Mexico -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
He too had done a Lincoln head, and it had been reduced to miniature,
so had Harding’s. His assistants were at work piecing together the
plaster sketch of a big memorial he is about to do, called “the wars of
America.” I could tell nothing from the fragmentary plastercast, but
the photographs of the thing complete looked fine.
He asked me who I’d studied with. I forgot to ask him. He abused
Epstein and showed Mrs. Junius all the worst things in the Epstein
book. Mrs. Junius, who is an amateur, and conventional, was not able
to appreciate the best of Epstein. B. asked me fiercely if I had come
to this country to live; I don’t know if I have or not, I told him, I
thought not!
As we were preparing to go, he pulled himself together. Either he
wanted to atone or the vision of our departure put new life into him.
He turned to me suddenly and said, “What do you think of Lenin?”
He then held forth to us on the three men of contemporary history,
Kaiser Wilhelm, President Wilson, and Lenin. The former who had
inherited his power, the second who had it offered to him, the third
who took it. We agreed that the greatest of the three is the one who
takes it. What had the other two done with their invested power? Let us
see what Lenin is still to do.
I dined with Mrs. Willard Straight, almost the nicest woman I’ve met
since I arrived here. She gives one a feeling of sincerity and absence
of pose. She is real. It was a delightful party, the Walter Lipmanns
and Bullitts and B. Berenson, all people I like, were there. Her house
has the right atmosphere.
MARCH 23, 1921.
I spent the afternoon at Knoedlers, who have very generously taken on
my exhibition from the Numesmatic Society for two weeks. My things
look well in their big room, and it is comic to see the Soviet leaders
daring to show their faces in Fifth Avenue! No one looks at Winston or
Asquith, they go straight to the Russians, as though fascinated with
horror!
Crystal Eastman and her husband took me to dinner at the Hill Club,
where I had to speak. I sat between Mr. Boardman Robinson and Dr.
Parker. Boardman Robinson is the author of the cartoon in the
LIBERATOR, “Capitalism Looks Itself Over,” a horrible and
terrible and wonderful conception. Mr. Robinson has red hair and beard.
He looks like the pictures of Judas Iscariot or maybe it’s St. Peter he
reminds me of. In which case small chance of Heaven for the rich! He’d
unlock the gates to all the radicals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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