Illinois native was paradox: patriot, ‘traitor’ and more

Bill Knight column for 7-22, 23 or 24, 2019  

A writer and man of extremes, Illinois native Floyd Dell died 50 years ago this week. Modest, he enjoyed his celebrity yet also earned status as an influential journalist and author. Dell became a creative playwright, novelist and poet, and embraced contradictions: socialism and bohemianism, public commitment and self-absorption, the personal and political, the carefree and careless.

“A pattern of commitment and independence, of cooperation and dissent was central to Floyd Dell’s life as a public intellectual,” wrote Douglas Clayton in “Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel.”

Respected and reviled for supporting conscientious objections to the draft during World War I, Dell was to eventually work for the U.S. government – the government that in 1917 indicted him for treason. Often tied to urban scenes in Chicago and New York, Dell drew heavily upon youthful ideals and experiences in the Quad Cities, Quincy and Barry, Ill.

A romantic whose friends included radicals John Reed and Max Eastman, novelists Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, Catholic activist/socialist Dorothy Day and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dell had been 16 when he joined the Socialist Party, giving his life meaning, he’d say: “Socialism was not a matter of economics only, but of a different life, based upon service for the common good and not on money.”

Dell also began to write as a youth: stories derived from Edgar Allan Poe, poems based on adolescent yearnings, essays built upon self-education more than schooling.

The teen-aged Dell was published in Harper’s, McClure’s and Century magazines. He lost a factory job, took one in a print shop, then got hired at the Davenport Times in 1905. Within a month, he was fired for having “no nose for news,” but was given two weeks’ notice during which he wrote about a poor woman who died at the train station, was rehired and assigned human-interest stories.

“As a reporter on a ‘regular’ paper ... one had to be an eye and an ear, an organizing memory, a pencil and a pad of paper and two fingers about a typewriter, rather than a person,” wrote Dell, who began contributing to the local Tri-City Workers magazine, where he was freer to advocate. In 1906, confused by a schism between the rather orthodox Socialist Party and the more militant Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), Dell left Tri-City Workers. Then the Times fired him, and he was hired by the competing Davenport Democrat, where he worked for a year.

In 1908, Dell moved to Chicago, where he became an editor, essayist, poet and critic, championing, Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, plus newcomers such as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay.

            When cultural change erupted there from 1909-13, Dell wasn’t merely present, he was at its center.

“Writers and artists within that chaotic, immensely productive vanguard mixed cultural and social rebellion in an effort to overturn the conventions and injustices they felt governed American life,” Clayton writes. “Dell was an indispensable figure in that rebellion.”

The era was made up of “disruptive historical, economic and geographic circumstances,” Clayton continues, but Dell “set himself the task of doing justice to his own contradictory inclinations.”

In 1913, Dell left for New York and Greenwich Village, joining The Masses magazine, the earliest, best and longest-lasting radical periodical

“The hope of democratic civilization lies in the dissemination of true knowledge,” Dell wrote in 1914, after Masses editor Max Eastman and artist Art Young had been indicted for criminal libel on charges brought by the Associated Press.

Dell was in the vanguard of the avant-garde, testing tensions between art and politics. And he was armed with The Masses, which “stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution,” he wrote.

After his 1917 piece about conscientious objectors, the government refused to permit The Masses from using the mails and indicted Dell and four other staffers for “conspiring to cause mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and to obstruct recruiting” under the Espionage Act. Two trials ended in hung juries.

He wrote 12 plays, countless essays, 10 non-fiction books and 12 novels, but his first novel, “Moon-Calf,” is his most memorable.

Following more than a decade of success, Dell in the ’30s suffered a decline in health and popularity. Prompted by economic and physical necessity, Dell took a position as writer and editor at the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. Dell liked it and the work – like writing speeches for Mine Workers president John L. Lewis.

Despite highs and lows and paradoxical impulses, Dell’s life and career left an esteemed legacy.

“I never knew a more reasonable or dependable person, more variously intelligent, more agile in combining sociability with industry,” Eastman remarked, “and I never knew a writer who had his talents in such complete command.”