THE MARXIST AT No. 477 E. 16th St. (1910)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** At No. 477 East Sixteenth Street lived a Socialist. He wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Socialist, however. Louis B. Boudin was a Russian-born American Marxist theoretician, writer, politician, and lawyer, who wrote a two volume history of the Supreme Court’s influence on American government as well as his piece de resistance, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism, first published in 1907. Boudin’s family emigrated to America in June 1891 and settled in New York City. He worked in the garment industry as a shirt maker and as a private tutor. At the same time, Boudin began legal studies, gaining a Master’s Degree from New York University and being admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1898. At first, Boudin was a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America. He was also a member of the governing National Executive Board of the party’s trade union affiliate, the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance from 1898 to 1899. Although he left the party for a short period, he returned after the turn of the century, being elected a delegate of the Socialist Party of America of the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907 and the 1910 Copenhagen Congress of the Second International. Boudin was frequently […]
COL. BACON KISSED THE WIVES (1905)
It is a shame the way newspaper reporters don’t write these days. The folksy, tongue-in-cheek, gossipy style of 100 years ago would today seem too daring, too familiar. And perhaps newspapers now are just a little too gun-shy of potential libel suits… Here is a story reported by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1905, that combines all the elements of a ribald over-the-fence tittle-tattle: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Fri., 20 October 1905 — The home makers and home defenders of Prospect Park South were stirred this morning to dark purposes. Quite well it was that Colonel Alexander S. Bacon got away from Ditmas Park home in that aristocratic section before his neighbors saw the morning papers in which the gallant colonel was depicted in the very act of kissing their wives. Not only that, but the same papers had Colonel Bacon declaring publicly that he had been enjoying sweet osculatory favors. It all grew out of Colonel Bacon’s law business. He was defending Mrs. Hortense Powers from the suit of her husband, William F. Powers, who wanted a divorce on the ground that Mrs. Powers had been too free with her kisses and favors for a neighbor, “Billy” Campbell. Colonel Bacon tried to excuse and justify these little tokens of affection. Here is the argument he was reported to have used before the jury: “Gentlemen, every one of you who is married probably has kissed his neighbor’s wife. Without wishing to be egotistical, I might say that I have been fortunate […]
