In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Louschart was killed in his home by a single blow to the head. The act was committed in the blink of an eye, but the feud motivating it had festered for months. Earlier that year, the deeply conservative Mathurin had apparently taken offense at his son Jean’s newfangled ideas about liberty and equality. Jean was vocal about his beliefs, which were stoking the fires of radicalism throughout France. Not content with throwing his son out of the family home, Mathurin attempted to punish him further by arranging to marry Jean’s girlfriend, Helen. Helen’s family was only too pleased to palm off their daughter to a vaunted member of the community, but Helen herself despaired at the prospect of being wrenched from Jean and shackled to a brooding old ogre for the rest of her life. Jean hatched a plan: he arrived one night at his father’s house to rescue Helen and ride off into the egalitarian sunset. But Mathurin interrupted their escape, and a fight ensued. Jean lashed out with a hammer. It struck Mathurin flush on the forehead, and the old man died instantly.

Despite his protestations of self-defense, Jean was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be broken on the wheel. That punishment, in which the condemned was strapped faceup upon a large wheel and then had their bones broken, had been a common means of torture, execution, and humiliation throughout Europe for centuries. Some believe it was a thoroughly French invention, pioneered as early as the sixth century. If so, more than a thousand years of history came to an unexpected end the day that Jean approached his agonizing fate in Versailles. In the weeks after sentencing, Jean’s fate became a cause célèbre. Here, many felt, was a young man being punished not for an act of violence but for his political beliefs. As Jean made his way to the scaffold on the day of his execution, dozens of locals charged forward, seized him, and carried him to safety. The authorities were stunned, and the strength of public opinion moved King Louis XVI to issue Jean a royal pardon. 

The freeing of Jean Louschart now seems one of the myriad small moments of rebellion that presaged the coming Revolution, which swept away centuries of tradition. France never again resorted to the wheel, which suddenly appeared to belong to a very distant past. Roughly a year after the Louschart case, a new method of execution was publicly discussed for the first time: the guillotine, a machine of killing that would, so its creators insisted, deliver pristine justice, one rolling head at a time.

The man charged with operating Paris’s guillotine throughout the turbulent 1790s was the same man who had been poised to execute Jean Louschart before the mob intervened. His name was Charles-Henri Sanson, chief executioner to both Louis XVI and the republican regime that swept the ancien régime aside. Though at the start of the Revolution he was as reviled and tainted as any executioner of his time, he ended his life as “The Great Sanson,” a hero to the French people. He was perceived across the continent as the last bastion of moral integrity in France.

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Killing was in the Sanson blood. The first of the family to act as the royal executioner was Charles-Henri’s great-grandfather, who was coerced into taking the position once his father-in-law had passed away. Over the next century, three other Sanson men inherited the role before Charles-Henri succeeded in 1778. He was thirty-nine at the time but already a capital-punishment veteran. When his father had succumbed to a debilitating illness in 1754, Charles-Henri had taken over his duties on the scaffold at the age of just fifteen. The boy exhibited astonishing qualities: a wisdom way beyond his years and a stomach strong enough to see him through the strangulations, beheadings, and burnings that were his workaday life. While still a teenager, he conducted the last hanging, drawing, and quartering in French history, inflicted upon Robert-François Damiens for an attempt on the king’s life. Sanson would later look back on this as a simpler time, when the worst sin imaginable was killing a king.

All we know of Sanson suggests he was an eloquent and thoughtful man. Erudite, well-read, and multilingual, he took his duties as a public official with the utmost seriousness. He may have felt, as his grandson would later claim, constrained and frustrated by the family business, eager to attain higher office but prohibited by the taint of the hangman’s noose. Traditionally, being an executioner secured one a good living but not one that could be enjoyed within the bounds of polite society. Though the people thirsted for public executions, the person responsible for taking a life was deemed spiritually polluted. The knowledge of this weighed heavily on Sanson, and he worked hard to cleanse the family name. It’s impossible to determine his deepest thoughts about the social and political torrents that soaked late eighteenth-century Paris, but it appears as if Sanson was proud to serve the king, even to such grim ends. The only things Sanson really wanted were the respect he felt a devoted servant of the king deserved. Curiously, it was the Revolution that offered him those things.

In the decade following the storming of the Bastille, all the most basic assumptions about French life—and death—were interrogated. In December 1789, the newly formed National Assembly debated the claims to civil eligibility of three groups who’d previously been denied full civil status: Jews, actors, and executioners. Even in the age of liberté, égalité and fraternité, many found the suggestion that executioners should be considered full citizens utterly ridiculous. “The exclusion of executioners is not founded upon prejudice,” Abbé Maury said. “It is in the soul of all good men to shudder at the sight of one who murders his fellow creatures.” Hearing these sentiments, Sanson was moved to write a letter to the Assembly on behalf of every executioner in France. He wrote that tackling the taboo surrounding executions was a revolutionary duty and failure to do so would betray superstition, cowardice, and hypocrisy. “Either conclude that crime must remain unpunished,” he challenged them, “or that an executioner is needed to punish it.”

As it turned out, the tide was in Sanson’s favor: the way executions and executioners were regarded within French society was in the middle of a seismic change. Hitherto, there’d been a strict class divide: beheadings for the well-to-do, while peasants choked and writhed on the end of a rope. Just weeks earlier, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had floated a hazy but startling vision of post-Revolution public execution. He suggested the introduction of some kind of decapitation machine that would ensure identical deaths for all condemned citizens and would also remove the medieval vestiges of pain and vengeance from the act of execution, leaving only the swift dispensation of justice. “With my machine,” he said, although he did not yet have a specific design in mind, “I strike off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you won’t feel a thing.” Many found it difficult to take Dr. Guillotin’s vision of a killing machine seriously. According to the nineteenth-century historian J. W. Croker, Guillotin was considered something of a joke by his peers, one of whom dismissed him as a man “without talent or reputation … a nobody who made himself a busybody.” Yet Guillotin’s ideas about equal rights on the chopping block struck a chord. In October 1791, a law was passed that standardized executions, prohibiting any means other than decapitation.

Looking at the well-worn blades he used for removing heads and perhaps foreseeing the increased workload ahead of them, Sanson explained that performing every execution with a sword was infeasible; a more efficient method was needed. With the new law, Dr. Guillotin’s laughable notion of a killing machine had become urgent. As the backlog of death-penalty prisoners mounted, the engineer Dr. Antoine Louis was recruited to quickly design a workable contraption, and a man named Tobias Schmidt was hired to build it, though the association with Guillotin stuck. On April 17, 1792, Sanson was joined by government officials at the Bicêtre Hospital to give the machine a dry run. Over the course of the day, bundles of hay, several human corpses, and a live sheep were placed under the guillotine’s blade. A few weeks later, Sanson appeared before a huge fascinated crowd in Paris to watch the guillotine’s public debut. Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, a notorious highwayman, was the first to face this macabre new rite. No one, not even Sanson, could have predicted how many more would follow him.

Contemporary reports of the first few guillotinings describe a sense of anticlimax among spectators. Efficient and businesslike, this revolutionary method of death was devoid of all the grandiloquent theater that attended a traditional execution. Some thought this progress: perhaps now executions would cease to be a source of popular entertainment. In fact, it simply marked the evolution of the spectacle from the medieval to the modern. The slow, somber process of old was replaced by swift clinical brutality, filled with pints of spurting blood. No longer were the condemned expected to win the crowd over with a show of quiet dignity; in the charged partisan context of the Revolution, defiant martyrdom became the keynote. Frequently, the men and women Sanson placed under the blade danced, sang, and girned their way to extinction, taunting their enemies with their final words. “In both word and gesture,” the historian David Gerould writes, “one had to show sovereign contempt for death;” the gory end of a life was often treated—even by the condemned—as “a splendid show.”

To those in favor of the Revolution, its purges, and its condemnations, the guillotine was the humane vehicle of ultimate justice, and it soon acquired mythical status. As the hand that guided the machine, Sanson’s profile was transformed. Forgetting his family’s long dedicated service to the House of Bourbon, the public now cheered Sanson in the street, hailing him as “the Avenger of the People,” a hero who personified the power and wisdom of the masses. His popularity grew to such an extent that his executioner’s uniform—striped trousers, three-cornered hat, and green overcoat—was adopted as men’s street fashion, while women wore tiny guillotine-shaped earrings and brooches.

Guillotine earrings, c. 1790.

Most remarkable of all, Sanson became the acceptable face of the Revolution among its most trenchant critics. Stories abounded of his grace and good manners, his love of gardening and animals, and his tenderness as a father and husband. Numerous English visitors to France, most of whom found the principles of the Revolution unpalatable and the violence committed in its name unspeakable, spoke glowingly of Sanson—even after he had carried out the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793. Perhaps they saw in him a glimmer of old, aristocratic France, a man who kept his opinions to himself and stoically carried out the task assigned to him not only by the state but by centuries of heredity and tradition.

According to contemporary accounts and the later testimony of his family, Sanson was plagued with guilt and doubt about his role in the king’s execution, a moment many identified as the symbolic start of the guillotine’s era of greatest infamy. In the months following Louis’s death, tensions among the leaders of the Revolution spilled over, culminating in the Terror, a year or so in which the government sought to stamp out even the vaguest trace of counterrevolution. “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice,” said Robespierre, the architect of that year of state-sanctioned violence. Between June 1793 and July 1794, sixteen and a half thousand people were sentenced to death throughout France. The avalanche of killing unleashed dark forces entirely unconnected with the stated aims of the Revolution. In the northern town of Cambrai, a priest named Joseph Le Bron found a new vocation when he became the local executioner around the start of the Terror and set himself up as a mini Robespierre, settling personal scores, indulging an apparent passion for mayhem, and killing dozens of people on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Christopher Lee as Sanson in La Révolution Française, 1989.

Shortly before the Terror began, Sanson had been devastated by a personal tragedy when his son—who, in the family tradition, was also his assistant—raised a severed head to the crowd, fell from the scaffold, and died. On top of that grief now came wave after wave of slaughter; in twelve months, Sanson was ordered to execute more than two thousand people. His diaries—at least, as quoted by his grandson—show the immense strain it placed on him. “A terrible day’s work” is his weary comment on June 17, 1793, when he was assigned fifty-four beheadings. On another day, he apparently hired sixteen assistants to help with the executions. “They are organizing the service of the guillotine as if it were to last forever.” One morning presented him with the neck of Marie Antoinette; another, that of Georges Danton, perhaps the key figure in the overthrow of the monarchy. It was impossible to keep track of the fortunes of the various factions within factions or to predict which exalted patriot would next be denounced as a traitor. “Great citizens and good men follow one another continuously to the guillotine,” Sanson confides to his diary. “How many of them will it yet devour?” The guillotine was no longer a machine of justice but an instrument of tyranny.

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Ironically, the office of executioner was one of the few hereditary institutions to make it through the 1790s unscathed. In August 1795, around a year after Robespierre’s fall and the unofficial end of the Terror, an exhausted Sanson handed over his duties to his son, Henri. Over his thirty-nine-year career, Sanson had presided over nearly three thousand deaths. Henri proved to be a chip off the old block and stayed in his post until 1840, by which time the monarchy had been restored and the Sansons were back to being royal lickspittles rather than revolutionary heroes. The transformation of the executioner’s public image had been only a passing phase.

On Henri’s death, the job passed to his son Henri-Clément, who found the family inheritance an intolerably shameful burden. The business of execution brought him out in hives, made him physically sick, and plagued him with nightmares. He turned to drink and gambling. At some point in 1847, he informed the government that he was unable to carry out that day’s execution because he’d pawned the guillotine to pay off a debt and lacked the funds to buy it back. This was the end of the Sanson family’s seven-generation association with the least desired public office in the land. Henri-Clément wrote a history of the Sanson executioners that purported to draw heavily on the diaries Charles-Henri kept during the Revolution. No such diaries have survived, so it’s impossible to know the veracity of that claim, and it’s certainly convenient that the quoted extracts fit with Henri-Clément’s suggestion that like him, his famous grandfather struggled with his duties, the stain of which precluded him from choosing another path in life.

Still well-known in France, Charles-Henri Sanson has cropped up as a troubled and troubling figure in many works of fiction, from Dumas to Hilary Mantel. Most recently, he’s been transformed into the romantic antihero of a manga series, a delicate but brilliant young man forced by the irresistible demands of family honor to carry out macabre duties in a world turned upside down. The memory of the guillotine, of course, has proved even more tenacious. It was last used in France as recently as 1972. A lawyer for one of the condemned men wrote of his disgust at the scenes of celebration in Paris when the death sentence for his client was announced, likening them to the baying mobs of the guillotine’s early years: “The crowd would undoubtedly have applauded, screamed with delight, if the executioner, in the manner of Sanson, had held up the two heads in front of them.” But as far as we know, Sanson himself rarely felt delight in that chilling moment. When he was asked how he felt during an execution, he replied: “Monsieur, I am always in a great hurry to get it over with.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the narrative history of their scandals and intrigues is easily as compelling as the episodes Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio recorded of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero. For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political players, whether they were power-grabbing populists, slick backroom schemers, or principled reformers. It started with Empress Theodora, sometimes described as a kind of sixth-century Eva Perón, who interceded in a wave of riots that shook Constantinople, put an end to the fighting, won the adoration of the public, and saved her husband’s throne. Irene, an empress from the late eighth century, ruled for several years with a mixture of silky court diplomacy and unflinching ruthlessness—to maintain her grip on power, she ordered that her chief rival, who also happened to be her son, be blinded.

The princess Anna Komnene was another of these influential women. To Edward Gibbon, who framed her reputation for modern audiences with his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she was a Lady Macbeth character who attempted to bump off her brother so she could rule the empire through her husband. The plot failed, and Anna was forced to flee to a monastery, where she spent the rest of her life stewing with resentment and thwarted ambition. Gibbon dismissed Anna as vain, vengeful, dissembling, and reckless, the embodiment of a particular type of unpleasant Byzantine woman. But to a generation of historians currently revisiting her reputation, Anna Komnene is not a lethal Machiavel but a sparkling litterateur, one of the great figures of her age who exhibited something that one might call distinctly, beguilingly Byzantine: a flair for disruptive innovation while, paradoxically, striving to keep centuries of tradition alive. 

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Confusingly, Byzantine Empire was a term first used decades after its fall, in the mid sixteenth century. It was adapted from Byzantium, an archaic name for its capital, Constantinople, and was used to describe the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which thrived for roughly a thousand years after the slow collapse of the western half in the fifth and sixth centuries. As such, the Byzantine people would have proudly considered themselves Roman, in culture, custom, and outlook. They were of Rome rather than from it, custodians of a mighty civilization that had elevated humanity to uncharted heights.

That sense of mission and superiority drove Anna Komnene all her life. She was the eldest child of the Emperor Alexios and the Empress Irene. She was born in the Great Palace of Constantinople, two years after Alexios had wrested power from the hapless Nikephoros III and begun the emergency surgery needed to save Byzantium from ruin. Alexios defeated military opponents and stabilized the economy, yet perhaps his greatest achievement was restoring dignity to the throne by framing his family as worthy successors of Constantine the Great, the fourth-century ruler after whom the Byzantine capital was named. In Anna’s family, continuity was next to godliness. As far as she was concerned, upholding the traditions of the past was both a privilege and a divine calling. Her earliest, happiest memories were of being hailed in public as part of the imperial line that had saved civilization.

