and Robert Lowie: Two Personalities, Two
Visions of Anthropology”, in Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, ed., Corridor Talk to Culture History: Public
Anthropology and Its Consequences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 1-32, at 2.

13
 did not want him to feel neglected. The Liberal Club could claim no immunity from the
wire-pulling that took place in bourgeois organizations.45

The Liberal Club was certainly at the cutting edge when it came to the topics for its
weekly lecture. Earlier memoir-writers and scholars have remembered or noted as
topics nudism, technocracy, chromosomes, women’s suffrage, Debussy, Whitman,
the tango, eugenics, the slit skirt, sex hygiene, white slavery, the single tax, and
Richard Strauss. New Forestry is an addition to the list. In all probability the lecturer
was Herman de Fremery, who was employed as a forester by the American Museum
of Natural History, while the “prominent female member” who lectured on the New
Pedagogy would be his wife, Henrietta Rodman, a teacher by profession.

*
Although not the first or only club to organise them, the new Liberal Club became
famous for its fancy-dress balls, known as Pagan Routs, a term for which the
ubiquitous Floyd Dell takes credit.46 Roberts remembers one in particular:

Our next bright idea was to hold a ball to raise funds. The name given the jamboree was
the Pagan Rout. It was held in Webster Hall on East 11 th Street, outdid previous affairs of
the kind in costuming, gusto and unconventionality, and made money. Pagan Routs
thereafter became the chief activity of the club. One of the most successful and certainly
one of the most beautiful was based on a Spanish musical and dancing show, La Tierra de
la Alegría [The Land of Joy], then playing in New York. The club members and their
friends wore approximately the correct costumes, and so the eye was satisfied. The
orchestra industriously rendered Spanish music, not too badly. Doloretes and Bilbao, the
female and male stars of La Tierra de la Alegría, danced as guests of honour. The efforts of
the merry-makers to go Spanish themselves on the dance floor were heavy-footed, to be
sure. But everyone had a good time.
I recollect it mainly on account of Doloretes and Bilbao and the vivid pageant, half
zarzuela or light opera, half popular dance recital, in which they had been brought from
Spain…. Charming La Tierra de la Alegría with its gay, piercing tunes, its wealth of
flamenco and regional measures. Brown Doloretes, a Triana gypsy undoubtedly, with her
marvellous figure and ugly face. Poor Doloretes, who died in New York, of an abortion I
was told, leaving Bilbao to carry on impeccably, his features expressionless like a mask
of stone, until the company disintegrated in a flurry, because no one worthy to take her
place could be found.47

La Tierra de la Alegría, an operetta by Joaquín Valverde based on a book by two

young writers, José F. Elizondo and Eulogio Velasco, and translated by Ruth Boyd
Ober, was a huge success, running at the Park Theatre in Columbus Circle from the
end of October 1917 to the end of January 1918, and then touring the country. It had
previously been popular in Madrid, Paris, London, Buenos Aires and Havana. Little
is recorded about the life of Doloretes Falagan. Antonio Vidal (1885-1934) had been
born in Seville but brought up in Bilbao, hence his stage name. He is regarded as one
of the greatest Spanish dancers. The Liberal Club persuaded the lead dancers to

45 Roberts, These Many Years, 132-133.

46 See Dell, “Rents Were Low in Greenwich Village”, 261.
47Roberts, These Many Years, 134. Carl Van Vechten wrote a warm appreciation of “The Land of Joy”: The Music of
Spain (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1918), 91-101.

14
come down and perform at Webster Hall on 15 February 1918. The poster preserved
in Roberts’s papers offers a vivid glimpse of this colourful occasion (figs. 3 and 4)
and adds a picture to the impressive portfolio of Frank Matson Walts, best-known
for his series of covers for The Masses.48

Figs. 3 and 4 "Pagan Rout IV: A Spanish Dance of Joy". From the W. Adolphe Roberts Papers. National Library of
Jamaica MS353.10.1.19. With kind permission of the National Library of Jamaica.

