An inscribed book of children's poetry: Did E. D. Cumming know Lincoln Kirstein?

One of the things about writing a biography is knowing when to stop. I published Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty in 2020, but I keep learning things about Edward Dilworth Cumming.

Image by noriyuki yagi from Pixabay

George Miller Cumming (1854–1927) graduated from Harvard College in 1876. He studied at Harvard Law for a few months in the fall of 1876 but then switched to Columbia Law. From 1877-1879 he traveled and studied in England, France, and Germany, and he was admitted to the New York Bar in 1881.

I have just found that George's son, Edward — "Ned," born 1901 — once owned a book of children's poetry and stories in German, Schnaken & Schnurren, by Wilhelm Busch and published in München in the 1860s-1870s. Ned's name was written inside it, along with the place name "Irvington." Eventually, the collection ended up in the hands of Lincoln Kirstein, born 1907, and who donated it to the Morgan in 1979. It's still available to see at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City today.

I don't know if the two of them knew each other as children (though they were six years apart) and exchanged the book then, or if they did it later as adults, or if the two of them never knew each other at all and the book passed through a used bookseller — or, possibly, through their fathers.

The Cummings spent time at their Irvington home especially around 1915, though the home may have been in the family earlier than that. Ned may have been reading the children's poetry as a teenager to practice German.

Screenshot of the library catalog listing of Schnaken & Schnurren from the Morgan.

The question interests me because, while Cumming was a private person and I know nothing about his personal relationships, Kirstein was more prominent and knew famous people. While a Harvard undergraduate, Kirstein was a cofounder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, along with his fellow undergraduates Edward Warburg and John Walker and a twentysomething PhD candidate, Alfred Barr, a bisexual man who was already lecturing on modernist art at Wellesley College. (This detail on Kirstein comes from Bad Gays: A Homosexual History.)

Rachel Maddow wrote about Lincoln Kirstein in her 2023 book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Kirstein, she says, was "Harvard educated, independently wealthy thanks to his father, bisexual, an unflinching aesthete, and a budding arts impresario, just like his colleague Philip Johnson, who was "an almost exact contemporary." But Kirstein was Jewish, and Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer. Maddow writes:

"While at Harvard, Kirstein had founded the society for Contemporary Art on campus, as well as a literary magazine that published new poetry by e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and Ezra Pound — before Pound was revealed as a committed fascist himself. While Johnson spent the first years of his professional life introducing Europe's modern design and architecture to America, Kirstein was busy creating an American ballet troupe to rival the best in Europe."

This was the New York City ballet, co-founded with George Balanchine.

Kirstein's father, Louis E. Kirstein, was, according to Maddow, "close friends" with Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law who "spent the 1933–34 academic year at Oxford" and who wrote to FDR (they were friends) saying that England had a "sober" feeling like that which "preceded 1914." The younger Kirstein, Lincoln, "could sense ill winds blowing across the Atlantic and into the kinds of upper-class salons of Manhattan that welcomed rich, influential young men like him and Philip Johnson." And in New York at the end of 1934, Johnson "was losing sway at the Museum of Modern Art, where Lincoln Kirstein had started warning its key trustees, including Nelson Rockefeller and his mother, that the museum was in danger of being 'tarred with the Fascist brush.' Kirstein's whispered misgivings had also helped scuttle the Art, Inc., concessions at Rockefeller Center. Johnson's standing in New York was at a low, and he was working himself into a full-on snit about it."

There was an evening soiree in 1934 "at a stylish loft on East Fortieth Street," Maddow writes, with a "bohemian hostess," at which a drunk "wealthy socialite" guest told a Jewish guest that his people were corrupt and should be genocided. Though Kirstein wasn't there, the hostess reported to him the next day what had happened, explaining that she feared that antisemitism of the German intensity "might happen here in America."

In late 1934, Johnson and Alan Blackburn left New York for Louisiana to work for Huey Long. Maddow writes: "Kirstein had managed to keep his sense of humor about their weird fascist buccaneering," even when "Blackburn asked for Kistein's latest address and then threatened to have him beaten up," but he always remembered "Johnson's nastiest remark to him." As he recalled in 1944 while serving in the Army: "He told me I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution." However, as he continued in this letter, which was a character recommendation for Johnson, who was at risk of indictment for sedition: "Since being in the Army, I have seen Pvt Johnson frequently... I am convinced that he has sincerely repented of his former fascist beliefs, that he understands the nature of his mistake and is a loyal American." Maddow commented that this was "very generous," given that it would be "decades" before Johnson himself made "any statement of contrition."

In 1927, George Miller Cumming died, and around that time, his three surviving family members moved to the New York suburb of Scarsdale. Then, around 1937, when the owner of the house in which they lodged had a physical fight with the neighbors (political? we don't know), the three of them moved back to Manhattan. As I wrote in the book: "The Cumming family — Ned, his sister Emily, and their mother Lucy — had two apartments: West 116th Street and East 43rd Street. All three of them were associated with both addresses." I note the proximity of East 43rd Street to the party on East 40th Street where Kirstein's friends had gathered one night in 1934.

Though Louis Kirstein (1867–1942), who was born in New York, dropped out of school at 13, he later received honorary degrees from Harvard University and Boston University, and he became associated with Harvard Business School. His friend, Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), who was born in Vienna, came to New York at age 12 and graduated first in his class from Harvard Law, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He began working for a law firm in 1906. That firm was Hornblower, Byrne, Miller & Potter; he was the firm's first Jewish lawyer, but he stayed there only briefly. (At that time, Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff, who had begun his law studies at Columbia in the 1890–1891 academic year, was a lawyer there; Woodruff had "full charge of preparation of railroad mortgages.")

George Miller Cumming, who served as the president of various railroads, was a law professor at Columbia from April 1891 to June 1897, so it's possible he encountered the young student Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff in 1891.

Ned Cumming died in 1940. Lincoln Kirstein died in 1996.

About these historical people

You can learn more about George and Ned Cumming in Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

You can learn more about Kirstein in Lincoln Kirstein: The Published Writings 1922-1977. A First Bibliography and in Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Maddow says: "In the 2014 film The Monuments Men, Bob Balaban's character, Preston Savitz, is modeled on Kirstein."

Who worked at the library

"Belle da Costa Greene...was appointed the director and inaugural librarian of the Morgan, which was founded by J. Pierpont Morgan — the American financier. * * * Greene’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, separated from Belle’s father, Richard T. Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard College, in the 1890s. * * * Genevieve dropped the last letter of their family name and was lighter-skinned enough to pass as white, as were Greene’s siblings.

This opened doors for Belle da Costa Greene in segregated America, and she worked at Princeton before joining the research library. There she met a cousin of J. Pierpont Morgan, who at the time was looking for someone to organize his growing collection.

* * *

Being a woman librarian and director of a major institution was a big deal at the time. Greene was able to achieve what most women could not, especially during a time when they had just gotten the right to vote."

— The true story of a famed librarian and the secret she guarded closely, Jordan-Marie Smith, NPR, October 29, 2024

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