Ultimately, her legacy would be defined by her relationship to her father, but it was three women who shaped the course of her life. The first was Maria of Alania, the mother of the boy to whom she was betrothed. Maria was a patron of artists and scholars; Anna described her as “a living work of art, an object of desire to lovers of beauty.” Though the death of Anna’s husband-to-be severed her relationship with Maria, the older woman’s example continued to exert itself during Anna’s teenage years. Unbeknown to her parents, Maria hired experts to tutor Anna in mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. Anna thrived in those subjects and excelled in debates with the greatest minds at court.

Anna was similarly influenced by her paternal grandmother, Anna Dalassene, who was a crucial figure in Alexios’s reign. She had played a pivotal role in the coup that placed her son on the throne, and she dictated the culture of the new court, turning the imperial palace into a haven of monastic culture. Piety, erudition, and self-discipline supplanted the licentiousness and frivolity that had supposedly prospered under the previous regime. So significant did she become to political life in Constantinople that when Alexios left the city, he entrusted supreme control to his mother.

The third powerful female presence in Anna’s life was her mother, Irene. According to some sources, when Alexios died in 1118, Irene agreed with Anna that Anna’s husband, Byrennios, should be elevated to emperor ahead of John, Anna’s younger brother, who was the rightful heir. Supposedly, the precious Anna had hated John since the day he was born. His arrival into the world ended her ambitions of ruling through a noble husband, just as her wily grandmother had exerted her will through Alexios. The story goes that as Alexios lay on his deathbed, Anna conspired to kick her brother aside—only to discover that her husband lacked the mettle to take the opportunity. A furious Anna plotted against John for a further year until her scheming was uncovered. Bitter, humiliated, and in mortal danger, Anna was ultimately given no choice but to slink away to the dull obscurity of a monastery, removed from Constantinople and the racing pulse of the Roman civilization that was her life force. As one unsympathetic put it, “She was only thirty-six years old, and her life was over.”

There she wilted, so it’s said, unfulfilled and vengeful, for nearly two decades; only the death of her husband revived her. On his passing, Byrennios had left an unfinished account of how Alexios had risen to power and begun a new golden age, the regime’s official version of the past and present. Now fifty-five, Anna took on the project—and utterly transformed it from something competent and sober into a landmark work that has preserved her own beliefs in a way that none of her powerful male relatives managed.

The Alexiad, as it is now known, is a classic of Byzantine literature and arguably one of the most accomplished works of history written anywhere in the Middle Ages. It is, by the standards of the time, rigorously sourced and is rich with micro and macro descriptions of Byzantium. For some, Anna’s exquisite sketches of historical characters are a little too observant of their clothes, mannerisms, or habits of speech. Writing in 1906, the esteemed French historian Charles Diehl explained to his readers that Anna was “a passionate woman” and therefore was prone to be distracted from matters of consequence by her “liking for the decorative, for exterior magnificence.” Diehl is one of the great Byzantinists, but one is tempted to wonder whether he skimmed over the lengthy passages in which Anna analyzes political and military strategy. Ironically, other historians have concluded that Anna’s astute handling of those topics proves that she was not the book’s sole author; no woman, the sexist thinking goes, could have done that all by herself.

“The historian,” Anna writes early on, “must shirk neither remonstrance with his friends, nor praise of his enemies.” Balance and impartiality do not, however, leap from the pages. Anna gives full vent to many of her personal grievances, including against Pope Gregory VII, Muslims, and pretty much anybody living west of the Adriatic. Her father, on the other hand, is peerless. In keeping with the Komnenos family endeavor, the book’s objective is to commemorate Alexios as one of the great men of history, a hero part Constantine, part Odysseus who restored the empire to a state of antique perfection. Unlike Byrennios’s original sketch, Anna’s tome is elaborate in style and content, an epic fifteen-volume flourish of Attic Greek. On the surface, it’s an homage to a legendary leader of men. But Anna constantly reminds us that she was Alexios’s firstborn, the unspoken implication being that she has inherited more than a little of his genius. Despite her rhetorical protestations of humility, nobody who reads the Alexiad could think it was humble; Anna exhibits her learning and talent like a peacock splaying his feathers, and the work is all the better for it, turning what could otherwise have been dry hagiography into an engaging document of a crucial era.

While restricted in timeframe, the scope of the Alexiad is epic; the full life of the empire is touched upon. However, its primary use to historians is perhaps as a source for the Byzantine perspective on the First Crusade, which occurred between 1095 and 1099, in the middle of Alexios’s reign. Anna’s disdain for the Norman leaders of the Crusade—whose culture she feared was exerting too much influence on Byzantium—is fascinating and sometimes inadvertently hilarious. She has numerous snarky remarks about their habits and customs—everything from their heretical religious beliefs to the ugliness of their trousers—as well as frequent nods of appreciation to their boldness, brazen and vulgar though she found it. Bohemond of Taranto, for example, wins Anna’s horrified admiration for successfully escaping his enemies by playing dead in a coffin all the way from Antioch to Rome with a deceased chicken hidden on his person. The putrid stench convinced anyone brave enough to take a peek that Bohemond really was a rotting corpse. At times, her candid observations are compelling because they sound baffling to modern ears, such as a passage in which she writes that Bohemond’s nostrils gave “free passage for the high spirit which bubbled up from his heart.” Was this a waspish jibe about big Norman noses, or did twelfth-century Greeks consider wide nostrils to be an outward sign of inner masculine virtue? The strangeness and familiarity of the past are bound together in Anna’s riveting prose.

The same year it is thought that Anna finished the Alexiad, 1147, coincided neatly with the start of the Second Crusade. By this time, the emperor was Anna’s nephew Manuel, whose enthusiastic response to the crusaders differed from that of the skeptical Anna and Alexios. In the Alexiad, in praising the life and lamenting the death of her father, Anna also praises the golden age of his reign and laments its demise. Perhaps, too, it was a meditation on her own life. It had taken her around a decade to complete her magnum opus. By the time she was finished, her father, mother, and husband had all died. Reflecting on these losses, and her failed attempts to snatch the reins of power from her late brother, she ends with a strikingly melancholy note: “Like rivers flowing down from high mountains … the streams of adversity … united in one torrent flood my house. Let this be the end of my history, then, lest as I write of these sad events I become more embittered.”

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It’s believed Anna died in 1153, at the age of sixty-five. A funeral oration written in her memory by Georgios Tornikes lavished praise upon her, recalling her charm, her beauty, and her soaring intellect. She was, he said, “a rival star” to Constantinople’s galaxy of brilliant men. In the context of the times, it’s hard to think of more extravagant praise. Future readers of her work would not always be so enamored with her.

Forty years after Anna’s death, Niketas Choniates, a scholar from Constantinople, wrote a history of Byzantium that begins where the Alexiad ends: the death of Alexios and the accession of John. In Choniates’s telling of that episode, Anna takes center stage by attempting to enact a coup. It’s unclear precisely where Choniates got his information, but his unsourced account formed the bedrock upon which rests the modern view of Anna as a cutthroat who used the Alexiad as a way of atoning for (or obscuring) past wrongdoing.

For a millennium, her reputation was fixed, boosted by Gibbon’s hostile take. But in the last few years, a number of researchers have offered radically different readings of Anna’s biography. In 2014, Penelope Buckley published the first full-length literary analysis of the Alexiad, arguing that Anna was a genre-crossing pioneer who exploited her masterful knowledge of literature to shape her father as the ultimate Byzantine hero. Two years later, Leonora Neville disputed Choniates’s characterization of Anna and his version of her involvement with the attempted usurpation. Absolve Anna of guilt for the supposed crimes against her family, Neville argues, and the Alexiad is not “something she did to pass the time after her life was over, sitting in a prison and stewing in hatred.” Instead, it’s a towering work of the twelfth century, one in which Anna had to execute rhetorical acrobatics, “performing” on the page the dual roles of woman and historian, which were mutually exclusive identities in Anna’s world. In fact, Neville suggests, this duality is the root of her dastardly reputation: Choniates would have regarded the very existence of the Alexiad as proof that its author was a woman of improper ambition, precisely the sort to shamelessly infringe on male authority.

It’s an intriguing and persuasive argument. Of course, as Neville readily accepts, it’s possible that both Annas coexisted. The gifted author could also have been an ambitious schemer, as elder members of her family had done in the recent past. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever have a definitive answer. Yet Neville’s thesis underlines the ingenuity of the Alexiad. With its Attic Greek, rhetorical archaisms, and veneration of the late emperor, it is tightly bound to the traditions of the past. Yet it’s also a radical breach of convention, probably the first and only work of history written by a woman in Greek before the twentieth century. It’s emblematically Byzantine in its insistence that the great traditions of antiquity are upheld in the unfolding of something strikingly novel. Yet Anna was unique. Hers was a rare medieval experience, captured in a way that was even more unlikely and surprising than the events of her remarkable life.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by boxing. George Bellows’s may be the best. Between 1907 and 1909, Bellows created three paintings—Club Night, Stag at Sharkey’s, Both Members of This Club—that captured boxing’s glories and indignities. The sport provided a powerfully visceral metaphor for the American experience of the twentieth century.

But boxing also transfixed artists beyond American shores. Around the time Bellows created his triptych, a tranche of Europeans created sublime, radical work inspired by the sport. One of them was the Swiss enigma Arthur Cravan. Described by one critic as “a world tramp … a traverser of borders and resister of orders,” Cravan traveled the globe in the early 1900s by forging documents and assuming false identities, preening, harassing, and haranguing, as he went. He was hailed by André Breton as a pivotal precursor of Dadaism, and belonged to that category of floating prewar avant-gardists whose legacy resides more in their mode of living than their artistic creations. Indeed, he declared himself anti-art and avowed boxing to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern, American-tinged age. He’s often referred to as a “poet-boxer,” though he wasn’t especially accomplished as either; his real talent appears to have been making a spectacle of himself, in every sense. 

Cravan’s real name was Fabian Avenarius Lloyd; he adopted myriad pseudonyms and aliases during his short life. He was born in Switzerland, in 1887, to Irish and British parents with whom he had a tumultuous relationship, though he was immensely proud that his aunt Constance was Oscar Wilde’s wife. In his early teens, Cravan came to regard the familial link to the world’s most disreputable genius as proof that he was destined for a life of fabulous infamy.

That journey began in 1903 when, aged sixteen, he was kicked out of his boarding school for an egregious act of indiscipline—according to some, he hit a teacher—and, inspired by his hero Arthur Rimbaud, he left Switzerland in search of adventure. Over the next several years, Cravan took up with hookers in Berlin, hoboed his way from New York to California, and worked in the engine room of a steamship bound for the South Pacific, jumping ship when it docked in Australia. But it was in Paris that the legend of the man we know as Arthur Cravan—writer, brawler, and hoaxer—was cemented. Within the space of six years, he scandalized polite society, infuriated the avant-garde, slugged it out with one of the greatest heavyweights of all time, and then disappeared without a trace.

*

In the years immediately before World War I, Paris was in thrall to speed, danger, and incivility. The experiments of Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp revolutionized painting; Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps twisted music and dance into disorientating new forms; aviation pioneers guided flying machines around the contours of the Eiffel Tower.

Amid the craze for brutal novelty, boxing became a sensation. Though originally based on Victorian aristocratic ideals, it was championed by the modernists of Montmartre as an embodiment of the new century. It was also regarded as a fundamentally American pastime, a visceral, primal, and demotic endeavor redolent of the popular culture that was beginning to excite the world beyond the United States. When Jack Johnson fled racially motivated prosecution in the U.S. in 1913, he arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. After he’d beaten Jim Jeffries to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world in 1910, he’d been tarred as a threat to social order back home. A film of the fight had been a hit in France but was banned in America for fear that images of a black man schooling a white man in the ring would cause grave insult and incite sedition. In Paris, African American athletes and entertainers were in vogue, and Johnson gained celebrity status, mixing in nightclubs of Montparnasse and performing sell-out shows that combined pugilism displays with dancing and singing.

By the time Johnson arrived in Paris, Cravan had carved out a reputation as a boxer himself, a discipline he first picked up while traveling across the USA. He was also known as an ardent proponent of the “American” attitude toward life, by which he meant living according to desire and instinct, and telling so-called civilized society to take a running jump. In an essay titled “To Be or Not To Be … American,” he wrote that, thanks to the influence of cakewalk dancers, track athletes, and boxers such as Joe Jeanette, the whole of Paris had turned American. “Overnight,” Cravan said, “everyone began to spit and swear” and “floated around in clothes two sizes too big for them.” He finished the piece with a crib sheet for how to pass as American: “Chew … never speak … always look busy … and, above all else, crown yourself with arrogance.” It was advice he followed assiduously.

His spindly legs excepted, Cravan looked every inch the serious athlete: six foot four, a lean two hundred and thirty pounds, muscular and broad shouldered. It’s difficult at this remove to judge his mastery of the sport, but he unquestionably excelled in other parts of the boxer’s skill set: the swagger, the hype, and the trash talk. On entering the ring, Cravan acted as his own hype man, bragging about his brilliance and achievements, announcing himself as, among other things, “a hotel thief, snake charmer,” and nephew of Oscar Wilde. He did not mention, but was surely aware of, the irony that the man behind Wilde’s scandalous downfall was the Marquees of Queensbury, the same man after whom the rules of boxing are named.

Cravan found a place for boxing and braggadocio outside the ring too. Perhaps inspired by Jack Johnson’s performances, he held events that combined dancing, boxing, and lectures on modern art. But whereas Johnson had inserted boxing into a stage show, Cravan essentially did the opposite, turning his fights into something between a pantomime and a bracing piece of performance art, intended to make the audience as uncomfortable as possible. He advertised one performance promising it would climax with his suicide, only to profanely rebuke those who packed the venue for being so depraved that they would pay to watch a man take his own life. A newspaper report of another show says he “fired several shots into the air, then, half in jest, half seriously, made the most insane pronouncements against art and life. He praised athletes above artists, he praised homosexuals, those who rob the Louvre … Things almost went too far, however, when Cravan threw his briefcase into the audience. It was only by accident that no one was hit.”

Among fashionable Parisians, Cravan was a celebrity, renowned for his vitality and exhibitionism. The poet Blaise Cendrars recalled dancing the tango in nightclubs with Cravan, “Arthur in black shirts with the dickey slit right open to reveal his bleeding tattoos and the obscene inscriptions on his skin.” Cravan valued being seen above just about everything, and claimed that his motivation for writing was to “infuriate my colleagues, to get myself talked about and to make a name for myself.” Between 1911 and 1915, Cravan published five copies of Maintenant, an anti-art magazine of polemical essays, poems, and short stories, all of which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms. Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia cited it as a forerunner of 391, the hugely influential Dadaist publication. One memorable piece was “Oscar Wilde is Alive!,” a story in which Cravan claimed Wilde paid him a visit on the night of March 23, 1913. Though obviously a work of fiction, it appears to have duped the editors of the New York Times, who reported the story as though it were true and even conducted an interview with Cravan during which he kept a straight face while insisting that the occupant of the Wilde plot in Père Lachaise cemetery was an imposter.