*
The dimensions of radicalism in the Americas in these years just before the Russian
Revolution are difficult to calibrate, but membership of the New York Liberal Club
was probably the clearest way in which people of that city could at least announce
their radicalism. Adolphe Roberts’s autobiography adds significantly to what we
know about the club’s early years in the Village. Memory is a notoriously unreliable
tool, so there is no reason to grant his memories absolute authority. However, he is
the only one of the fourteen Liberal Club officers (in 1913) to leave a record of any
kind; he did compose his autobiography in his mid-60s, while in good mental and
physical health; his memoirs are, as far as one can judge, written openly and
honestly; and – unlike Floyd Dell, whose voice has tended to dominate previous
accounts – Roberts was in New York and active in the Liberal Club at the time of its
translocation to MacDougal Street. In addition, a letter signed by him provides one
of the few – if not the only – surviving Liberal Club full letterheads, and the poster of
the Spanish dance he kept all his life provides a vivid glimpse into the dramatic and
colorful world of those radical and bohemian years.

48Frank Matson Watts (1877-1941). Although often described as an African American, Walts was apparently white,
the confusion stemming from the work that he did for publications such as The Crisis: see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the
Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 154-158. Oddly,
Roberts also was – and still is – sometimes described as African American, apparently on the grounds that anyone
born in Jamaica must be assumed to be black.

15
Appendix

Members of the Greenwich Village Liberal Club according to Keith Richwine 49:

Sherwood Anderson
Peggy Baird
Stella Ballantine
Teddy Ballantine
Griffin Barry
Maurice Becker
Albert Boni
Franklin Booth
Neith Boyce
Louise Bryant
Arthur Caesar
George Cram Cook
Mary C. Davies
Floyd Dell
Edith DeLong
Charles Demuth
Theodore Dreiser
Rebecca Edelson
Max Eastman
Bobby Edwards
Sam Eliot Jr.
Elizabeth Freeman
Barnard Gallant
Rae Gelder
Daisy Gillmore
Inez Gillmore
Susan Glaspell
Edward Goodman
Jo Gotsch
Hutchins Hapgood
Marsden Hartley
Hippolyte Havel
Ernest Holcombe
Leigh Holdredge
Polly Holladay
Lucy Huffaker
Alexander Irvine
Orrick Johns
Margorie Jones
Robert Edmond Jones
Harry Kemp
Edna Kenton
Bernadine Kielty
Mary C. Kimbrough
Aldred Kreymborg
Renée La Coste
Lawrence Langner
Sinclair Lewis
Arthur Livingston

49 Richwine, “The Liberal Club”, 117-118.

16
Robert Locker
Jack McGrath
Kirah Markham
Augustus Meyers
Scudder Middleton
Edna St Vincent Millay
Nickolas Muray
Louise Murphy
Eugene O’Neill
Will Pennington
Ruth Pickering
Grace Potter
Nina Wilcox Putnam
Leslie Quirk
Ida Rauh
John Reed
Henrietta Rodman
Cornell Ridderhof
Estelle Roege
Ray Rohn
Harry Scherman
Gilbert Seldes
Frank Shay
Justus Sheffield
Herman Simpson
Upton Sinclair
Harold E. Stearns
Lincoln Steffens
Anna Strunsky
Simeon Strunsky
Berkeley Tobey
Laura Tobey
Louis Untermeyer
Jean Starr Untermeyer
Mary Heaton Vorse
William English Walling
Rose Watson
Harry Weinberger
Helen Westley
Jack Westley
Clement Wood
Art Young

Additional Liberal Club members according to Lawrence Langner, Steven Watson,

Christine Stansell, and Sergei Kan50:

F. Sumner Boyd [SW]

Stella Cominsky [CS]
Saxe Commins [LL]
Jo Davidson [LL]
Mabel Dodge [SW]

50Langner, The Magic Curtain, 69-72; Watson, Strange Bedfellows, 392-395; Stansell, American Moderns, 83; Kan, “The
Falling Out”, 2.

17
Alexander Goldenweiser [SG]
Maurice Parmalee [LL]
Margaret Sanger [SW]
Howard Scott [LL]
John Sloan [SW]
Marguerite Zorach [SW]
William Zorach [SW]

Additional Liberal Club members (and officers) according to the Liberal Club
letterhead51:

W. Adolphe Roberts
John R. McMahon
Marian Cothren
Robert H. Lowie
Jessie Ashley
Elizabeth Blair
Joseph Boardman
Herman de Fremery
M. Teresa Thompson
Mrs Louis Revere
Mrs John McMahon

51 See fig. 2.

18