Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,018
By This is the grave of Mabel Dodge Luhan.
Born in Buffalo in 1879, Mabel Ganson grew up in wealth. Her father was a Gilded Age industrialist and it was all about big money for her. Her parents wanted her to be the ideal Victorian woman and they raised her in all the social graces. Imagine that terrible Gilded Age show, but in Buffalo. She went to the fanciest schools in New York City, spent a lot of time in Europe, went to a finishing school in DC.
But it didn’t stick. Quite a few of the daughters of the elite didn’t quite see things the way their parents did. They didn’t give up wealth and privilege–c’mon now–but they did rethink the position of women in society. Many became suffragists. A few, such as J.P. Morgan‘s daughter, marched with the young immigrant socialist workers on the streets of New York in the Uprising of the 20,000. A few went way farther than this. Mabel Ganson was one of them. She was already a wild child (relatively speaking) at a young age. She married a guy at the age of 21 and her father was furious. The father let it be, but then the guy died in a hunting accident less than two years later, leaving her with a baby, though most certainly she wasn’t doing much of the caretaking of that child. She almost immediately began sleeping with a Buffalo doctor. Ashamed, the family sent her to Europe.
She wasn’t one to last long single though and she soon married the architect Edwin Dodge. She would keep his name, but the marriage didn’t stick. The Dodges lived in Florence between 1905 and 1912 and were major socialites in the ex-pat community. She was also sleeping with her chauffeur and tried killing herself a couple of times. They returned to the U.S. in 1912, but the marriage was falling apart. This didn’t seem to bother Dodge at all. She became one of the leading socialites in New York. Everyone went to her place for the salons and the company and the charm.
Dodge embraced radical politics for awhile too. In fact, she became close to John Reed and they became lovers almost immediately. It was the two of them working together that generated the idea for the Paterson strike pageant in 1913, when striking IWW workers from the textile mills there would hold a fancy labor fundraiser in front of all the richest people in New York. They pulled it off too, with Reed providing the publicity and Dodge the money and connections. But it was a disaster for the strike, as it divided workers between those who got to play in New York and those who had to remain in Paterson and also pulled picketers off the line and allowed scabs to get through. This was rich people playing at labor activism.
Well, the failure of the strike pageant didn’t hurt Dodge any. She and Reed went to Europe. But they broke up because she began to believe that his caring about politics meant that he didn’t have time for her–and she was very much that kind of person in a relationship. She might vaguely care about politics if they reflected well on her, but she had few real political commitments that weren’t in the end about herself. So she and Reed broke up after he went to Mexico to report on the revolution taking place there.
In 1916, Dodge remarried again, this time to the painter Maurice Sterne. She was involved in the Provincetown art colony. Evidently, she and the labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse hated each other out there; at the very least, Vorse at least had real political commitments. Like Vorse, Dodge became a reporter, unlike Vorse, no one remembers her work. In 1917, she continued to flit around and decided to move to Taos, New Mexico, along with her husband and the anthropologist Elsie Crews Parsons, who was one of the intellectuals beginning to talk up New Mexico in fancy crowds. This was the first moment of rich whites falling in love with the “authentic” cultures of New Mexico. It was in 1912 when Santa Fe decided to freeze itself in time through its architecture to attract tourism and create false narratives of authenticity, as my friend Chris Wilson explored in great depth in his magisterial book The Myth of Santa Fe, one of the greatest academic books ever written about New Mexico.
Well, Dodge effectively invented the rich eastern white woman “going native” in New Mexico. You see this all the time today in Santa Fe, especially. The more ridiculous the hoop skirts and turquoise jewelry on an aging white woman, the more likely it is she lives on the Upper East Side the rest of the year. With men, it’s still the turquoise, but with bolo ties. While in Taos, this crew got to know a Taos Pueblo man name Tony Luhan. He helped them find a place to buy property. Dodge soon started sleeping with him, leaving her husband again and marrying him in 1923.
Dodge Luhan would spend the rest of her life as the Queen of the Taos Artist Colony. She was the dominating individual in the marriage, which whatever, who cares, but she used Tony’s authenticity to create a new vision for herself and set herself up as the ultimate in the avant-garde, since she crosses sexual and racial boundaries. She became the doyenne of the Taos colony. Everyone visited her. Some didn’t like her, including D.H. Lawrence, who moved to Taos as well, but ended up living on a ranch well outside of town, questioning much about her. Incidentally, Lawrence’s ranch is now a research study site at the University of New Mexico. I’ve been up there since a former partner of mine did work up there 25 years ago. Lawrence is supposedly buried up there, but I don’t really know if it’s true and it is not easy to access anyway. But he wrote negatively about Luhan in not so veiled characters in some of his later books.
Luhan spent the rest of her life in Taos. She wrote about it, promoted Native cultures, loved being the cultured New Yorker turned semi-Native, scandalizing society with her marriage to a Taos man, and clearly dominating that relationship. She also wrote about her lesbian relationships from early in her life in her 1933 book Intimate Memories, which was intended to scandalize polite society and did. She turned to writing more later her life too, penning several books about Taos and its arts. Her 1935 book Winter in Taos is generally considered to be among her best, but I haven’t read it.
Later, after filming Easy Rider and falling in love with Taos himself, Dennis Hopper bought Luhan’s house. He brought rather a different energy to the place, though whether that was better or not, I don’t know.
There’s much more to say about this figure, about whom I am obviously not a fan given my experiences in New Mexico with rich east coast people playing Indian. But the post is long enough.
Mabel Dodge Luhan died in 1962. She was 83 years old.
Mabel Dodge Luhan is buried in Kit Carson Memorial Cemetery, Taos, New Mexico. Interestingly, Tony Luhan is not buried with her. He’s with his own people on Taos Pueblo. If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the Taos art scene of this time, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Arnold Ronnebeck is in Denver and Walter Van Tilburg Clark is in Virginia City, Nevada. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.