Reports of resurrected uncles aside, Maintenant caused a stir because of its stinging attacks on fashionable artists. Its review of the 1914 exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists was especially lacerating. Every artist on show was brought down: “What a kick in the ass I’d like to give them! Oh jumping Jesus Christ almighty! … Deltombe, what a prick! … Hassenberg, how filthy … Hayden, a bit of good advice: take a few pills and purge your spirit; do a lot of fucking or better still go into rigorous training.” It’s difficult to believe that Cravan meant most of it; by his own admission he was unfamiliar with much of the work he lambasted. His aim wasn’t criticism but abuse, inflicting the swollen eyes and busted noses of the boxing ring onto the patrons of the salon and the gallery, giving serious, high-minded art a proper pasting. Art was “more in the guts than in the brain,” he said; “painting is walking, running, eating, drinking and shitting.” As he had likely anticipated, several of those he’d insulted ganged up and confronted him on the street. According to Buffet-Picabia, it “ended at the police station, not to Cravan’s advantage.”

With his taste for confrontation, one might have thought Cravan to be one of those avant-gardists like Marinetti, who greeted the Great War as a chance to finish off the moribund old world and bring forth the new. But, as Roger Lloyd Conover has said, one of the many contradictions that defined Cravan was that he was a “fighter who refused to bear arms.” In the summer of 1914, Cravan began another phase of wandering. In 1916, he found himself in Barcelona where he somehow managed to book himself a high-profile fight against Jack Johnson. Johnson was in the midst of a celebrated stay in Spain, during which he was received by royalty and starred in movies. Photographs from the fight give some idea of the scale of the event, which was held at Barcelona’s huge bullfighting arena La Monumental. What the photos don’t convey is what a mismatch the fight was. Even a ring-rusty, thirty-eight-year-old Johnson was leagues ahead of Cravan. Johnson won with a sixth-round knockout, though it could’ve been over much sooner had he wished it. There are reports that Cravan shook with fear before the contest began, knowing how out of his depth he was. One writer has suggested that “Johnson and Cravan were more collaborators than competitors,” and that the event was a con, just a hype-fueled payday for an aging legend and a flamboyant interloper with no credible chance of a win—the Mayweather-McGregor of its day.

The money Cravan earned from the Johnson fight helped him buy his passage out of Europe, and what he thought was safety from the war. In January 1917, he sailed for New York. Dozens of other European artists and intellectuals were making the same journey at the time; one of Cravan’s shipmates was Leon Trotsky, who noted in his diary that he’d met a man who claimed to be related to Oscar Wilde and “who frankly declared that he would rather smash a Yankee’s face in the noble art of boxing than be done in by a German.” Cravan didn’t stay in New York long; just long enough to put several noses out of joint. He split his time between sleeping rough in Central Park and hobnobbing with Greenwich Village bohemians. Among them was the poet Mina Loy, with whom Cravan began an intense love affair.

The occasion of their meeting was the Society of Independent Artists exhibition at the Grand Central Gallery, in April 1917. New York’s first encounter with modern art had come four years earlier with the seminal Armory Show, at which Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase caused an almighty rumpus. This time, Duchamp presented Fountain, the urinal that changed art history. Having witnessed Cravan’s work back in Paris, Duchamp and Picabia invited Cravan to deliver one of his anti-art lectures at the exhibition. He didn’t disappoint. On the day, he stood half cut in front of his audience, swore at them, waved his cock around, and was promptly arrested.

Once you’ve pulled a stunt like that, it’s difficult to know where to go next. As the Indépendents’ exhibition came to a close, Cravan may have felt that his work in New York was essentially done. Even if that wasn’t the case, he felt he couldn’t stay much longer; the USA had officially entered the war four days before the exhibition opened, and Cravan—who had a tangle of iffy passports and travel documents—feared that some army or other was poised to conscript him. After a grim few months of trekking through inclement weather into Canada, he turned south and arrived in Mexico in December 1917, intending to settle there with Loy. It was another border crossed, and the beginning of another new chapter.

*

Loy referred to Cravan as “Colossus.” It was a reference to the size of his ego as much as his physicality. In her autobiography, she recalled that friends thought her mad to get mixed up with such a conceited, obnoxious prig. But she was convinced that her love changed him, especially after they moved to Mexico. “In public he was civilized,” Loy said, “in private, sublime.” They married on January 25, 1918. Cravan found work in a local boxing gym, got in shape, fought for the odd purse, and stayed out of trouble.

Though Cravan’s days of exposing himself in public and insulting strangers were behind him, he couldn’t shake his addiction to travel and adventure. In the autumn of 1918, he and Loy, who was now pregnant, decided to make their way to Buenos Aires. The city was on the rise, and it had much to offer a cultivated couple in search of a steady income. While Loy traveled ahead on a hospital ship, Cravan decided he would make the journey via a dilapidated old boat. He set sail from the port town of Salina Cruz in November, and was never seen or heard from again. Loy searched frantically for years but never found any trace of him. Decades later, she was asked by a magazine her happiest memory: “every moment spent with Arthur Cravan,” she answered; the saddest was “the rest of the time.” Predictably, there have been stories that Cravan lived on, including as a mysterious man named Fabian Hope who turned up in Paris after the war, hawking what he claimed were unpublished Oscar Wilde manuscripts. But, as Charles Nicholl concluded at the start of this century when he retraced Cravan’s final steps, it’s far likelier that Cravan suffered the more mundane and awful fate of drowning in the Pacific Ocean.

In the intervening century, tales of his reappearance have transformed Cravan into an elusive prophet of modernism. His life and death prefigured a new type of artistic figure, that of the beautiful, brilliant young artist whose work revolves around the plasticity of their identity; there is more than a little of Arthur Cravan in Warhol, Bowie, and Andy Kaufman. One might say there has been something of Cravan in every subsequent boxer, too. As early as 1929, John R. Tunis wrote that a “modern pugilist is last of all a fighter,” needing instead great proficiency in “the art of obtaining publicity.” Cravan knew that better than any competitor of his generation. His identity as a poet-boxer also seems prescient, though he’s been well outstripped, of course, by Muhammad Ali, the motormouthed master of self-invention and reinvention. Really, though, Cravan remains a curious and obscure one-off whose greatest contribution was to the spirit of Dada. He blurred the distinctions between a fist in the face, a brush on the canvass, and a snigger behind one’s hand.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Albert Edelfelt, Queen Blanche of Norway and Sweden with Prince (later King) Hacon, 1877.

Being a red-blooded, blue-blooded male in the Carolingian Empire was a risky business. Those who grew up in Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries were frequently exposed to extreme violence. One adolescent royal from the period was struck so hard in a play fight that, in the words of a contemporary account, his playmate’s sword “penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone.”

The only thing the Carolingians valued as much as ruthlessness on the battlefield was proficiency with Biblical text. William of Septimania appears to have had a thorough education in both. He was barely in his twenties when he seized control of Barcelona in 848, but he had already spent four years warring against the crown. The city had been the old stomping ground of his father, Bernard. Bernard was an important figure in the reign of Louis the Pious, the Carolingian emperor who ruled a great swathe of territory from what is now northern Spain to the Czech Republic. But in recent times Bernard had endured a spectacular fall, toppled by intrigue and machination that ended in his death and devastated his family. When still in his teens, William became determined to win the battles his father couldn’t. He joined a rebellion against the ruling dynasty that had once been as close as kin. 

It was an audacious act, and in the long run it was destined to fail, but it was consistent with the moral education he’d received since childhood. His mother, Dhuoda, had drilled into him that there was only one true measure of nobility: “in every matter, be obedient to the interests of your father.”

She wrote those words of maternal wisdom in Liber Manualis, a handbook on how to be a nobleman that she composed for William when he was a teenager, and which she hoped would guide him through his adult life. Across eleven chapters, Dhuoda’s book outlines the subjects that should most concern a man of high birth, such as how to pray and read the Bible; how to distinguish vice from virtue; how best to honor his parents; how to serve God and the Crown; how to handle illness, affliction, and hardship. The work belongs to the tradition of “mirrors for princes,” an ancient literary genre that also proliferated during the Middle Ages. But, Dhuoda’s mirror, the only extant written work by a European woman from the ninth century, is one of a kind: not, as most were, a cleric’s tutorial but a mother’s gift of loving guidance through an uncertain future, with the thoughts, feelings, and personality of its author running through it. Like the Alfred Jewel, the Cross of Lothair, and so many of the most beautiful creations of early medieval Europe, the Liber Manualis beguiles with its intimacy and exquisite intricacy, a glittering portal to a culture that can seem entirely alien from our own.

*

Almost everything we know about Dhuoda comes from the Liber Manualis. According to her own account, she married Bernard on June 29, 824, at the Palace of Aachen, which was the center of power in the Carolingian Empire. She might’ve been as young as fifteen, she was certainly no older than twenty, and in all likelihood she saw in front of her a life of wealth and prominence as the wife of a noble servant of Europe’s most powerful ruling dynasty in centuries. Five years after the wedding, Bernard was rewarded for his loyal service with the positions of chamberlain at the imperial court and mentor to Charles, the emperor’s six year-old son by his new young wife, Judith. Judging by the lavish paeans written about her, Judith was adored by just about everyone save for her three adult stepsons who saw her and her little boy as a grave threat to their inheritances. When they heard that Charles was to be awarded lands that had formerly been given to them, the brothers struck out against their father and their stepmother, and plunged the empire into a decade of destructive factionalism and civil war.

Dhuoda’s young family was caught in the cross fire. Bernard was accused of sorcery and sexual impropriety with Judith, and fled to Barcelona. Throughout the 830s his relatives were preyed upon. One of his brothers was blinded; another was beheaded. His sister, a nun, was captured and drowned, ostensibly for being a witch. In 840, the emperor died, but it only exacerbated the conflict between his sons. Now aged sixteen, Charles asked Bernard to join forces with him. Bernard demurred, perhaps concerned that backing such a young pretender was too risky a gamble. He would soon regret his lack of conviction; the boy proved astoundingly resolute.

In 841, Charles recorded a surprise victory over his eldest sibling, which elevated him to a position of great strength. Scrambling to get back in Charles’s good books, Bernard made an offering: the fealty of his only child, William, who was sent to live and serve at Charles’s court. Such arrangements weren’t uncommon among the Frankish nobility, where adolescents were often sent to reside in a patron’s household as a sort of apprenticeship in noble living. But, this was not a usual situation, and Dhuoda was clearly concerned to see her beloved first born drawn into the “worsening turmoil of this wretched world,” as she described the events of her time. Thinking of his well-being in this life and the next, she set out to offer comfort and guidance in the only way she could.

Dhuoda began work on the handbook at her home in Uzès, on November 30, 841, the day after William’s fifteenth birthday. At the time, the world must’ve seemed a precarious and unmalleable place. While Bernard battled his enemies, the empire continued to be riven by a civil war, made all the more alarming by a succession of Viking raids from the north and Moorish incursions from the south. Just a few months before William was sent to Charles, Dhuoda’s newborn second child had been taken to live with his father a couple of hundred miles away in Aquitaine. At the moment of separation, she didn’t even know the baby’s name; it was Bernard’s privilege to decide that. Family life had slipped from her grasp. Composing this book of instruction for William was a means of exerting some control, setting down on the page her most valued truths and projecting a sense of order on a world that seemed bereft of it. “I am somewhat ill at ease,” she writes in her introduction, “and eager to be useful to you … Even though I am absent in body, this little book will be present.”

Responding to crises in this literary way was a thoroughly Carolingian trait. At the end of the previous century, Emperor Charlemagne fostered the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, a period of intense intellectual and cultural activity, and a rediscovery of classical learning. All manner of disciplines, from architecture to jurisprudence to metalworking, were patronized by the imperial court with the aim of sparking spiritual and moral reform across the continent and revivifying the vanished civilization of Rome. Central to these efforts was the preservation of knowledge through the written word. The Carolingians transcribed thousands of ancient papyrus texts to more robust parchment, safeguarding vital works that would otherwise have been lost. According to the scholars Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, only eighteen hundred manuscripts survive from pre-800 continental Western Europe, yet, as a result of the Carolingians’ commitment, we have nine thousand manuscripts from the ninth century. The irrepressible power of books is a dominant theme of the Liber Manualis, and it is crammed with literary references, especially those from works of theology and philosophy, and, of course, Scripture. Like many of her contemporaries, and unlike many of ours, Dhuoda didn’t regard reading as escape from the “real” world but as a purposeful, pious deed, and the first step on the road to righteous action. In the opening section, she beseeches William to “willingly grasp [the book] in your own hand, and enfolding it, turning it over, and reading it, and studying it, you’ll strive to fulfill its teachings,” as though the mere sensation of its cover on his skin would help him act bravely and wisely.

The Liber Manualis does everything mirrors for princes are meant to do. It counsels and consoles its reader, and abases its author, stressing her unworthiness before God and her march toward death. But it is also something more than a dry, serious work of moral instruction: Dhuoda refuses to remove herself from the text. Barely a page goes by without a glimpse of the author somewhere—in her love of puns, acrostics, and numerology; her predilection for tossing in biographical details; the curious extended metaphors; her aside about how difficult she finds writing. When those moments hit, Liber Manualis doesn’t read like a book about how to be a nobleman but a book about what it’s like to be Dhuoda. Working within the conventions of the mirrors, she finds a way to create a self-portrait—not to indulge her ego, but to provide William with something that will keep her alive in his mind, a keepsake as intimate and evocative as a lock of hair. She all but admits as much herself:

“Dhuoda is always here to exhort you, my son, but in anticipation of the day when I shall no longer be with you, you have here as a memento of me this little book … You will have learned doctors to teach you many more examples, more eminent and of greater usefulness, but they are not of equal status with me, nor do they have a heart more ardent than I, your mother, have for you, my firstborn son!”

Some scholars go further and suggest that Dhuoda made herself so visible in the text as a rebuke to Bernard, whose political mistakes and alleged infidelities put the family at risk. According to M. A. Claussen, the message of the Liber Manualis is that “Bernard is a loser;” if William wants to survive the chaos, he’d better steer clear of his biological father’s example and follow that of the person who’s been doing Bernard’s job for him for the last fifteen years: Dhuoda.

*

On February 2, 843, the Liber Manualis was complete. Dhuoda may have feared, when she sent it to William, that this would be her last meaningful communication with him. “Despite the many cares that consume me,” she writes, “this anxiety is foremost in God’s established design—that I see you one day with my own eyes.” She urges him to share the book with his little brother when he is old enough to read. This may have been empty rhetoric, or else a sign of how bleakly she saw events in the outside world. There’s no record of when William first cast his eyes over the book. It’s possible he had it by the time Charles and his brothers finally came to a truce in August 843. They sealed the deal with the Treaty of Verdun, often referred to as “Europe’s birth certificate,” which formally divided the empire in three, establishing the boundaries of modern France and Germany.

