Louise Bryant (December 5, 1885 – January 6, 1936) was an American feminist, political activist, and journalist best known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of November 1917.
Born Anna Louise Mohan, she began as a young girl to use the last name of her stepfather, Sheridan Bryant, in preference to that of her father. She grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Oregon in Eugene, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. Pursuing a career in journalism, she became society editor of the Spectator and freelanced for The Oregonian, newspapers in Portland, Oregon. During her years in that city (1909–1915), she became active in the women's suffrage movement. Leaving her first husband in 1915 to follow fellow journalist John Reed (whom she married in 1916) to Greenwich Village, she formed friendships with leading feminists of the day, some of whom she met through Reed's associates at publications such as The Masses; at meetings of a women's group, Heterodoxy; and through work with the Provincetown Players. During a National Woman's Party suffrage-rally in Washington, D.C., in 1919 she was arrested and spent three days in jail. Both she and Reed took lovers outside their marriage; during her Greenwich Village years (1916–1920), these included the playwright Eugene O'Neill and the painter Andrew Dasburg.
In her 1917 coverage of the Russian Revolution, Bryant wrote about Russian leaders such as Catherine Breshkovsky, Maria Spiridonova, Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the United States and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in 1918 as Six Red Months in Russia. Over the next year, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established in September 1918 to investigate foreign influence in the United States. Later in 1919, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support for the Bolsheviks and to denounce armed U.S. intervention in Russia.
After Reed's death from typhus in 1920, Bryant continued to write for Hearst about Russia, as well as Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and other countries in Europe and the Middle East. Some articles from this period were collected in 1923 under the title Mirrors of Moscow. Later that year, she married William C. Bullitt, Jr., with whom she had her only child, Anne, the following year. Diagnosed in her later years from the rare and painful disorder adiposis dolorosa, Bryant did little writing or publishing in her last decade, and drank heavily. Bullitt, winning sole custody of Anne, divorced Bryant in 1930. Bryant died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles. In 1998, a group from Portland restored her grave, which had become neglected.
Early life Her father, Hugh Mohan, was born in Pennsylvania to Irish immigrant parents from county Fermanagh.Mary V Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 10 He became a journalist and stump speaker involved in labor issues and Democratic Party politics. Moving to San Francisco, he continued to write for newspapers, and in 1880 he married Louisa Flick, who grew up on the ranch of her stepfather, James Say, near Lake Humboldt in Nevada. The Mohans had two children, Barbara (1880) and Louis (1882), before the birth of Anna Louise. Later in 1885, the family moved to Reno, where Mohan continued his journalistic career but drank heavily. One day he departed and never returned to his wife and children. Louise's mother divorced him in 1889 and married Sheridan Bryant, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific railway. The couple had two children, Floyd (1894) and William (1896). Although the family lived in Wadsworth, Nevada, Louise accepted an invitation from James Say to live at his ranch. She remained there for three or four years, returning to Wadsworth at her mother's insistence at the age of 12. Bryant adopted her stepfather's last name, but never changed it legally from Mohan.
Attending high school in Wadsworth and Reno and college at Nevada State University (now known as the University of Nevada, Reno), Bryant developed interests in journalism, debate, illustration, social life, dancing, and basketball. She edited the "Young Ladies Edition" of the Student Record in 1905, wrote a short story, "The Way of a Flirt", for a literary magazine, Chuckwalla, and contributed sketches to it and another publication, Artemisia. Depressed after the death of her step-grandfather in 1906, Bryant left school for a job in Jolon, California, where for a few months she boarded at a cattle ranch and taught children, mostly young Mexicans. That summer she moved to Eugene, Oregon, where her brother Louis worked for the Southern Pacific.
After learning that she could transfer her college credits from Nevada, she enrolled at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Popular at the school, which then had a total student enrollment of less than 500, she helped start a small sorority, Zeta Iota Phi (a chapter of Chi Omega), and served as its first president. During her time in Eugene, she produced poems and pen-and-ink sketches for the Oregon Monthly. In a small city steeped in "puritan moralism", she was the first to wear rouge on campus; she had multiple boyfriends, and she wore clothes that Miriam Van Waters, the editor of the Oregon Monthly, and Luella Clay Carson, the dean of women, considered improper. Taking off the spring semester of 1908 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse on Stuart Island, one of the San Juan Islands near the U.S. border with Canada, she returned to Eugene to finish her bachelor's degree in history, graduating in early 1909. Her senior thesis was on the Modoc Indian Wars.
