6 - The Pan-American Dream (1918)

Summary

I am the man who dreamed the new day dawned

And so arose at midnight with a cry.

By the beginning of 1918, the mind of President Woodrow Wilson—ever the visionary—was turning to the post-war settlement. It was clear that his voice would be dominant, so particular attention was paid to his pronouncements. By the summer it was clear that the war was going the way of the Allies: the Battle of Amiens in August would prove decisive. By November, the fighting was over and on 4 December Wilson set off for the peace conference in Paris which would, he believed, finally bring a Woodrovian order to the unruly world. Imposing order at home would prove equally challenging. To date, New York had kept open its doors, which was one reason why it was such an exciting place to live. But a country at war is always likely to see enemies within. In May, the so-called ‘Sedition Act’—actually a set of amendments to the 1917 Espionage Act—severely limited freedom of expression. The radical magazine The Masses was charged with publishing ‘treasonable material’ and brought to trial twice, in April and September, both trials ending with deadlocked juries.

The war limited travel, though two notable arrivals in the city in June were the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. In retrospect, the literary event of the year was the first instalment of James Joyce's Ulysses in Margaret Anderson's The Little Review. Meanwhile, however, Hispanic culture was becoming a real presence in New York. Following the success of Enrique Granados's opera, Jacinto Benavente's plays appeared in English translation in New York in 1917, with the one-act ‘His Widow's Husband’ performed by the Washington Square Players in late October. Nineteen eighteen would see no fewer than 24 printings of Vicente Blasco Ibanez's novel, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which would become the best-selling novel of 1919. And now came the Spanish music and dance of La Tierra de la Alegría, a show which had played to acclaim in Madrid, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, and Havana.