The end of the dynastic strife would’ve done nothing to ease Dhuoda’s anxieties. In the spring of the following year, Bernard was captured by Charles and executed for treason. William might have witnessed the grisly event. With Dhuoda’s command to honor his father in his ears, that summer William joined a revolt against Charles’s rule. He now moved to claim what he considered his birthright, the title his father had once held: Count of Barcelona. A chronicler recorded that when William took control of the city in 848, he did so “by guile rather than by force.” But it would require more than cunning to keep his station. Within two years, Charles had him on the run. By 850, William was dead, killed by Charles’s supporters.

Exactly eleven hundred years later the historian André Vernet discovered a copy of the Liber Manualis in Barcelona. It wasn’t the original, but it may well have derived from it, and therefore be evidence that William kept the handbook close to him. It’s unknown when Dhuoda passed away, but it’s unlikely that Dhuoda saw William before his death. There’s a small chance that she lived long enough to see her younger son, a man best known to historians as Bernard “Hairy Paws,” who also fought against Charles, become the Count of Auvergne and the Margrave of Aquitaine.

The turbulent tale of Dhuoda’s family caught the medieval imagination. The rumored affair between her husband and Empress Judith became the basis of The Erl of Toulouse, a famed fourteenth-century English chivalric romance. To the modern mind, however, always in search of a chink of insight into the interior life of the individual, it’s Dhuoda’s book that captivates. She was an avid reader, and a born writer, thinking and scribbling for her audience of one.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Ben Hecht

One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown had the movie’s ad campaign been that Nugent was sure it was going to be a turkey. When that proved not to be the case, he was stunned. “We cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed,” he wrote in his review the next day.

In truth, Gone with the Wind had come perilously close to being just the kind of disaster Nugent had foreseen. Three weeks into shooting, the producers shut down production, fired the director, and hired Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. Hecht was known as the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” for his ability to knock out clever, crowd-pleasing work in the time it takes most writers to sharpen their pencils. But this was a tall order even for him: he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel and had just seven days to dismantle and rebuild an epic blockbuster. The fact that he did it—fueled, so he claimed, by nothing but bananas and salted peanuts—might seem evidence of his remarkable talent. Hecht himself cited it as proof of the rank absurdity of Hollywood. Despite authoring dozens of successful films and earning six Oscar nominations, he dismissed Hollywood as a “marzipan kingdom” populated by idiots, responsible for an “eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
Hecht gave that lacerating verdict in his autobiography, A Child of the Century (1953), listed by Time in 2011 as one of the hundred best works of nonfiction published since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Written in the rambunctiously opinionated style of Hecht’s hero, H. L. Mencken, the book deals with Hecht’s eclectic life as a literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He was intimidatingly prolific, and always provocative. His second novel, Fantazius Mal­lare (1922) landed him in court on an obscenity charge; a later novel, A Jew in Love (1931) had him labeled as a self-hating Jew. Hecht shrugged off the controversies; bigger strife lay ahead.

As his career in Manhattan and Hollywood climbed to new heights of critical and commercial success, he suddenly swerved onto an entirely unexpected path: revisionist Zionism. During World War II, Hecht sabotaged his Hollywood career by castigating the U.S. and its citizens for failing to stop the Holocaust.

It was 1939, the climax of the so-called golden age of Hollywood. In addition to Gone with the Wind, cinema audiences that year were treated to The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights, the latter two of which Hecht also wrote. But as Hollywood cheered its successes, safe in its bubble of unreality, Hecht’s restless gaze switched to Europe and the increasingly frequent and horrific reports of Jewish persecution. The desperate situation stirred in him a sense of belonging and duty to his fellow Jews that he’d never felt before. So, Hecht did what he always did when something got under his skin: he sat himself down and picked up his pen.

*

Hecht came of age alongside the ambulance chasers, muckrakers and polemicists of Chicago. In 1910, he arrived in the Windy City as a sixteen year-old runaway from small-town Wisconsin and discovered it to be just as Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser had described: dirty, dangerous, and vibrating with supercharged ambition. On his reporter’s beat, he “haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops,” and saw “people shot, run over, hanged, burned alive, dead of poison, crumpled by age.” Eventually, these things served as source material for plays and scripts, including the mob film Underworld, for which he picked up a statuette at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929. As was often the case with his work in Hollywood, the success of Underworld astonished him; he’d been so aghast at the final cut of the picture that he reportedly asked to have his name removed from the credits.

After his apprenticeship in Chicago, Hecht moved to New York in the early twenties in pursuit of literary greatness. In 1926, Herman J. Mankiewicz, a screenwriter friend living in Los Angeles, wrote him a letter that read, “Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” In need of money, Hecht moved. While the sunshine was wonderful, and the parties diverting, he loathed Hollywood, partly because he thought most of its films were execrable, but mainly for its fakery, hypocrisy, and moral cowardice. He reserved special contempt for “the hollow-headed big boss,” the philistine ogres in charge of the studios who filled their movies with preaching moralism, but in private treated everyone like dirt. “Men who have been the targets of rape and bastardy charges and who make seduction a profession remain honorable figures in Hollywood society.” Some things, it seems, never change.

During the roaring twenties, Hollywood’s vapid silliness seemed of a piece with the times. But when the darker days of the thirties arrived, Hecht began to despair at the studios’ inability to engage, on or off screen, with world-changing events. In particular, he was infuriated by the reticence to address the rise of the Nazis, especially as so many Jewish people of East and Central European descent were thriving in the industry. According to the film historian Thomas Doherty, the first Hollywood movie to directly engage with events in the Third Reich was Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released in 1939, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. “In that year,” said Hecht, alarmed by the situation abroad and the indifference of his colleagues at home, “I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes.”

Having never been active in politics, or even a vaguely observant Jew, Hecht began to write articles about the plight of European Jewry, and joined the Fight for Freedom Committee, a pressure group urging American involvement in the war. Using his First Amendment rights for these causes brought him to the realization that he’d never been a truly active citizen until now; “in 1939 I became also an American,” he said.

In April 1941, he wrote a piece titled “My Tribe Is Called Israel” in his column for P.M., the liberal New York newspaper, defending his efforts to “increase generally the Jew consciousness of the world,” and castigated “Americanized Jews” for failing to join him out of fear that they would appear to value Jewish lives more than American ones. It was lucid and strident invective that teetered on the vituperative—a typical Hecht opinion piece—and it caught the attention of the so-called Bergson Group, a small network within the U.S. who sought to advance the agenda of Irgun, a paramilitary organization fighting to establish a free Jewish state across the entirety of the historical land of Israel. The group was led by Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook), a charismatic twenty-five-year-old Palestinian who sensed in Hecht a potential ally. Bergson reached out and arranged a meeting at the Twenty One Club, Hecht’s favorite Manhattan hangout.

A “force of nature” with a “small blonde mustache, an English accent and a voice inclined to squeak under excitement” was Hecht’s impression of Bergson after that first encounter. They were an odd couple, but a perfect match, each as outspoken and single-minded as the other. Though Hecht was insistent that he was “un-Palestine-minded,” he agreed to do what he could to put the Jewish persecution into the spotlight. It was the start of an exceptionally fruitful relationship. Bergson injected a radical sense of purpose into Hecht’s work; Hecht supplied bracing, high-profile propaganda that catapulted Bergson’s causes into the American mainstream.

The meeting with Bergson thrust Hecht’s campaigning into a new gear. On behalf of the Fight for Freedom Committee, he and Charles MacArthur devised the pageant Fun to Be Free, staged in front of seventeen thousand people at Madison Square Garden in October ’41, calling for a preemptive American strike against Nazi Germany. When Pearl Harbor shook the nation two months later, Hecht might’ve thought the task of attracting people to the cause of Europe’s besieged Jews would become easier. According to his testimony in A Child of the Century, it remained ferociously difficult.

In February 1943, Bergson helped him make contact with the activist Chaim Greenberg, who passed on revelatory research about the extent of the Holocaust. Hecht wrote an article for The American Mercury titled “The Extermination of the Jews.” It was swiftly picked up by Reader’s Digest and garnered huge attention. Hoping to capitalize on the publicity, Hecht arranged a meeting of thirty of New York’s most prominent Jewish writers. After he gave an impassioned speech asking them to use their pens to attack Germany, Hecht recalls that most of the room turned on him. He was accused of idiocy and recklessness. At a time when American soldiers were losing their lives in huge numbers, he was told, drawing attention to the suffering of Jews in Europe would only generate anger toward Jews in the U.S. Edna Ferber asked Hecht on whose orders he was acting, Hitler’s or Goebbels’s?

Poster for the Washington, D.C., production of We Will Never Die.

Undeterred, Hecht teamed up with the composer Kurt Weill and the producer Billy Rose to stage We Will Never Die, an extravaganza at Madison Square Garden that told the American public about the Holocaust. It featured a full orchestra, a choir, lavish scenery, and a gigantic cast of performers, including Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Leonard Bernstein, Stella Adler, and a teenaged Marlon Brando. Hecht even managed to persuade a hundred Orthodox rabbis “to commit sacrilege” and appear on stage. It was put together in less than a month and was an unqualified triumph. Demand for tickets was so high that they put on an extra performance and broadcast it through loudspeakers to a crowd of twenty thousand that gathered outside the sold-out venue. Governor Dewey pronounced the day, March 9, 1943, a moment when all New Yorkers should “offer prayer to Almighty God for the Jews who have been brutally massacred.” The show toured the country, picking up many influential supporters along the way, including several members of Congress. When President Roosevelt announced the formation of the War Refugee Board a few months later, Hecht’s pageant seemed like a turning point, the moment when it became impossible to ignore Europe’s abandoned Jews. It’s estimated that around two hundred thousand lives were saved as a result of the board’s work.

Yet Hecht was unsatisfied. He thought FDR’s actions were too little too late, and was dismayed at how much effort it had taken to rouse people’s concerns about genocide. As the war reached its bloody denouement, Hecht came to believe that Bergson was right: the only way to secure the safety and dignity of the world’s Jews was to establish a homeland in Palestine. When Irgun resumed its military operations against the British rulers of Mandate Palestine in 1944, Hecht agreed to defend and promote its cause within the United States. “I had no interest in Palestine ever becoming a homeland for Jews,” he recalled of the time before he began his association with Bergson. “Now I had, suddenly, interest in little else.”

Irgun was a deeply controversial group, even among many committed Zionists, who thought them wild, violent radicals who damaged rather than strengthened the chances of building a Jewish state. Hecht admitted that his attraction to them was rooted in the fact that they exhibited a type of bold and defiant Jewishness that countered all the ancient stereotypes. What the British government perceived as unspeakable acts of terrorism, Hecht recast as the awakening of a Jewish identity that had laid dormant for millennia. “Here were Jews who did not believe in the master plan of submitting always to injustice and then patiently removing it as one removes burrs from a dog’s body,” he said. In Irgun’s scheme, Jewish people would no longer apologize for their existence and push their Jewishness to the background. Hecht had seen that happen, in ways large and small, his whole life. It was true even in Hollywood, where many of the biggest stars of the day—Edward G. Robinson, Melvyn Douglas, Lauren Bacall—had changed their names so as not to appear “too” Jewish. In the future that Irgun envisioned, such timidity would be unthinkable.

Two child refugees aboard the SS Ben Hecht. Courtesy the Institute for Mediterranean Affairs.

Hecht wrote the play A Flag Is Born in support of Irgun. It was produced by Peter Bergson’s American League for a Free Palestine, starred Marlon Brando as a Holocaust survivor, and was advertised as “1776 in Palestine,” with Hecht positioned as a latter-day Tom Paine. The success of the play, on Broadway and on tour in cities across the country, raised the better part of a million dollars with which Bergson bought Igrun a ship to illegally transport hundreds of Holocaust survivors to Palestine. It was named the SS Ben Hecht. Ultimately the mission failed; the British Navy captured the ship and sent the refugees to a prisoner camp in Cyprus. But Ben Hecht was now synonymous with the struggle for a Jewish homeland and arguably the most celebrated supporter of Irgun in the United States. He couldn’t have been prouder, though—Hecht being Hecht—he couldn’t shake the warning that Mencken had given him years before: “the leader of every cause is a scoundrel.”

*

After A Flag Is Born, Hecht’s defenses of Irgun grew increasingly astringent. In a full-page newspaper advert in May 1947, he taunted the British government, called them the real terrorists of Palestine, and had a message for Irgun’s fighters:

Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.

The following year, Hecht’s films were officially boycotted in the UK, which severely harmed his career in Hollywood, though he wore the injury as a badge of honor, calling it “the best press notice I had ever received.” He understood also that the boycott was a futile gesture from the British, coming as it did a few months after the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Hecht should’ve been overjoyed at that event, but the new Israeli nation led by David Ben-Gurion disavowed Irgun, its methods, and its creed. Ben-Gurion said plainly that “Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.” Hecht was disgusted. It was, he thought, as though the United States had rounded on Washington and the Continental Army once the Revolutionary War had been won. His time as a propagandist was over.

Britain’s boycott against his films ended in 1951, making it easier for Hecht to work in Hollywood again. He wrote for Rock Hudson on the 1957 version of A Farewell to Arms, and for Brando on Mutiny on the Bounty, though he didn’t think much of either movie. In his dotage, he made a final, brief, reinvention as a TV talk-show host, interviewing a fascinating range of people, including Eartha Kitt, Salvador Dalí, and Sugar Ray Robinson. The show was supposedly canceled because of Hecht’s insistence on talking about sex, drugs, religion, and various other things you weren’t meant to discuss on fifties TV. He peppered Jack Kerouac with questions of that sort during one episode, receiving little but honey-voiced giggles in reply. “I could write a book about the way you’ve lived,” said Kerouac, probably unaware that Hecht had already done that, too.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Lilya Litvyak.

On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich launched its ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was pestilential in scale; more than three million Axis soldiers swarmed Russia’s borders in a matter of hours, overwhelming Soviet defenses. Hitler regarded the peoples of the Soviet Union to be a subhuman rabble against whom victory was inevitable. But the supposed Untermensch turned out to be ferocious opponents, hardened by decades of deprivation and fueled by an unbending love of country.

Among those supercharged patriots were eight hundred thousand women who volunteered for frontline action, in roles such as snipers, machine gunners, and tank drivers. Nearly two hundred thousand women served in air defense, including those who flew bombers and fighter planes in Air Group 122, at the time the world’s only all-female air-combat unit. It was established in the fall of 1941 by the twenty-nine-year-old navigator Marina Raskova. Thanks to a series of daring long-distance flights undertaken in the late 1930s, she was one of the most famous people in the Soviet Union, and a role model to millions of young women. Yet, Raskova’s reputation was to be surpassed by one of her students: the petite, baby-faced Lilya Litvyak, who became the world’s first female fighter ace, and is better known as the White Rose of Stalingrad. 

“Warrior! Answer to the motherland’s victory!”

