saga of doorbell ringing, writing envelopes—speaking on street corners—making the club so the leader would see you. Watching the Law Journal to see if the Judge you broke your fool neck for in November remembers your name in July for a bit of patronage. . . law committees, publicity work, ghosting speeches.
The Tammany EVM joined was a well-oiled machine, but it was also a machine nourished by countless concrete links to the city’s working-class communities, and under the leadership of Alfred E. Smith it was turning to the left. Smith was the son of Irish immigrants, a boy from a poor family who started off in politics running errands for the Tammany District leader. EVM campaigned for him for Governor in 1922. In a precursor of the New Deal, Smith introduced labor laws, safety regulations, workers’ compensation, and rent control. He also stood up against the renascent Ku Klux Klan and spoke out against the 1924 Quotas Act, which blocked immigration from eastern and southern Europe (admitting only 124 people a year from Lithuania, but 28,000 from Ireland). The Democratic Convention of 1924 was held on Tammany’s home turf, at Madison Square Garden, and Smith was the organization’s candidate for the presidential nomination. While the urban ethnics backed Smith, the Protestants from around the country despised him (some turned up in white hoods and sheets). The convention was deadlocked for 99 ballots before Smith and his opponent, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, withdrew and the nomination was handed to a nonentity named Davis. For Tammany this was a bitter blow, especially for young Smith men like EVM. That November, Davis duly lost the state to Coolidge while Smith was easily re-elected Governor.
The EVM who plunged into Tammany politics in the early twenties is hardly visible at all in the diaries and private letters of the period. Here he appears a romantic introvert, quoting Omar Khayyam and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe: dreaming, posturing, hungering, spewing out overwrought prose about dawn and death and love and the stars, self-pitying but at times delirious with the excitement of an unknown future. In 1922, he puts what he calls an “epilogue” on the first page of a new diary: “The Dreamer wants to put at the end of his story the beginning. The Dreamer still hopes. The epilogue of shattered romance is really the prologue of a new desire.” In a long entry bemoaning his special fate—“burdened with a dual ancestry” in “a world of hate”—he muses:
There doesn’t seem much contentment in having a strict individuality. I have always gloried in being different, each and every mood of mine that partook of eccentricity was sponsored to become a habit by the thought that in it lay inanimate some future potentiality that made for success. I still sense the wall, feel the sting of the word “different” and loathe those people who hate their memories of a ghetto and yet place others in a prison of mental abhoration . . . One cannot be both Jew and Christian. One can’t forget the Inquisition by remembering that Christ was born a Jew. It is possible at times to feel relieved and read scientific treatises on the similarity between the races, but it is but flattering for the moment.
In a primeval wilderness, he suspects, a man and a woman could meet and love each other without regard to heritage, “But God, they tag you here from birth!” To Jews, he belongs “out there”—in the non-Jewish world—but to gentiles he belongs “back in the ghetto.” “Not only am I a member of an outcast race, but an outcast in the race.” Those he resents most “have put a sign on their door: ‘thou mayest eat and drink with us, but marry into our lives, never.’” And here he seems to be referring to Jews, not gentiles: “I can’t blame them though. Perhaps if I saw a troop of Black Hundred kill my relations, that barrier of blood would antagonize me even if it reached but an infinitesimal quantity.” Yet, typically, he finishes this entry on a note of defiance: “Israel has lived and been revitalized because of being pressed almost to extermination. I glory in your hatred. I mock your fooling childish fancies. I am nearer God than you. I am of more strains of life.”
There’s something of the same oscillation in his jottings on sex, love and marriage. “I have not been a victim of sex,” he boasts. “That one big bogey has no terrors for me. The so-called wild woman hasn’t a chance.” Yet he fears “the mistake of falling in love before being loved.” He pursues the object of his desire but meets only frustration: “Month after month to look forward to the ultimate consummation of one’s desires—and then to lose the prize!” But when he does succeed in the chase, his reactions prove ambivalent: “It was wonderful the sensation of having someone say, I love you. It was wonderful to hold someone in your arms—and defy the world to take you from her side. But it’s not always the bolting of doors that keeps the thief away.” Reflecting on the lesson of this failed relationship, he vows never to lose respect for his future wife, whoever she may be: “intimacy should not breed contempt.”
He seems to have met Olga and begun courting her in 1923. They married in 1925. Between these two dates EVM wrote a series of letters to other women friends (Lilla, Mutchie, Mamie, and Mollie); the letters are flirtatious, hinting at past intimacies, or his own desire for intimacy. Sometimes the tone is pontificating: “Too often among the Jewish race the old talmudic and rabbinical idea exists that a woman is man’s inferior and just a breeder of children.” Sometimes it is whimsical: “I am in love, kid, and really so and methinks that my chase is over. I am wondering if I shall enjoy a domestic existence and shall forget the wanderlust. It is amusing how quickly I change, and yet don’t you think me adaptable?” He feels the hand of destiny—“an unknown publisher of works is giving me material to live that perhaps may be good copy some day to write”—but rues his foibles and continuing frustrations:
I have tried to analyze myself and discover why I should detest to do things that ordinarily I should do, work for instance. I think were I never to have been pampered from the beginning I might now have succeeded in making my brain accomplish something. But ceaseless nagging and having people tell me that my views were all wrong changed my decision. My Jewish ancestry betokens work, success, brains . . . which parent can I attribute my idealism to, which my impracticality? Both equally and neither.
Writing to a fraternity brother he protests bitterly at having been mocked after showing friends something he had written in his diary. “Don’t you see that there are two races in me? Two widely diversified strains. Were I a boob I wouldn’t think about these things and all would be well.”
Finally, there are two letters from Ed to Olga, in both of which he analyzes in some detail the reasons why they were not meant for each other. The first appears to be written immediately after a break in their courtship:
I am sorry that we could not have found a more congenial way in which to end our friendship. I almost said love but love typifies immortality, and as this ends it cannot be love. I appreciate your frankness. It repays me for my own to you . . . I feared this ending and I shall tell you why. I recall first kissing you. You said you had never kissed in return before. That was enough to thrill even so experienced and so youthful a man as myself. Then I remember your face, it appeared as though you were conscience-stricken. I never had seen anything so ghastly.
The decision to end the relationship seems to have been Olga’s, and she seems to have told him that she could see “no future” in him. “Perhaps you are right,” he muses, then springs to his own defense:
I never have felt the need of practicality. Is a man a man who would refuse a loan without interest to a friend? That is your practicality . . . I am not of the multitude . . . more’s the pity. Yet were I of the multitude I could forget the taste of your lips, your arms about me . . . This then is the end. Please do not feel hurt, and as I told you, have no tears, for tears have air waves, and my heart is a radio. I may be of a most diversified inheritance, but I have always believed in God, who, what or why, unlike you mortals that are sure, I am not sure.
But this was not goodbye. They renewed their relationship, and after some months of indeterminate courtship, EVM wrote again: “The distinct and different point of view that you hold towards life in general makes it utterly impossible to even have a starting point, where at least there might exist a common ground to reason
