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Floyd Dell — 1920s Socialist author and playwright
By John Hallwas
Floyd O’Dell from western Illinois built an reputation as an introspective and worker sympathetic author and playwright in Chicago and New York’s Greenwich Village.
One Illinois author who effectively conveyed his personal experience and cultural insights in more than one way, and who became a noted writer, was Floyd Dell. But now, a century after he was attracting national attention—as a literary figure who lived in Chicago and then in New York—his works are not well-known. However, his best books deserve a modern readership, and his remarkable autobiography is especially thought-provoking—and inspiring.
Dell’s earliest years were associated with western Illinois. He was born at Barry, a Pike County village, in 1887. His father was a butcher who was sometimes out of work and made little money, and like most women at that time, his mother was simply a housewife, so the family coped with poverty, often moving from one run-down house to another. However, Barry had a small public library, where Dell initiated his devotion to books.
Twelve years later, Dell’s family moved to nearby Quincy, where they lived in a decrepit house on the city’s south side, and he attended Franklin School, which was a junior high.
Fortunately, Dell’s parents did occasionally read books, and his mother encouraged him to read, so the gifted youngster spent much time at the public library. Along with the engaging books of fiction and poetry that he enjoyed, he also introduced himself to groundbreaking major works by great thinkers like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. His reading caused some sense of isolation, but it also fostered his spiritual growth. And it made him recognize, and reject, the forces that exerted control of his development. As he later said in his autobiography, for example, he loved his mother, but one issue that emerged was “how to gain some moral freedom from the overwhelming domination of a good mother’s love.”
As a school child in Quincy, he became acquainted with Socialism (which advocated collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods), but as a farmer back in Pike County told him, when Dell and his mother returned for a visit, “Socialism was not a matter of economics only, but of a different kind of life, based upon service for the common good.” And for that reason, the youth became very attracted to the Socialist outlook—which eventually changed his life. He read more about it and often contrasted the ideals of that cultural system with his own poverty and limited opportunity, as someone who worked in the summers as “a bundle boy for a department store, an elevator boy in the same [business], a helper in a harness factory, an assistant shipping clerk . . . a solicitor for newspapers, a book canvasser, and a worker in a candy factory.”
Nevertheless, Dell was a remarkable junior high student, who edited the school newspaper, encouraged the creation of a school library, founded a student organization that promoted literary works, and eventually delivered a graduation speech on “The Influence of Oratory upon History.” During those school years he also started writing poems, and he authored a few plays, too, including one on Benedict Arnold, the American Revolutionary War general who defected to the British side, and another on John Brown, the noted abolitionist.
Dell spent a couple of years in high school, but his intellectual interests, rather than his class assignments, continued to drive his inner development. In 1903 his family moved to Davenport, Iowa, where he soon dropped out of high school. However, he spent much time at the newly built Davenport Public Library, where the head librarian, Marilla Freeman, helped and encouraged him. Among other things, he became an atheist, too, viewing the God that many people believed in as a creation of humanity.
During his late teens, in 1905, he was a cub reporter for the Davenport Times, and then he became a reporter for the Davenport Democrat. After attending some meetings of area Socialists, he often focused on socio-economic issues from that perspective—and he became outspoken, which occasionally prompted some criticism of his views by others. But he made some important intellectual contacts, too, including writer George Cram Cook, who was a close friend.
Dell also became a published poet. He originally wrote poems just to reflect on, and express, his outlook on things, and to share his views with people that he knew, but during his late teens he also sold poems to Harper’s Magazine, The Century, and McClure’s. So, while in Davenport, Dell was becoming a promising literary voice at an early age.
In 1908, when he was twenty-one, Dell moved to Chicago, where he not only continued to do newspaper work, with the Chicago Evening Post, but was an editorial assistant for, and soon the editor of, that newspaper’s Friday Literary Review. In that role, he championed such midwestern voices as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg.
He also continued his non-journalistic writing, producing both poems and plays, as well as his first book, Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913). He followed that with several collections of essays about the female situation, such as Feminism for Men (1914) and Enter the Woman (1915).
Despite Dell’s general appreciation for women, and his support for new and meaningful changes in the female experience, he also realized the challenge in modern love relationships, for he and his first wife were divorced in 1913, after just four years of marriage.
Dell soon moved to New York, where he became associated with Greenwich Village, a district in lower Manhattan that had become known for an influx of artists and freethinkers. By then he was a radical who was very committed to criticizing capitalism and improving modern culture, so he also co-edited The Masses (1914-1917), a Socialist publication. That magazine also expressed anti-war views, which not only aroused criticism but even forced him, and co-editor Max Eastman, to face two stressful trials for violating the Espionage Act, which fortunately did not result in a conviction.