Born in Moscow in August 1921, Litvyak knew nothing of the Russia before Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and their revolution. Her parents, Anna and Vladimir, had grown up in the countryside. They moved to the city as newlyweds in 1918, peasants in pursuit of the proletarian dream. They settled in a decent apartment and quickly found work; Anna in retail, Vladimir in a factory, before climbing his way up to a bureaucratic post within the People’s Commissariat of Transportation. Their eldest child, Lilya, had a typical post-1917 education. She entered the Little Octobrists and the Young Pioneers—the Soviet version of the Scouts—before joining the ranks of the Komsomol, the youth branch of the Communist Party. In these organizations, she was inculcated with the belief that the USSR had the ability to alter any aspect of life at will. “It was both possible and necessary to alter everything,” is how the author Raisa Orlova, remembers these times, “the streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, the human souls.” Anna Kiparenko, a Komsomol member, likewise believed she was involved in a profound chapter of history: “Human beings of a new kind were being formed.”

Throughout the thirties, Stalin’s regime embarked on a series of wide-ranging agricultural and industrial reforms. Women in particular were said to be in the process of an historic emancipation, liberated from bourgeois drudgery by purposeful work and technology. On farms, women were urged to learn how to drive tractors; in cities, they were encouraged to enter the male-dominated world of heavy industry, or the cutting-edge field of aviation, especially after Marina Raskova’s exploits had made her a household name. Litvyak was one of countless teenage girls who answered the call and joined her local flying club. These young women were certain that their lives would be filled with adventures and opportunities that their mothers, born in the time of the czars, had never known.

But the effort to catapult the Soviet economy into the future took a gruesome toll. Between 1934 and 1941, Stalin’s infamous purges of the ideologically suspect sent twenty million people to the Gulag or the grave. Litvyak’s father was one of them. As with so many victims of the Great Terror, it’s unclear why he was targeted or exactly what happened to him. Perhaps the breakdown of his marriage, which occurred at some point during the thirties, had something to do with it. More likely, he was just unlucky enough to work underneath the “Iron Commissar” Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders. Quoting a senior Soviet official, the historian Bill Yenne writes that on Kaganovich’s watch, “every second man” was jailed or shot. Yenne contests that Vladimir’s inexplicable and unjust disappearance instilled in Litvyak an urgent desire to clear the family name. That motivation, along with her intense patriotism and her innate attraction to danger, led her to volunteer when the call went out in October 1941, just as the Nazis bore down on Moscow, and Russia seemed doomed.

*

Marina Raskova’s plan for Air Group 122 was to harness the Soviet Union’s female aviators into three regiments: 586 Fighter Regiment, 587 Bomber Regiment, and 588 Night Bomber Regiment. Within weeks it was abundantly apparent that Litvyak was destined for the 586. She was a headstrong thrill-seeker, a born fighter pilot.

The ubiquitous party officials lived among the recruits. One of them, a political officer named Nina Ivakina, was tasked with spotting signs of ideological weakness. Every week, Ivakina had some new instance of rebelliousness and indiscipline to report. One night, a week before Christmas, Litvyak committed a serious transgression by slipping out of the dormitory after curfew to go dancing with the male soldiers of the neighboring garrison. Going AWOL during basic training was a bad start to Litvyak’s military career. Ivakina thought it consistent with the rest of her usual rude, tardy, and disobliging conduct. “She is not conscious of being at fault,” recorded Ivakina with tangible astonishment when Litvyak had been arraigned before a Red Army Commanders’ Court and expressed no remorse for her actions.

Lilya Litvak.

During her several months of training, Litvyak took every opportunity to assert her individuality. First, she refused to have her light brown curls cut short like all the other recruits. When she finally relented, she got hold of peroxide to bleach her hair white-blonde. When handed her standard-issue uniform, she customized it with a glamorous fur collar, an offence for which she was, briefly, arrested. It may seem odd that Litvyak felt so free to express her sense of agency given that she was forever being watched, not only by her military superiors, but by agents of party and state. Yet, despite the horrors it brought, many Soviet citizens experienced the war as an oasis of (relative) freedom, when one could speak and act without worrying about toeing the party line. “To think,” the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam acidly remarked to her friend Anna Akhmatova, “that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were killed, when we were starving, and my son was doing forced labor.” Ivakina branded Litvyak “a swanky, flirtatious, aviatrix.” It was meant to be a lacerating indictment, but if she’d been asked to describe herself in three words, Litvyak might’ve plumped for the same ones.

Despite Ivakina’s reservations, Raskova felt that Litvyak’s obvious flaws were outweighed by her instinctual brilliance in the air. It was a rare gift that no amount of training could provide. Nothing threatened Litvyak’s place in Air Group 122, not even the revelation that she had lied on her application form and grossly overstated her experience as a pilot. In fact, that may even have helped Raskova see her as a kindred spirit. When Soviet archives opened up after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, it emerged that Raskova had worked undercover for the NKVD—the secret police—informing on people during the Great Terror. This perhaps explains the surprisingly close relationship she had with Stalin; when she died in 1943, she was given a state funeral and her ashes were put in the Kremlin. According to Valentina Grizodubova, with whom she flew her most famous expeditions, Raskova “had no specialist training as a navigator and had clocked up a total of only thirty or so flying hours … I have no idea how Marina gained her navigator’s license.”

In the cockpit of Litvyak’s Yak-1, the Soviet dream of reimagining human life seemed to come true. In early 1942, a few weeks before her first mission, she wrote an illuminating letter to her mother.

“What can be in store for me? Either something wonderful and magnificent, or everything might collapse in an instant into the ordinary routine of the civilian life which ordinary sinners live. Of course, what I want is to live, if only a little, but a wild interesting life … The hour will soon come when we shall soar on the wings of hawks, and the life we live will be very different.”

That summer, Litvyak finally got her chance at combat. She flew defensive missions over the port city Saratov, an important strategic location on the Volga. Having succeeded in those, she and some of the other women in 586 Regiment were transferred to a male regiment within the vicinity of Stalingrad, during the early stages of the infamous six-month struggle for the city. On September 13, she entered a dogfight against Germany’s Jagdgeschwader 53 unit, among the most lethal fighter pilots on earth. Litvyak came through unscathed and brought down her first Nazi plane, piloted by Erwin Maier, who was immediately captured by the Soviets. Later that day, Maier’s captors introduced him to Litvyak. It took a long time to convince him that this tiny blonde woman—little more than a girl—had been the one to end his war.

Over the coming weeks, Litvyak flew further successful missions and gained the dubious distinction of being the first woman in history to kill enemy combatants in the air. Her legendary exploits spread to Germany where outlandish tales turned her into a vampish figure, a warrior femme fatale with a delicate white rose painted on the side of her killing machine. The flower was actually a lily, a reference to her first name, though she did keep a picture of a rose with her in the cockpit, as well as bunches of wild flowers, which she got up early in the morning to pick, and sometimes spread on the wings of her stationery aircraft in preparation for a mission.

Litvyak impressed everyone with her calmness and skill in the maelstrom of combat. Yet, that fall and winter her opportunities to fight frontline combats were limited. Even though her commander recognized the talent of the female pilots, he struggled to think of them as equal to their male counterparts. Litvyak and the other female pilots, were received with a mixture of fascination, hostility, condescension, and, eventually, hard-earned respect, from the men who refused to fly if their aircraft had been touched by a female engineer. It was only when she, another female pilot named Katya Budanova, and their two female mechanics were transferred to the 296 Fighter Regiment in January ’43 that Litvyak was given the opportunity to experience the heat of battle once more. She fought with increasing flamboyance. It was also in 296 that she met and fell in love with a young male pilot, Alexey Salomatin, her squadron leader, who shared Litvyak’s flair for the dramatic. Their whirlwind romance was an open secret and, according to some sources, two months after they met, they asked for permission to marry.

Lilya Litvyak surrounded by male pilots.

Shortly thereafter, Litvyak was involved in her most intense battle yet. She took on six Messerschmitts with typical brio, shooting down two of them, dodging three, and being hit by one. Her crash landing left her with a serious leg injury. After hospital treatment, she was sent home to Moscow to convalescence in her mother’s apartment. Her heroism had caught the imagination of her home city and the whole of Russia. The story of a beautiful girl who made scarves and dresses out of the parachutes of German POWs, and who could take on six Luftwaffe beasts at a time, seemed like a modern-day fairy tale. It was the perfect propaganda for the Soviets who, after nearly two years of grind, were finally gaining the upper hand against the Nazis. Indeed, it was a story with global appeal; British and American news organizations both reported on the White Rose of Stalingrad, including the New York Times.

Litvyak was offered an extended period of leave, but, desperate to get back into the thick of the action, she turned it down. As she made her way back to the front, it must have occurred to her that she might never see Moscow again.

*

“Fascism is the bitterest enemy of women. Everyone to the fight against fascism!”

To the public, she was a celebrity, but among her comrades in the Soviet Air Force, Litvyak was now treated with the utmost respect. On her return to her regiment, she was promoted to the rank of senior lieutenant, and a few weeks later—at the age of twenty-one—was given a further promotion to squadron leader. But between those events fell tragedy. Salomatin, the man she’d supposedly married just before her injury, crashed and died. Those who saw it happen suggested it’d been an entirely preventable accident, the result of showboating as he came into land. Litvyak was devastated. “Fate has snatched away my best friend,” she told her mother.

In response, she pushed for more responsibilities, more opportunities to serve Mother Russia. “Lilya didn’t want to stay on the ground,” recalled her mechanic Inna Pasportnikova. “She only wanted to fly and fight, and she flew combat desperately.” She completed several missions that summer, all with the aggression and commitment for which she’d become famous. But on August 1, she disappeared on a mission during the Battle of Kursk. It’s thought she was shot down by a Nazi plane, but neither her body nor her aircraft were ever positively identified. Rumors circulated that she had defected to Germany, but if the White Rose of Stalingrad had turned fascist, it’s surely not something the Third Reich would’ve kept under its hat.

One can only wonder how Litvyak would’ve fared in the Soviet Union that emerged from the war. After D-day in June 1944, Stalin’s government began to plan for peacetime rebuilding. As part of this, there was a retreat from propagandizing women as Stakhanovite workers and warriors, and a new emphasis on the patriotic duties of childrearing and homemaking. In July, stringent divorce laws were introduced, as were the title Mother Heroine and the Order of Maternal Glory—awards given to women who bore and raised more than seven children. In a postwar Soviet Union, Stalin saw little place for the gender radicalism of earlier decades, no matter how hollow the rhetoric of those times had been.

Thus, the stories of the hundreds of thousands of women who had served and fought on the frontline drifted to the background of the collective memory. In Gorbachev’s Russia, Svetlana Alexievich sought out dozens of women who’d fought and killed in the “Great Patriotic War.” Many of them said they’d never known how to reconcile their past lives as warriors with their present lives as mothers and grandmothers—that is, real women, rather than the conjured forms they’d been during combat.

Alexievich’s interviews—published in English as War’s Unwomanly Face—are a compelling read. They’re a spin on the usual narrative about the men who came home from the world wars without the capacity to talk about what they’d experienced, or even to make sense of it in their own heads. “Men could go through it all,” said one woman who’d served as a sniper. “They were men after all … I began to tell all about it to my granddaughter, but my daughter-in-law checked me: there is no need for a girl to know of such things. She said she was to become a woman … and a mother … And I have no one to tell it to.”

It’s tempting to think that had Litvyak lived, she would’ve told all of Russia her story, whether it wanted to listen to it or not.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Moll CutPurse smoking.

When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed return to normality. For the previous forty-one years, the natural order had been put on its head by the reign of Elizabeth I, a woman performing the ultimate male duty. Elizabeth’s reign had necessarily been an act of political transvestism. She presented herself as the Virgin Queen, the chaste goddess, but also as the guardian of divinely ordained power; she wore dresses from the neck down, but the crown upon her head remained inherently male. “I have the body of a woman,” she famously reminded her people, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth’s accession sparked a preoccupation with masculine women in England. Within twenty years of the beginning of her reign, there were reports that females had been seen strutting along the streets of London wearing men’s breeches and doublets, in brazen contravention of the law. When the writer William Harrison encountered some of these imposters in the capital he swore that it “passed my skill to discern whether they were men or women.”

For centuries, clothes had served as a marker and enforcer of one’s station in life. Yet, Elizabeth feared that the rapid growth of England’s cities, and the spending habits of an emerging class of wealthy merchants, was causing what one contemporary commentator termed “a mingle mangle of apparel … So that it is verie hard to knowe who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not.” To address the confusion, Elizabeth issued eight proclamations against “excesse of apparel,” dictating what fabrics, colors, and styles each social rank were allowed (or, more often, not allowed) to wear. None but the sovereign and her immediate family were permitted to wear purple silk, for instance, and all but the nobility were obliged to wear woolen caps on certain days. Similar steps were taken against cross-dressing among the sexes, but to little effect.

If any had hoped that the coronation of James, the long-awaited adult Protestant male, would tilt the world back on its axis, they were disappointed. During his reign, the phenomenon of the London “Roaring Girl” reached its apotheosis in the form of Mary Frith, a smoking, cursing, thieving, braggart who spoke and—most shocking of all—dressed like a man. In the guise of the semifictional character Moll Cutpurse, Frith became an urban legend in every sense of the term, encapsulating much that was exhilarating and terrifying about London life in the years when the city began its mutation from medieval city into modern metropolis. To the burghers and the zealots, she was a despicable inversion of all that was good and godly; the criminal underworld cheered her, while artists and pleasure seekers immortalized her as the personification of a town where anything was possible.

For a short time, she was noisome, irrepressible London in human form, sharp-elbowed, loudmouthed, and strong-willed. But in the years immediately after her death, she was reclaimed as a defender of hierarchy and patriarchy, a transformation made possible by eighteen of the strangest, most radical, and most violent years in British history, when civil war and revolution created “a world turned upside down”; when, for a brief moment, all the most basic assumptions about society were tossed into the air; and when, in comparison, a girl wearing slacks really didn’t seem like such a big deal after all.

*

From Frith’s first appearance in the historical record, it’s clear she was trouble. In 1600, age sixteen, she was up before magistrates accused of stealing two shillings and eleven pence from a man in the Clerkenwell area of London. Two years later, she stood trial for a similar offense; in 1610, she was found not guilty of stealing ten pounds’ worth of money and jewelry in Southwark. Around this time, according to one account, she escaped a ship destined for Jamestown, perhaps in the party of new settlers that saved the colony from collapse after the Starving Time. The tale is probably apocryphal, but it expresses an essential truth. In the seventeenth century, Jamestown represented the absolute opposite of London, making it the perfect place for a wayward young woman to be put back on the straight and narrow. The notion that Frith rejected this fate makes for an impeccable genesis story, a prologue to the semimythical figure she was about to become.

Repeated scrapes with the law would have gained any woman a degree of notoriety. What elevated Frith to celebrity status was that she conducted her criminality in men’s clothing. When she was barely into her twenties, titillating stories of her behavior began to circulate through London. In 1610, not long after she’d been cleared of burglary, she was well-known enough to be the subject of a play by John Day titled The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall of the Bankside. The following year, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker had her as the eponymous lead of their celebrated play, The Roaring Girl, or, Moll Cutpurse. This being the indecorous world of Jacobean theater, the character of Moll Cutpurse wasn’t put on stage to be spat at. Rather, she was the play’s unlikely moral center. Being neither fully male nor fully female, as it seemed to Middleton and Dekker, she was perfectly placed to ridicule and question the follies of both sexes.