Portland
In the spring of 1909, Bryant moved to Portland, Oregon, first sharing a downtown apartment with one of her college friends, Clara Wold, then renting her own apartment in the same building. Among her jobs, she designed a stained-glass window for the Povey Brothers, worked as a freelance reporter for The Oregonian, and became an illustrator and society editor for the Portland Spectator, a weekly news magazine. Meanwhile, she formed friendships with people—such as Cas Baer, drama editor for The Oregonian—who were interested in journalism and the arts. In late 1909, she met and married Paul Trullinger, a dentist who lived on a houseboat on the Willamette River, collected art, and liked drinking parties that sometimes included invitations to his office to inhale ether.
Bryant, who retained her maiden name and her downtown apartment after her marriage to Trullinger, bridled at doing housework and yearned for professional advancement. Drawn toward politics and the women's suffrage movement by her friend Sara Bard Field, she joined the Oregon branch of the College Equal Suffrage League in 1912. She and Field gave pro-suffrage speeches in smaller Oregon cities, and Bryant rode on the suffrage float in Portland's annual Flag Day parade. Led by Abigail Scott Duniway, women achieved suffrage in Oregon later that year.
Bryant became familiar with the socialist journal The Masses through Portland resident and lawyer C. E. S. Wood, who eventually married Field and who often contributed to the magazine. Enthusiastic about its contents, particularly articles by Portland native John Reed, Bryant began raising subscriptions for it. Emma Goldman, a well-known anarchist whom Wood had defended in court, gave a speech in Reed's honor at the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) hall in Portland. She and other political activists, such as Alexander Berkman, were among guests entertained by Bryant and her husband. In 1914, Reed, a Harvard graduate and established writer who by then lived in Greenwich Village, came home for a visit, during which he spoke at the University Club of Portland against the class system. Exactly how or when or how often Bryant and Reed met is uncertain, but they probably met each other on December 15, 1915, before they were introduced by mutual friends Carl and Helen Walters. Near Christmas 1915 when Reed again came home to visit his widowed mother, the young couple announced their love at a dinner party. Reed returned to Greenwich Village on December 28, and Bryant, abandoning her marriage, followed him three days later. Trullinger filed for divorce, which was granted in July 1916, on grounds of desertion.
Greenwich Village and Cape Cod
Reed had rented a room for Bryant near his apartment at 43 Washington Square. Their unmarried co-habitation caused little curiosity among Reed's friends in the Village, many of whom rejected marriage and other middle-class norms. Unified by an "air of intellectual freedom, moral laissez-faire and camaraderie", most were involved in literary, artistic, or political pursuits in a Bohemian neighborhood that in some ways resembled the Left Bank of Paris. While visiting New York, Field took Bryant to a meeting of Heterodoxy, a women's group that included feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, political activist Crystal Eastman, actress Ida Rauh, writers Zona Gale and Mary Austin, and many others. Among Bryant's new friends were feminists Inez Milholland, Inez Gillmore, and Doris Stevens. Other notables circulating in the Village included Emma Goldman, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and one of Reed's former lovers, arts patron Mabel Dodge.
At Number 43, Bryant and Reed pursued their journalistic endeavors in separate work rooms. Four months after leaving Oregon, Bryant broke into print in New York with an article about two Portland judges, one of whom had dismissed a case brought against Goldman for distributing birth-control information. It was published as "Two Judges" in the April 1916 issue of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman's brother. Meanwhile, Reed, who had reported on the 1913 Paterson silk strike, Pancho Villa in 1913–1914, and the ongoing war (World War I) in Europe, went on assignment for Collier's to interview William Jennings Bryan in Florida.
Later that spring Bryant and Reed heeded Vorse's call to spend the warm season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod, and to take part in the communal theater productions of the Provincetown Players. Others from the Village went as well and joined the group, organized in 1915 by George Cram Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, who hoped to produce plays that were both political and artistic. Among the works the group staged in 1916 were Bryant's The Game, in which characters named Life and Death play dice for the lives of Youth (a poet) and Girl (a dancer). It appeared on the same bill as Not Smart by Wilbur Steele and Bound East for Cardiff by O'Neill.
During the summer, Reed left Cape Cod to cover the Progressive Party convention in Chicago, and at other times he retreated from the players to work on articles for Collier's and Metropolitan Magazine. During these absences, Bryant and O'Neill became lovers, not surprising in a group that professed and practiced free love. Reed, made aware of this new development, responded by inviting O'Neill to begin taking his meals with them. In a note to Field, Bryant said that her relationship with Reed was "so beautiful and so free! ... We don't interfere with each other at all ... we feel like children who will never grow up."
Croton-on-Hudson