However, he soon wrote one book that brought him significant, appreciative attention: Moon-Calf (1920). It is a novel about a talented youth named Felix Fay—an idealist who has writing talent even in high school, and who goes on to become a Socialist and a poet, as he struggles to find himself as well as to develop a meaningful love relationship. So, it was deeply influenced by Dell’s own experience. And it sold well.
Moon-Calf was followed by ten other novels, including The Briary-Bush (1921), Janet March (1923), This Mad Ideal (1925), Runaway (1925), An Old Man’s Folly (1926), An Unmarried Father (1927), Souvenir (1929), Love Without Money (1931), Diana Stair (1932), and The Golden Spike (1934). The first of those, The Briary-Bush, was also focused on self-growth and centered on Felix Fay, the character from Moon-Calf, who then strives for success as a writer in Chicago. And another novel, Souvenir, depicts that same character later in his life. So, Dell created a fictional trilogy related to his own experience.
One of the best of Dell’s novels, Diana Stair, is about a woman who becomes a mill worker and a fighter for freedom. As the original book cover also says, “It is the picture of an America torn by dissension, with industry blackening out the landscape, with women discarding traditional moralities and leaving their homes for the first time, to fight side-by-side with men for economic freedom.” So, it is focused on self-growth and groundbreaking social change. It is not surprising that Dell viewed it as his finest novel.
Dell also produced a distinctive book titled Love in Greenwich Village (1926), which is focused on accounts of challenging relationships among residents living in that place, who are committed to “freedom and happiness.” (Some of those were printed as stories for magazines and then were gathered into the book.) And those short stories are told by a narrator who begins by explaining “The Rise of Greenwich Village,” as a distinct and promising community, and who closes the book by declaring “The Fall of Greenwich Village,” after it had become “a side-show for tourists . . . a commercial exhibit for tawdry Bohemianism.” So, the book combines fictional stories (as well as several poems) with cultural commentary about that community—and it also reflects the experience of the author.
Dell also wrote a dozen plays, such as Human Nature: A Very Short Morality Play (1913) and Enigma: A Domestic Conversation (1915). He also acted in some of them, at Greenwich Village. He even produced a collection of his one-act plays, titled King Arthur’s Socks and Other Village Plays (1922). The last play that he wrote was a comedy titled Little Accident (1928), which had an extended run on Broadway, and two years later it was made into a movie. While in New York, Dell was also a leader in The Provincetown Players, a noted theater group that produced plays by many famous figures, including Eugene O’Neill.
Dell also wrote more than a dozen volumes of nonfiction about the human experience, including such titles as Enter the Woman (1915), Looking at Life (1924), The Outline of Marriage (1926), and Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Patriarchal Society (1930). In yet another nonfictional account, Intellectual Vagabondage (1926), he discusses various writers and thinkers who brought change, and who influenced him, such as Charles Darwin, Robert Ingersoll, and Walt Whitman. And he wrote one extensive commentary on another author, who was also a Socialist committed to reform, as well as a novelist: Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (1927).
But Floyd Dell’s most engaging book for modern readers is surely Homecoming: An Autobiography, published in 1933. It is focused on the spiritual development of a talented, rebellious youth who makes a deep inner journey as he lives in Barry, Quincy, Davenport, Chicago, and New York. As he says in the “Preface” to his book, “I took a long time finding out what I was like, what I wanted out of life, and how to get it; I was poor, lucky, despairing, happy; I hated and loved the world I lived in; [but] I had joy in my work, and in my thoughts; and life became more interesting, larger and deeper, with every year that passed. . . .” In short, he grows as an individual and emerges as a successful writer. Toward the end of the book, his fictional reflection of his life, Moon-Calf, appears, and Dell becomes a very successful writer.
The autobiography ends with Dell having some positive experiences, both as a husband, who learns to accept marriage and be grateful for the love and support of his second wife, and as a family member who re-engages with his distant, elderly parents. In fact, Dell and his wife make a trip back to western Illinois, to visit his parents, and as he says toward the end of his autobiography, “[my] feelings of misery lifted and vanished when I got back home, where I was among people who knew me as I was.” So, Dell also asserts that engaging deeply with those you love and appreciate is crucial, and that’s why the inspiring autobiography of a social rebel is titled Homecoming.