The play seems to have been a hit; it cemented Moll Cutpurse in London’s ever-swelling cast of totemic characters. Loved, loathed, and constantly talked about, Frith capitalized on her notoriety by making an appearance at the end of a 1611 performance of The Roaring Girl, at the Fortune Playhouse, dressed as a man, carrying a sword, and dancing a jig. Cross-dressing was, of course, a staple of English theater: a number of Shakespeare’s most famous works toy with the theme, and boys regularly took on female roles, a practice that rankled the country’s growing ranks of devout Calvinists. The sight of a woman in men’s dress, however, was provocative, even in the zone of suspended reality the stage provided.

Frith’s daring is precisely why she, rather than any of the other cross-dressing women who had emerged since the 1570s, so fascinated the public. When the first cases emerged, many thought that women who wore male clothes were prostitutes, advertising with their physical appearance that they had jettisoned all sense of propriety. But there was never any suggestion that Frith was a prostitute, nor that she was attempting to communicate something about what we would term her sexuality. As Peter Ackroyd writes, “in the twenty-first century [Frith’s cross-dressing] might be seen as a token of sexual identity; in fact it was a token of urban identity.” Frith’s male clothes were the uniform of swagger, agency, and individualism; they allowed her to live the sort of fleet-footed, urban existence that appealed to her, one that was typically off limits to women. And, as her performance at the Fortune shows, she also loved wearing men’s clothes because in the bustling streets of London, she was guaranteed to be seen in them.

Inevitably, her exhibitionism didn’t go unpunished. On Christmas Day 1611, she was arrested and sent to Bridewell Prison. In February, she was made to do public penance dressed in a white sheet. The famed letter writer John Chamberlain reported the scene to a friend. “She wept bitterly and seemed very penitent,” he wrote, although he suspected this was all for show: “It is since doubted she was maudlin drunk. Being discovered to have tippled off three quarts of sack before she came to her penance.” In any event, she was deemed to have served her sentence and sent back into the maw of the city.

As she approached thirty, it’s possible that Frith felt pressure to make an honest woman of herself. Although later accounts of her life maintained that she only had use for men as partners in stealing and drinking, in 1614 she married Lewknor Markham, who may’ve been the son of the playwright Gervase Markham, keeping her theatrical connections alive. The reformation wasn’t permanent. In 1617, she was up before the beaks again.

Soon after that, public concern about cross-dressing women reached a new pitch, although historians struggle to identify evidence that the practice was suddenly on the rise. In 1620, two pamphlets were published, Hic Mulier (“Mannish Woman”) and Haec-Vir (“Womanish Man”) fulminating against the creeping menace of gender inversion. That same year, the king himself urged men of the cloth to “inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolence of our women.” On hearing the news, John Chamberlain wrote in one of his letters, “the world is very far out of order, but whether this will mend yt God knowes.”

In the case of Mary Frith, at least, it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. In yet another trial in 1624—during which she confirmed that she hadn’t seen her husband for years—Frith was found guilty of importing beaver-fur hats, a transgression against the sumptuary laws that deemed these precious commodities suitable for noble gentlemen only. Indeed, the papers connected to the case allege that she was up to her old ways in every sense: harboring crooks; swearing and blaspheming; frequenting taverns and smoking tobacco. It’s also apparent that her main source of income was from “fencing”: she would receive stolen goods and broker their return to their owners. It was as though having given birth to the myth of Moll Cutpurse, Frith felt obliged to keep her alive.

*

After her prosecution in 1624, Frith all but disappeared from the official records. The following year, King James died. By 1642, his son Charles I had shepherded the people of the British Isles into a brutal civil war that pitched the Crown against Parliament, and claimed the lives of one in fifty people. The conflict, predictably enough in these dress-conscious times, was potently symbolized by clothing: the puritanical “Roundhead” supporters of Parliament in plain and somber garb on one side; the “Cavalier” monarchists with flowing wigs and flamboyant suits on the other. It ended in 1649, with the unthinkable, when Charles was tried and convicted of war crimes against his own subjects and publicly executed days later. The people of Charles’s three kingdoms were stunned. It was as though the sun had been plucked out of the sky.

The king’s demise triggered an eleven-year experiment with republicanism, under the guidance of Oliver Cromwell. The wheels of that strange new vehicle of government fell off when Cromwell died in late 1658, and by early 1660, the monarchy had been restored. Between those two milestones, on July 26, 1659, Mary Frith’s life came to an end. What she experienced during the years of carnage and turmoil can’t be known for sure, but it may have taken a personal toll. The records of the Bethlem Royal Hospital—better known as Bedlam, London’s infamous mental asylum—state that she was released in 1644, two years into the war, having recovered from insanity.

It’s unclear when or under what circumstances she was committed, though one might speculate that it had something to do with her willful nonconformism. As the stronghold of Parliament’s rebellion against the king, London was in the grip of abstemious religious sects who effected a huge change in the city’s cultural life. In 1642, the suppression of plays and closure of London’s theaters were ordered; in 1644, the Globe was demolished. By 1646, the Puritans’ war on Christmas had outlawed almost all the traditional festivities, including church sermons. In that environment, it’s easy to imagine how a taboo-buster like Mary Frith might be appraised.

The restoration of the Stuart monarchy saw license and excess return to London’s streets. Theaters reopened, and women were allowed to appear onstage for the first time. The king, whose fleshly appetites resulted in seventeen acknowledged bastards, so loved actresses that he made the best-loved of them, Nell Gwynn, one of his many mistresses. London once again was a Moll Cutpurse kind of town. Within three years of Frith’s death and two years of the Restoration, a book was published, The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse, which purported to be Frith’s firsthand account of her many adventures. If Frith really was behind the book—and a minority of historians maintain she was—then the self-portrait is rather an abstract one. Though filled with juicy revelations about her work as a thief, a fence, and a bawd, there is no mention of her marriage or her spell in Bedlam, and the details of many incidents contradict the facts recorded in official documents.

Whether Frith was at all involved with the book, or whether, as many believe, it was the work of the publisher William Gilbertson, The Life confirmed Moll Cutpurse’s remarkable metamorphosis into an emblem of the good old days before the war, back when people had morals and a sense of decency. She boasts of having once genuflected before the king when other “Saucy Rogues” in London wanted his head on the chopping block, and that she was “the onely declared person in our street against the Parliament.” In what she describes as a time of “holy Cheats and sanctified Delusions,” when the city mob assumed superiority over a divinely ordained monarch, Frith’s perverse character, her desire to invert all social norms, made her the voice of reason. The vices she clung to—drinking, bull baiting, bawdry—almost seemed like virtues when practiced in defiance of the Puritans’ proscriptions. Though she boldly confesses to stealing coins and trinkets, she suggests that she never countenanced the ultimate act of larceny committed by the Roundheads: the theft of the king’s God-given power. Among a regicidal shower of ne’er-do-wells, Moll Cutpurse suddenly shone like a diamond in dog shit.

Thus, in the hands of a canny publisher, the most outrageous woman in England became a smiter of radicalism and conservative heroine. Yet for all the obvious propaganda, there are lines in The Life that sound as if they could only have been spoken by Frith herself. “I doe more wonder at my self than others can do,” she says at one point in a wistful aside. It sounds tantalizingly like a real person communicating an emotional truth about this life of notoriety that she had led, as do the book’s final lines. “Let me be lay’n in my Grave on my Belly, with my Breech upwards, as well for a Lucky Resurrection at Doomsday, as because I am unworthy to look upwards, and that as I have in my Life been preposterous, so I may be in my death … and there’s an END.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Joricramos, Euclides da Cunha.

There’s an argument that 1922 was the moment modernism took flight. It saw breakthrough works by a slew of writers including Joyce, Eliot, and Fitzgerald; Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus while Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago; Hitchcock directed his first movie as Disney made his first animations; Mussolini’s Fascists took hold of Italy, and Einstein got his hands on the Nobel Prize.

Less known than those canonical events is the modernist happening that struck São Paulo, where a festival of exhibitions and lectures gave many Brazilians their first exposure to modern art, unveiling young, homegrown creative talents with a radical vision: to ditch the long-burning obsession with emulating European civilization, and instead glory at the beauty beneath their own feet.

In the nineteenth century, this would have sounded absurd to educated Brazilians, Eurocentric to the core. But the 1922 generation was the first to have grown up with Os Sertões (“The Backlands”), a classic of Brazilian literature largely unknown to the outside world. Published in 1902, the book is a unique, genre-defying exploration of the country’s arid northeast and the calamity that befell it in 1897, when, in the name of the Brazilian national motto “order and progress,” the federal government flattened the town of Canudos and butchered as much of its population as it could get its hands on. It was written by Euclides da Cunha, a young civil engineer whose experience of the so-called War of Canudos turned him from a zealous government propagandist to the anguished voice of the Brazilian conscience.

The book was a commercial sensation. It triggered a national reappraisal of the assumptions about Brazil’s varied population and the ideals of the recent republican revolution. Da Cunha followed Os Sertões with an equally revelatory study of the Amazon region. A couple of years later, he was dead, killed in a shoot-out with a love rival young enough to be his son. It was a turn of events worthy of the season finale of a Rede Globo telenovela, an ignominious but apt end for a man who spent a lifetime pondering what it meant to be Brazilian.

Born in 1866, da Cunha was a sickly and brittle child, “stunted,” in the phrasing of one biographer, “by the unpleasant surprise of being born.” At the age of three, he lost his mother, after which he was tossed between the care of various family members, and contracted tuberculosis. At twenty, still with his small frame and delicate, faintly avian good looks, he entered the Military Institute of Engineering in Praia Vermelha against a backdrop of revolution.

Euclides da Cunha. Via the Instituto Moreira Salles.

As a cadet, da Cunha was tutored by men who espoused the abolition of slavery and the monarchy, envisioning a Brazilian renaissance that would create a superpower in South America, one modeled on western Europe and, in some respects, the United States. Inspired by the positivist thinking of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, these theories claimed that Brazil had to stick rigidly to the European example in just about everything were it to assume a place at the table of truly modern nations. The revolutionaries therefore faced a knotty contradiction: they wanted to create an advanced, sophisticated nation that respected individual liberties but thought the biggest obstacle in their way was Brazil’s majority population of uneducated, rural peoples of African and native heritage. The paradox existed in microcosm within da Cunha, himself of mixed descent, the grandson of a Karari Indian and a Portuguese slaveholder. Despite this, he fell in with the orthodoxy and believed that beyond the cities on the Atlantic coast, Brazil teemed with inferior peoples in desperate need of uplift from the urban elites.

Da Cunha’s concerns about the racial composition of the country became especially pertinent in 1888, when Princess Isabel declared the end of slavery. It was to be the royal family’s last significant act: in 1889, the monarchy fell and the republic was established. For the next few years, da Cunha balanced his work as an engineer with propagandizing for the government in the newspapers of Rio. Then, at the start of 1897, the capital was hit with astonishing news from the distant state of Bahia that tens of thousands of freed slaves, Indios, and mestizos were rising up against the government, led by a crazed millenarian preacher whose aim was to destroy the nascent republic and send Brazil back to the dark ages. Humiliated by their losses, the army was preparing to assert the primacy of the new republic by crushing this raggle-taggle swarm of savages. As a faithful champion of the revolution, da Cunha was invited to tag along and document the campaign. It would prove to be a decisive step in Brazil’s coming-of-age, tough not in the way anyone expected.

*

The town of Canudos was founded in 1893, by Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, better known to the thousands of people who hung on his every word as “the Counselor.” Ever since his wife jilted him sometime in the 1860s, the Counselor had wandered the impoverished towns and villages of Bahia, building and renovating churches and cemeteries, foretelling the end of days, railing against the sin of slavery, and offering advice and practical help to those at the bottom of the pile.

Euclides da Cunha in Lima, 1906. Via Foto Divulgacao.

Many of the most desperate and downtrodden looked upon the Counselor as a savior, though not a messiah; there’s no record of him claiming to have supernatural powers or a special connection to God. Local landowners and their political allies were alarmed by his popularity. In 1876, he was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife and mother, despite the fact that the former was still alive and the latter had died when he was only six years old. No charges were handed out, just a severe beating as a reminder of what happens to those who rock the boat. The Counselor took no heed. When the Republic was declared, his preaching became more vehement than ever. He condemned the new constitution’s separation of powers as heresy and urged people not to obey tax laws, which he claimed were designed to rob from the poor to give to the rich. His following swelled, thanks in part to newly emancipated slaves who found themselves free but without hope. After surviving an attempt on his life by the state police in 1893, the Counselor and a few hundred of his followers set up camp in an abandoned expanse of land owned by the local magnate, Baron de Jeremoabo. By luck or judgment, they had chosen an unusually fertile spot. Word soon spread that the Counselor had put down roots in Canudos, a new town blessed by God. It’s estimated that within two years, between twenty-five thousand and thirty-five thousand had joined him in a thriving, peaceful, community that lived by its own rules, separate from wealthy landlords, corrupt politicians, or an inconstant Church.

It was only a matter of time before things came to a head. When the government confiscated a huge order of lumber intended for Canudos’s new church, five hundred of the Counselor’s heavies went to reclaim it. The police ambushed them en route, and a hundred and fifty of the Counselor’s men died in the ensuing battle. Those who survived, however, fought ferociously and sent the police running. The authorities decided enough was enough: the dissidents of Canudos had to be brought to heel. But, to the disbelief of the generals and the dismay of the politicians, the first forces sent to discipline the Counselor and his followers were thrashed by Canudos’s fearsome guerrilla warriors. All of a sudden, what had been a local law and order issue in the back of beyond appeared to be morphing into a Manichean struggle that imperilled the very health of the republic.

The news caused hysteria in Rio. Rumors spread that the Counselor was in the pay of exiled former royals and hostile foreign governments who conspired to destroy Brazil’s new golden age. Violent mobs attacked pro-monarchy newspapers, their journalists had their homes ransacked, and one editor was murdered in broad daylight. There were even lists of prominent monarchists handed to hospitals so doctors would know whom to deny treatment.

When invited to be an embedded reporter in the march on Canudos, da Cunha was eager to serve the cause and trumpet the Republic’s virtuous strike against the forces of regression. Rio’s newspapers revealed Canudos’s diverse population as backward deviants, with names such as “Crooked-mouthed Raymondo” and “Shackle-foot Joaqium.” There were also terrifying women who fought as tenaciously as the men, such as the formidably named Maria de Guerra de Jesus, who apparently hacked a soldier to death with a sickle. The local Bahian elite agreed that the people of Canudos were fundamentally different creatures from real Brazilians. “Miserable ex-slaves and criminals,” is how Baron de Jeremoabo described them, “without a single one who is a human being.”

Da Cunha’s own dispatches told of a great victory for the federal troops over the barbarians, achieved with minimum bloodshed. It would take five years for the true story to surface. As described in Os Sertões, a two-month siege of the town killed hundreds through starvation and disease. At the start of October 1897, government artillery in the surrounding mountains smashed Canudos to pieces. Weak and demoralized, its denizens were sitting targets. Those who surrendered were promised clemency. Even so, as photographs by Flavio de Barros capture, soldiers avenged the defeats of the last several months with indiscriminate violence. Civilians, including small children, were tortured and murdered in their thousands. When the Counselor’s dead body was discovered, it was chopped up, the head put on a spike, and the brain gifted to scientists to see whether the precise cause of his madness could be identified. To their apparent surprise, no defects were found.

With shame and horror, da Cunha realized that in attempting to smother barbarism with civilization, the Republic had simply dragged Brazil down to hitherto unknown depths of savagery. To make sense of what he had seen, he wrote Os Sertões, in which the conflict is framed not as some spasm of counterrevolutionary mania but the denouement of a centuries-long process. The first two parts of the book explain how, in da Cunha’s opinion, an intricate interplay between man and his environment had created the peoples of Bahian backlands—the sertanejos—the supposed primitives who represented a roadblock on Brazil’s journey to modernity. Rather than pity or disgust, da Cunha has admiration for these people, for their resilience, ingenuity, and moral constancy, inherited qualities that allowed them to survive centuries of hardship and surged to the fore during the War of Canudos. The book wasn’t intended as a hagiography of the fallen; it frequently refers to the federal troops as heroes while characterizing the Counselor as a crazed demagogue, whose followers were “the objectivization of insanity.” Yet he cannot dismiss the sertanejos as refuse; they are not the vestigial mark of a primitive bygone era but the backbone of the nation, the biological and spiritual core of modern Brazil.

The book was an instant success, and its influence on national culture only increased as the years passed. In the words of one reviewer, Os Sertões “ordained that one discussed Brazil by discussing Canudos. And one discussed Canudos by discussing Os Sertões.” Today, when most foreigners think of Brazil, it’s the country’s wild heterogeneity that comes to mind, the teeming favelas juxtaposed with the dense jungle wilderness, or the raucous fusion of native and transplanted traditions that embodies Carnival. Da Cunha didn’t invent any of those things, of course. But Os Sertões did trigger a shift in the way Brazilians thought about their homeland, encouraging those with money, power, and influence to accept it for the South American place it is, rather than the European outpost so many of them longed it to be.

Da Cunha’s book elevated him, at the age of thirty-six, to the most rarefied plane of celebrity. He was spoken of as a peer of Machado de Assis, the absurdly prolific writer still widely regarded as the godfather of Brazilian letters. He should’ve gone on to write a dozen or more books, bequeathing a canon of stylish, intellectually nimble ruminations on the nature of the Brazilian identity, past, present, and future. For a time, it looked as though he would do just that. After Canudos, he headed for Amazonia, perhaps the one part of Brazil more impenetrable and terrifying to the city dwellers than the backlands.

He was tasked with mapping and documenting the region as part of the government’s effort to settle in Brazil’s favor a fraught border dispute with Peru. It was an epic mission of the greatest national importance, which ultimately defined the physical boundaries of modern Brazil—but it very nearly killed da Cunha. The ravages of the climate and the wildlife, hunger, thirst, shipwrecks, and ill health brought him to the brink more than once. The experience only made him appreciate Brazil’s native peoples even more. As Susanna Hecht reflects, da Cunha experienced an epiphany in Amazonia just as he had in Bahia, coming to see “Amazonia’s true conquerors in the modest, impoverished, and beaten-down sertanejos” whose travails had laid the ground for later explorers from Europe, and his own generation of revolutionaries. Instead of creating divisions among the population, da Cunha had found a way to place all of Brazil’s peoples in the same story of a single, united nation.

*

Da Cunha’s explorations of the interior transformed Brazil. But he left important pieces of himself in those distant landscapes that he never retrieved. The exertions of his years in Amazonia, perhaps combined with the lingering trauma of the things he’d witnessed in Canudos, hastened emotional turmoil. He grew anxious, dyspeptic, and increasingly withdrawn, prone to wild mood swings. When he discovered his wife, Ana, was having an affair with a dashing teenage soldier named Dilermando, it proved too much. Feeling rejected, betrayed, and publicly humiliated by Ana, who made little effort to spare his feelings, da Cunha lurched between explosive anger and brooding self-pity. Once, after a blazing row between the two of them, he followed Ana onto a bus, where he sat several seats behind her, shouting abuse at the top of his voice.

On the morning of August 15, 1909, Da Cunha rose to find Ana absent. In fact, she hadn’t been at home since the previous afternoon. He had a hunch where she would be. Bursting into Dilermando’s home he waved his pistol in the air, screaming, I’ve come to kill or be killed! A frenzied shoot-out followed in which Dilermando was hit three times. But da Cunha’s gun was a puny weapon, and Dilermando happened to be among the sharpest marksmen in Brazil; he managed to land two fatal shots deep into Da Cunha’s chest.

As he lay dying, those around him reportedly asked, What insanity is this, Dr. Euclides? When the brain was removed and examined during the autopsy—just as the Counselor’s had been twenty-two years earlier—several lesions were discovered, almost certainly from the legacy of his childhood illnesses and the malaria he contracted in Amazonia. These, the pathologist speculated, were the cause of not only the kamikaze revenge mission that killed him, but the years of peculiar behavior that had rendered this sage, contemplative man unrecognizable. Several years later, da Cunha’s eldest son attempted to murder Dilermando, now his stepfather, as a means of avenging da Cunha’s death. But, the boy was no more lethal a shot than his old man; Dilermando completed a morbid collection by killing Euclides Jr. in the exact same fashion as he had Euclides Sr.

Da Cunha’s legacy to the nation was unquestionably happier than that which he bequeathed his family. When the celebrations of 1922 got underway in São Paulo, the poet Ronald de Carvalho had a simple message that could have been written by da Cunha himself, and certainly wouldn’t have been possible without his influence. “Let us forget the marble of the Acropolis and the towers of the Gothic cathedrals,” urged de Carvalho. “We are sons of the hills and the forests. Stop thinking of Europe. Think of America.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Pleasant in her later years

Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.

They did things differently in the Old West. On the morning of August 14, 1889, Stephen J. Field, a justice of the Supreme Court, was eating breakfast at a café in Lathrop, California, when David S. Terry, a former bench colleague, stopped by Field’s table and slapped him twice across the face.

This was not unprecedented behavior. Despite having risen to the rank of chief justice of the Supreme Court of California, Terry was described by one contemporary as an “evil genius” with an “irrepressible temper,” who once stabbed a man for being an abolitionist and killed a Congressman wedded to the Free Soil movement. His gripe with Stephen Field, however, had nothing to do with slavery. In 1883, Terry’s wife had filed a lawsuit (Sharon vs. Sharon) against the multimillionaire U.S. Senator William Sharon, claiming she had been married to him in secret some years ago and that, having been callously discarded by the womanizing senator, she was owed a divorce settlement. After five years the case ended up at a federal circuit court, where Field found in favor of William Sharon; there would be no divorce settlement. Terry was livid and promised to exact revenge. 

It was only the latest twist in what had been a bizarre case. On the first day of the trial, William Sharon’s attorney asserted that his client was the victim of a plot involving an elderly black woman who had used voodoo to steal Sharon’s hard-earned fortune. That woman was known to the San Francisco public as “Mammy Pleasant,” around whom sinister rumors had swirled for years. Some accused her of being a murderess, a madam, and a practitioner of black magic who befriended white families only to curse them and bleed them dry; a nightmarish image of “the mammy gone wrong,” to quote one historian. But just as many—especially among the black community—knew her as Mary Ellen Pleasant: an ingenious entrepreneur, pioneering civil-rights activist, and beloved benefactor who broke racial taboos and played a singular role in the early years of San Francisco.

William Sharon.

Even within her lifetime, there were several competing stories about Pleasant’s origins. One version has her born into slavery in Georgia; another says she was the daughter of a wealthy Virginian planter who had a fling with a voodoo priestess from the Caribbean. In her published reminiscences she claimed to have been born in Philadelphia in 1812, to a Hawaiian father and “a full-blooded Louisiana negress.” Racial mixing and ethnic ambiguity, themes that would repeat over and again throughout Pleasant’s life, appear to have been part of her identity from the start.

As a child she was, apparently, sent to live with a Quaker family in Nantucket where she worked as a domestic servant and then in a shop, where she discovered a talent for persuasion, borne of her quick wit and charisma. “I was a girl full of smartness,” she said, who “let books alone and studied men and women a good deal … I have always noticed that when I have something to say, people listen. They never go to sleep on me.”

She married in Boston, in her twenties—most biographers identify her husband as James Henry Smith (Pleasant was the surname of her second husband), a merchant and abolitionist with whom she was likely involved in the Underground Railroad. He died sometime in the 1840s in unknown circumstances, leaving his young wife an inheritance of tens of thousands of dollars, just as stories of California’s seams of gold swept over the plains to the East Coast. The Gold Rush caused a stir across the planet; an Eldorado found on a new American shore confirmed to millions that the young republic really was a land of opportunity blessed by God. For African Americans, the promise seemed especially tantalizing. By 1850, New England abounded with tales of black miners striking rich. “This is the best place for black folks on the globe,” was how one black prospector summed it up in a letter to his wife in Missouri. “All a man has to do is to work, and he will make money.”

Pleasant saw an opportunity. Nine in every ten settlers in California were male, which put a premium on conventionally “female” skills of cooking and running a household. A woman named Mary Ball had made a mint from running a boarding house in San Francisco, and Pleasant headed there to do the same. She soon found work as a cook, earning ten times the wage she would have received back home. She also had her inheritance, with which she invested widely in California’s surging economy, putting her money in everything from Wells Fargo to laundries. She made great use of her contacts with white abolitionists from the East, and teamed up with a white banker named Thomas Bell on numerous financial ventures, a highly unusual partnership for the time, but one that lasted until his death decades later.

Pleasant’s investments grew at a terrific rate, as did her presence in San Franciscan society. Soon after her arrival, she invested in facilities and resources for black people who were trying to put down roots—including safe houses for those escaping the clutches of slaveholders in the South, and slavecatchers in the North. To Pleasant and many other dreamers who arrived daily, the new state must’ve seemed like the nation reborn.

*

California had given the prospect of opportunity to black Americans long before it was in the hands of the United States. In 1823, it became the northernmost portion of the newly declared Mexican Republic, whose constitution outlawed slavery. Over the next twenty-five years, countless black people, mainly crew members aboard ships from New England, came from the U.S. to start new lives, hoping to shake off the pall of race that spread across American society. William Leidesdorff, a young man of mixed Danish, African, Cuban, and Jewish ancestry, arrived from New Orleans in the 1840s and earned himself a vast fortune and a vice consulship from President Polk.

But these examples were outliers: the Golden State was young enough to accommodate a degree of racial mixing unfamiliar to most other parts of the country, but it was never color blind. When California became officially American, it did so as part of the Compromise of 1850, recognizing its status as a free state and a beacon to black Americans. Yet, the riches on offer also attracted a lot of white Southerners, who arrived with ideas—and sometimes human property—straight from Dixie. Many of those men occupied the highest offices; the state’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, was a native of Tennessee who spent much of his short, disastrous tenure attempting to make California a white-only enclave by proposing a complete ban on black settlers.

David S. Terry.

Burnett was loathed by abolitionists, but enthusiastically supported by David S. Terry, the infamously injudicious judge, a Texan by birth. In 1857, Terry presided over the case of Archy Lee, a teenage slave who absconded to Sacramento on the journey back to his master’s home plantation in Mississippi. In a farcical ruling that showed exactly where his sympathies lay, Terry said that although the state constitution considered Lee a free man, he would overlook that technicality as Lee’s owner was young, ignorant of the law, and “being in poor health, in need of the services of a slave.”

As a prominent figure in California’s black community, Pleasant had been involved in the Lee case, contributing to his legal fees and temporarily housing him. It was just one of dozens of campaigns for social justice she funded. The most startling came in 1859, when she donated a large sum—thirty thousand dollars, she claimed—to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. Though there’s no concrete evidence for this, most historians accept that Pleasant probably did play a substantial role in facilitating Brown’s extraordinary incursion. She certainly ran in the same circles as he did in Chatham, Ontario, and she was undoubtedly wealthy enough to have contributed a great deal of money.

Once the Civil War was over, Pleasant’s financial and social fortunes soared. She opened upmarket boarding houses and grew her contacts within the highest echelons of San Franciscan society, befriending congressmen, industrialists, and financiers. It was said that Pleasant had more dirt on California’s top brass than anyone else in the state. She knew about their infidelities and illegitimate children, their financial misdeeds, and their political skulduggeries. It’s hard to imagine the elites of New York or Boston allowing a black woman to have privileged access to such intimate secrets. In a fledgling city three thousand miles from New England, full of new money and transplanted people, such social inversions were rare but possible.

Pleasant’s social adventuring came to public notice in 1866, when she pursued a case against a streetcar company who refused to admit her. After a two-year battle, she won, in part thanks to the testimony of the white woman in whose home she’d once worked as a domestic servant. Though the woman referred to Pleasant as “Mamma” during her testimony, she spoke of her as a friend, explaining that they had met on the day in question for a social engagement. It was public confirmation of another small transgression, crossing boundaries of race and class. But California did have some recent precedent for this type of friendship. In the years of the Gold Rush, the state’s enormous gender imbalance meant that women were much more likely to form friendships with women they would never have dreamed of befriending under usual circumstances back home.

According to the biographer Lynn M. Hudson, this was the moment that Mary Ellen Pleasant became “Mammy Pleasant” in the minds of San Franciscans. Hudson believes the term stuck because it allowed white people to make sense of this campaigning, shrewd, solvent black woman who befriended white folk as a means of taking on the establishment. But it also announced her as a different type of “Mammy,” not the benign stereotype of the docile, ever-loving, ever-loyal Southern black woman. Pleasant was a Mammy of the Reconstruction, an unsettling sign—to some whites, at least—that the worm was turning.

Sara Althea Hill.

That image was solidified in the infamous Sharon v. Sharon case in which David Terry’s wife—Sarah Althea Hill was her maiden name—alleged that Senator William Sharon had secretly married and discarded her. Sharon testified that what appeared to be a marriage contract was actually a contract confirming that Sarah Althea Hill would sleep with him on a regular basis in exchange for monthly payments of five hundred dollars. Sharon’s attorney made much of Hill’s friendship with Mary Ellen Pleasant, whom he caricatured as a sinister crone who had encouraged an impressionable young woman into a dastardly plot. “[Hill] disclosed her secrets to a colored woman,” said Sharon’s attorney, as though this was itself damning evidence. Witnesses alleged that Pleasant had cast spells over Sharon and poisoned his food. At one point, she was even accused of baby farming. Hill’s lawyers countered that confiding one’s secrets in a mammy was simply what well-brought-up white ladies do. Pleasant gave evidence herself, and appears to have been articulate, measured, and consistent, not remotely like either the crazed witch or the kindly mammy described by the attorneys or the court reporters.

The case scandalized America; for a brief time “Mammy Pleasant,” a yellow-journalism caricature of Mary Ellen Pleasant, was infamous from coast to coast. Ultimately, Pleasant’s role in the Sharon v. Sharon case was overshadowed by a sixty-six-year-old veteran of the judiciary who really should have known better. When Justice Stephen J. Field ruled against Hill and in favor of Sharon, David Terry caused such a commotion in the courtroom that he was sentenced to six months behind bars, from where he issued threats to Field through the press. On the morning in August 1889 when Terry accosted Field in the café, he presumably had no idea that the judge had recruited an armed bodyguard to deal with precisely this eventuality. Before he knew it, Terry was sprawled on the floor, killed by a bullet fired in Field’s defense.