Despite his success, Dell stopped producing books in his early fifties. He then did editorial work and project reports for the national government’s Works Progress Administration, which occupied him for a dozen years. After retiring from that in 1947, he simply did free-lance writing—and he died in 1969, at age eighty-two, shortly after he and his second wife celebrated their fiftieth anniversary.
Since then, he has received some attention from literary scholars, including Floyd Dell (1971), an insightful overview of his life and work by John E. Hart, and Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel (1994), which is an extensive and engaging biography. More recently, in 2015, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Even Dell’s most popular books and plays are little-known today, but Homecoming especially deserves a modern readership. It depicts the experience of an Illinois author whose life of challenge, struggle, social activism, and literary emergence should be more well-known.
This article originally appeared in the November- December issue of the Illinois State Historical Society’s Illinois Heritage magazine. John Hallwas is the author or editor of thirty books related to Illinois history and literature, and he speaks widely on a variety of historical topics related to our state. For information, see his website: www.johnhallwas.jimdo.com. He is the ISHS President.
A Deadly Deception: The Asbestos Tragedy in McLean County
Emil Badovanitz worked at both the Cicero and the Bloomington, Illinois UNARCO asbestos plants. He died in 1965 age 60 due to asbestos exposure. McLean County Museum of History image.
By Mike Matejka
WGLT-FM (NPR) asbestos exhibit story: New exhibit on asbestos reveals a dark, unsettling and important B-N story | WGLT
Willard Tipsord was a father, foster parent, husband, grandfather, and, for over 30 years, a member of Carpenters Local 63 in McLean County, Illinois. As a young newlywed, he went to work at Bloomington’s United Asbestos & Rubber Company (UNARCO) plant to provide for his family. On May 1, 1989, at age 57, he died of mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer.
Tipsword was diagnosed in his late 40s, and despite trying every available treatment, his diagnosis it was a death sentence. Asbestos fibers lodge themselves in his lungs, causing cancer and reducing oxygen flow to the bloodstream., The asbestos slowly suffocates its victims.
Tipsord’s daughter Cheryl remembers her father as a “picture of health. He was tall, lean and muscular. He never drank. He worked all day and then through the evening, building cabinets and homes.”
“It was hard to see that strong, healthy young man dying day-by-day,” Cheryl recalls. “His life was cut short because he was knowingly exposed to a hazard. He did not have the human right to work in a safe environment.”[1] [MM2]
His granddaughter, Dr. Ericka Wills, was six when he died. Today she is a labor educator and activist, inspired by her grandfather. “Today as a union activist and Labor Studies professor,” she said, “I help workers and students gain a sense of empowerment by knowing that they have the right to create and engage in a democratic workplace. In doing so, I am honoring the men and women, like my grandpa, who gave their lives in the fight for safe workplaces, fair wages, and dignity at work.”
George Redman died at age 43 of an intestinal cancer after 20 years at UNARCO. His son Terry remembers,
Dad used to come home from work and my brother, and I would slap his pants and the dust would just fly. You would think he worked in a flour mill. Before washing his work clothes my mom would stand at the back door and shake his clothes, and the dust would just fly. She wanted to get as much of that dust[3] [MM4] as she could out before doing the laundry. He would come home exhausted from work and sit down, and we would sit on his lap and wrestle around, picking little flakes of asbestos off his clothes. It was on everything.
Like Tipsord, Redman was active in his community and athletic., He coached Khoury League baseball for his sons, led family camping trips every weekend and pitched horseshoes. Redman eventually left UNARCO and went to work in construction with Bloomington’s Laborers International Union of North America Local 362.
Redman remembered his father’s final days. “It was something you never forget, watching your Dad die. He was in Carle Hospital in Champaign. He weighed about 180 pounds, a strong man, He deteriorated down to 110 pounds when he passed away. Since they missed the cancer for almost a year, after they operated, they were unable to save him. …We were lost, the leader of our family was gone.”
Willard Tipsord and George Redman are two of 133 verified, and countless unverified, asbestos-related deaths in McLean County, Illinois. The McLean County Museum of History’s newest temporary exhibit, A Deadly Deception: The Asbestos Tragedy in McLean County explores the history of the Union Asbestos and Rubber Company (UNARCO) manufacturing plant in Bloomington, which operated from 1951 to 1972. It uncovers the workers’ experience, their fight for better working conditions, and the onslaught of litigation that followed.
In 1951, UNARCO closed their Cicero, Illinois, plant and relocated to Bloomington. UNARCO local personnel manager Ed Hayes transferred with the plant and in 1952 began keeping a fatality total from Cicero, going back to 1944. UNARCO already had faced workers’ compensation suits from their Chicago suburban location.