*

No sooner had the baroque soap opera of Sharon v. Sharon reached its denouement than Mary Ellen Pleasant began her fall. Several years earlier she had built a thirty-room mansion, a home for herself, her business partner, Thomas Bell, and his young family. Many assumed that the house belonged to the Bells and that Pleasant took care of the chores and the children. But her business dealings were no secret—nor, after the Sharon trial, were her connections to respectable white society. Whispers spread about what was really going on in “The House of Mystery,” and whether the old lady had some hold over the Bells, as she was alleged to have had over the Sharons.

When Thomas Bell died in 1892, his widow announced that the rumors were true. Teresa Bell accused Pleasant of manipulating her husband and stealing tens of thousands of dollars. The ensuing court case exposed Pleasant’s financial arrangements as byzantine and opaque, making it impossible to discern where the Bells’ affairs ended and hers began. Despite having evidence that she had designed and paid for the construction of her mansion, the court ordered her to leave, transferring ownership to Teresa. There were accusations that Pleasant had manipulated the family for her own ends, that she had abused the children, siphoned money to undeserving black women, and even that she had murdered Thomas Bell by pushing him down the stairs. Quite where the truth in all this lies is anyone’s guess, though we can be sure that Teresa Bell was sincere in her belief that Pleasant had done her great wrong. “A demon from first to last” is how she described her in her diary.

Once Teresa Bell sued, Pleasant’s finances began to unravel. She spent her final years living with friends, dying in 1904 not impoverished but very much diminished. Her obituary in the San Francisco Examiner read, “Mammy Pleasant Will Work Weird Spells No More.” It was an undignified—and unimaginative—way to announce the passing of a woman whose life had expressed so many of the dazzling, contrary excesses of nineteenth-century America. On the one hand, she spent ninety years trapped in the vices of race and gender; on the other, she used her talents and her will to earn a fortune and shape the society in which she lived. She successfully pursued her constitutional rights through the courts, while in the kangaroo court of public opinion she was sentenced to the ducking stool. An unsentimental capitalist, she belonged to the era of the Gilded Age robber barons. Yet her ardor for civil rights made her a precursor to more famous generations of campaigners who gave global notoriety to locations such as Montgomery and Baton Rouge.

In 1965, Pleasant’s final wish was belatedly granted: the inscription SHE WAS A FRIEND OF JOHN BROWN was added to her gravestone. It might be the pithiest, most eloquent summation of an extraordinary life: transgressive and audacious, fired by personal ambition and social justice, and radical to the final breath.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.

Brilliant Chang

Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.

Four years after The Birth of a Nation, his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, D. W. Griffith created what’s probably American cinema’s first-ever depiction of an interracial love affair. His 1919 movie Broken Blossoms centers on the relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man, a virtuous, loving couple driven apart by injustice, intolerance, and enervating poverty. The film was set in Limehouse, the notorious slum on the docks of the River Thames that was home to London’s Chinatown, and a synonym across the English-speaking world for the so-called Yellow Peril.

Griffith’s portrayal of Chinese London was more positive than most. From the late nineteenth century, Limehouse attracted Britain’s most famous authors, usually on the subject of opium dens and criminal intrigue. Dickens was one of the first with Edwin Drood; twenty years later Oscar Wilde used it as a backdrop to Dorian Gray’s debauchery, and Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes there to infiltrate the capital’s underworld. But the writers most responsible for cementing Limehouse’s infamy were Thomas Burke, a British author inspired by Jack London’s take on the incipient danger of Chinese immigrants, and the pulp novelist Sax Rohmer. The latter created Fu Manchu, the evil Chinese genius bent on destroying white civilization, who became one of the most enduring literary characters of the twentieth century, inspiring a thousand and one inscrutable, amoral, and fiendishly brilliant Chinese baddies, including Dr. No and Ming the Merciless. Ridiculous caricature though he was, Fu Manchu tapped into genuine fears that white people on both sides of the Atlantic had about globalization and the Chinese diaspora.

In 1922, less than a decade after the publication of the first Fu Manchu novel, Londoners were horrified to discover that a real-life Chinese supervillain lived among them in the form of Brilliant Chang, a dealer of opium and cocaine, who briefly acquired a reputation as the biggest threat to the empire since Kaiser Bill. At the time, one of the reasons Chang terrified the British public was that—in keeping with the racist stereotypes—he seemed so mysterious; nobody quite knew who he was or where he came from, though in a sense London had spent the past two hundred years inventing him. 

Chinese men had been a fixture of London’s docks since the mid-eighteenth century, when they arrived as sailors working for the East India Company, importing tea and spices from the Far East. Conditions on those long voyages were so dreadful that many sailors decided to abscond and take their chances on the streets rather than face the return journey. Those who stayed generally settled around the bustling docks, running laundries and small lodging houses for other sailors or selling exotic Asian produce. By the 1880s, a small but recognizable Chinese community had developed in the Limehouse area, to the consternation of white native-born Londoners, fearful of racial mixing and an influx of cheap labor. The entire Chinese population of London was only in the low hundreds—in a city of roughly seven million—but nativist feelings ran high, as evidenced by the Aliens Act of 1905, a bundle of legislation that sought to restrict entry to poor and low-skilled foreign workers.

Chang’s experience of Britain seems somewhat atypical. The fullest records of his life indicate that he was born Chen Bao Luan, the scion of a wealthy family that had made its money from legitimate trading operations based in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He left China in his early twenties, settling in Birmingham in 1913, the same year that the first Fu Manchu novel was published. Some accounts suggest that he arrived as an engineering student. If that’s true, a career in rivets and joists can’t have held much attraction for him; in 1917 he apparently emerged on the police’s radar for his acquaintance with a criminal gang. It may have been at this point he acquired his nickname, derived from “Charlie Chang,” slang for cocaine.

That same year, selling and possessing nonprescription narcotics was ruled illegal. Before the new laws, shoppers in Knightsbridge could buy cocaine from Harrods in special boxes designed to be sent as morale-boosting gifts to loved ones serving at the Front. As the war effort intensified, the government placed unprecedented restrictions on anything deemed to sap productivity or fray moral fiber. By law, pubs were obliged to close at nine thirty P.M., booze was watered down, and drugs of various sorts were banned, acquiring in the process an astringent moral dimension that stuck just as firmly once the guns fell silent.

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On the evening of November 27, 1918, London celebrated the end of World War I with a gala ball at the Royal Albert Hall attended by every fashionable celebrity in town, including Billie Carleton, a young star of musical theater. The following day, Carleton’s maid found her dead from an apparent overdose of cocaine given her by a Chinese resident of Limehouse and his Scottish wife.

It was Britain’s first celebrity drugs scandal, and it flowed seamlessly into a moral panic about the threat posed to British women by the postwar surge of suffrage, jazz, and the attentions of nonwhite men. Limehouse in particular was identified as a beacon of this turpitude. “The time has come,” opined one male journalist, “to draw a cordon around this area of London and forbid any white women from frequenting it.” Unfortunately, he paid no recognition to the sacrifices made for Britain by ordinary Chinese people during the recent war. Between 1916 and 1918, the British government imported ninety-five thousand Chinese laborers to support British front-line troops. Two thousand of them were killed; many of them were left traumatized; all of them endured great hardship for little remuneration. None of them were allowed to settle in Britain.

Just a few months after Carleton’s death, Sax Rohmer used her story for as the basis of Dope, a lurid potboiler about a fragrant young woman led astray by a dastardly Chinese drug baron. The book was published just as anti-Chinese feelings ran viciously high. A false rumor that a white Englishman had been denied tenancy of a room sent a furious mob on Limehouse, where the homes of Chinese families were burned and locals were attacked in the street. That summer, in the port cities of Cardiff and Liverpool, similar attacks against Chinese and black people resulted in five deaths and many injuries.

Around this time, Chang moved to London, using family money to become a restaurateur, not in Limehouse but on Regent Street, one of the most desirable addresses in the city. He reveled in the cachet that came with his fashionable nightspot, and cultivated a corresponding image, dressing in finely tailored suits and fur coats, always with immaculately styled hair. Fancying himself a louche playboy, he trod a perilously fine line between twinkly-eyed ladies’ man and creepy womanizer. He kept a stash of handwritten, boilerplate letters of introduction addressed to “Dear Unknown,” which flunkies handed out to women who caught his eye, requesting the pleasure of “a little dinner and a quiet chat.” One of the women he hit on was Freda Kempton, a twenty-three-year-old “dance instructress,” a professional dancer paid to partner customers on the dance floor of a Soho nightclub. The job required limitless energy, undimming affability, and a permanent grin. It was an open secret that dance instructresses took various stimulants to keep them perky.

The precise nature of Kempton’s relationship with Chang is hazy, but it seems likely that he occasionally supplied her with cocaine, a service he offered to numerous people he met at his restaurant and in the nightclubs of Soho. On the evening of March 5, 1922, Kempton joined her friend at Chang’s, where she apparently took from him a tiny blue bottle filled with powder. The next evening, her landlady discovered her convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Within moments, she was dead.

Unlike the Billie Carleton case, Kempton’s fatal overdose was ruled suicide rather than misadventure. At the inquest into her passing, family and friends testified that she had long been an anxious introvert, susceptible to mood swings that might now be recognized as a clinical condition. In recent months, she had split from a beloved boyfriend and had been lucky to survive a nasty accident after which she had “never really been the same,” according to her mother. Then, just weeks before her death, Kempton’s close friend Audrey Knowles-Harrison took her own life. This litany of misfortune drained her; she half joked that she was contemplating following Audrey’s lead in order to stave off further misery. The press reaction to the inquest’s findings skirted these sad particularities, trying instead to frame Kempton as another carefree flapper who played with fire and got burned. Marek Kohn’s fascinating study of the case, in his book Dope Girls, highlights one obituary that referred to Kempton as “a foolish little moth whose wings were scorched by the flame of vicious luxury,” while the Reverend J. Degan dismissed her as a “jazz-bitten” flibbertigibbet who “put her head … right into the lion’s mouth with high-pitched laugh and frivolous joke.”

When Chang was called to give evidence, photographers gathered to take his picture, and journalists described his presence in the courtroom with fascination, disbelief, and disgust. “Undersized, yellow, with coal-black straight hair combed back from his wrinkled brow,” ran a description of Chang in the Empire News, “he was typical of the mysterious East.” He said he had frequently given Kempton money but denied ever supplying her with drugs. The police had no firm evidence to the contrary—even though his avowal that “I have never done anything wrong in my life” must have made him sound guilty as sin—and no charges were brought against him. Regardless, the papers assumed him guilty, not just of supplying a small group of West End partygoers but of flooding the nation with drugs and corrupting its women.

“What’s there about the yellow man,” asked the Evening News in the debate that Chang sparked, “that fascinates the white woman, holds her in a spell?” The journalist W. A. Mutch hypothesized that it must have some strange biological basis, as in Limehouse he claimed to have seen white women’s bodies “befouled” and their brains “benumbed of all moral sense” simply by being in the continued presence of Asian men. The Daily Graphic took the radical step of actually talking to the women in question, who simply said that Chinese men in Limehouse made good husbands: they drank little, worked hard, and spent more time in the home than Englishmen. The private detective Annette Kerner refused to believe it. She claimed that these women were bought and sold by pimps, though—somewhat confusingly—she also believed that “the slatterns … loved their dark masters” and their “unspeakable affections.”

Kerner had been sent to Limehouse on an undercover assignment for the Metropolitan Police, who spent close to two years trying to collar Chang, now widely known as “the Dope King” and having been described by one overeager journalist as “the most dangerous man London has ever housed.” Over the following months a number of Chang’s employees were convicted of offenses under the new Dangerous Drugs Act. But no evidence was obtained against Chang himself until 1924, when the police obtained a warrant to search his home and found a small stash of cocaine in a kitchen cupboard. It seems like a strangely sloppy mistake for one of the world’s master criminals, suggesting that Chang was a small-time dealer as opposed to Fu Manchu come to life, or that the evidence was planted—or, quite possibly, both. In any event, his conviction was hailed by the press as a great national victory: the kingpin of London’s underworld had been caught and the honor and purity of Britain’s young women had been saved. Elements of the press hoped Chang might spend his time behind bars contemplating “the ruin, the degradation and the death of hundreds of young girls upon his conscience,” although there is no hard evidence linking him to any more than about a dozen customers.

After a year in prison, Chang was released—and immediately deported. The press bid him good riddance, though the newspapers noted with irritation that several pretty young women came to the dock to wave him off.

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Chang’s deportation marked the end of the postwar drug panic, but the Sinophobia persisted in various odd ways. Capitalizing on Brilliant Chang’s notoriety, the travel agent Thomas Cook began charabanc tours through the streets of Limehouse, staging fights between men with pigtails shouting in Mandarin, waving machetes in the air. George Orwell and Arnold Bennett joined hundreds of other Londoners in slumming expeditions to Chinatown, in much the same way that white thrill-seekers from downtown Manhattan made late-night trips to the clubs of Harlem. But most of those who went to explore Limehouse left disappointed. They discovered that the fabled Chinatown was tiny, effectively just two streets, and the vast majority of the few hundred Chinese who lived there were ordinary families who spent precisely no time in opium dens or S and M orgies. “If they have secrets,” wrote one deflated tourist, “they seem to keep them well.”

The great Chinese writer Lao She lived in London between 1924 and 1929, and was astonished by the gap between the reality of Limehouse and the myths that appeared in the newspapers. “If there were twenty Chinese living in Chinatown, their accounts would say five thousand; moreover every one of these five thousand yellow devils would certainly smoke opium, smuggle arms, murder people then stuff the corpses under beds, and rape women regardless of age.” In most cases, the inaccuracies weren’t the result of exaggeration but invention. Sax Rohmer boasted, “I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese,” while Thomas Burke admitted that his supposedly penetrating descriptions of the real Chinatown were based on “no knowledge of the Chinese people … All I knew of Limehouse and the district was what I automatically observed.” As with the hysterical reporting about Chang, Yellow Peril fiction said far more about its writers and their readers than it did their subjects.

In the early 1930s, large portions of Limehouse were demolished as part of an urban-renewal campaign. Ten years later, Luftwaffe bombs flattened the area, and London’s first Chinatown disappeared along with the surrounding cavalcade of absurd mythology. Chang was never seen again, either, at least not on British shores, though his legend bobbed to the surface every now and then, with stories that he had returned, like some Asian Moriarty who could never be defeated.

Today, London’s Chinatown is in Soho, right in the heart of the city and permanently filled with sightseers. Its main thoroughfare is Gerrard Street where, coincidentally, one of Chang’s restaurants once stood. Understandably, it’s not an association that Chinese residents are keen to keep alive, but it is in some way fitting—a trace of Limehouse, and a timely reminder to Londoners that the city that now crows about being the most cosmopolitan place on earth was not so long ago anything but.

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.