In Bloomington, UNARCO filled the massive Chicago & Alton Railroad’s locomotive backshop. The large locomotive shop had been used to repair steam locomotives. It was obsolete with the new diesel-electric engines. The community welcomed the new employer and its promised 250 new jobs. Asbestos is a naturally occurring substance composed of fibrous silicate minerals resistant to heat and corrosion. Asbestos was renowned as a versatile material, with new products constantly emerging. Asbestos was used in buildings as insulation, fire retardant, pipe wrapping, shingles, and floor tile, as well as in protective clothing, auto brake shoes, ironing board covers and even as fake Christmas snow.
The exhibit contributes to the universal story of workerspeople being sacrificed, effectively forced to endure toxic conditions and environmental hazards in the pursuit of their employers’ profit. The Museum believes this exhibit illustrates a national tragedy on a local scale.
According to Diane Neely, a worker who who started at UNARCO in 1954 and became an administrative manager, the plant used about 5,000 pounds, or two and a half tons, of asbestos daily. This amounted to about 650 tons annually.
At UNARCO, burlap bags full of asbestos would arrive from South African mines; the bags would be opened, dumped, and woven into asbestos fabric for insulation. Each process increased the amount of airborne asbestos dust. UNARCO employee William Johnson remembered emptying the bags: “Usually [it] was packed somewhat so you would have to sort of shake it to get it out. … there would be dust as it went into the grinder. There would be dust when they first opened the bags and shook them, and then it would go through a blower to lift it up and blow it down into the building, and there would be some dust coming out cracks. ... I worked on the day shift, and there was a beam of light that would come through the window. [The asbestos] looked like millions of diamonds in the air.” Otto Kessinger[5] [MM6] , another worker at the facility, said that: “At the end of the plant where I worked, you could look up . . . it looked like it was snowing with asbestos fiber.”
Dust masks were sometimes provided, but workers’ masks were inadequate. Management and technicians were given higher-end, more expensive masks. Workers were given inexpensive foam masks, like the disposable COVID masks of more recent memory. Even those masks were not always available. Cheryl recounts that her father and his co-workers would use kerchiefs to cover their face. Management demanded they remove them.
Workers were frustrated by the provided masks. Charles Hammond also died from asbestos exposure at UNARCO. His wife Charlotte recalls: “They furnished masks, but they were the wrong kind. They’d get clogged up and you couldn’t shake it out. Or they would go for months without masks. Then they would get some and they’d be the wrong kind again. When you’re young, you believe the company. You need a job.” Workers headed home with asbestos fibers clinging to their clothing that exposed their families. In some cases, family members also succumbed to the diseases caused by asbestos.
The workers belonged to Textile Workers Union[7] [MM8] of America Local 1292. They negotiated with the company over wages, but their safety grievances rarely were resolved. Frank Eaton remembered that: “Well, Bill [Johnson] and I were both committee men of the union ... we wrote bunches of grievances over the air quality … we would complain about the dust in the air. The company would say they were going to fix it … in all probability we would have a second step grievance at least once a month.”
Although the workers were reassured the workplace was safe, UNARCO continually monitored the workers’ health through regular x-rays. Workers who showed possible deadly exposure were “eased out.” Company management would visit the worker and family at home and, admit to the fact of the asbestos-caused disease. A settlement offer was extended, provided the worker agreed not to sue.
UNARCO established their own insurance company, Associated Safety & Claims Services Inc. Plant official W.H. Haines admitted in later testimony that this was a “dummy fund” so that employees would not learn the company was self-insured.
In 1970, the building materials firm Owens-Corning bought the UNARCO facility. They sent their own industrial hygienist to evaluate the plant. The resulting report said that: “The atmospheric conditions in the work environment of this plant are unbelievably bad. ... No consideration was given to protecting the health of the workforce. ... The outdated equipment and methods of handling prevent proper control under present conditions.” Owens-Corning ceased local asbestos production in 1972 and manufactured industrial sinks at the plant.
UNARCO was not an outlier -- multiple corporations manufactured and used asbestos and, despite corporate claims about the mineral’s safety, doubts grew. The industry developed its own public relations efforts to quiet public fears.
The asbestos industry funded research conducted by Saranac Labs, in upstate New York., a leading cancer research institute. These studies verified the link between cancer and asbestos. The research contract stipulated the results were proprietary and not for public distribution. [9] [MM10]
Despite these industry efforts, by the late 1960s, asbestos’ deadly nature was slowly exposed. Multiple lawsuits were filed by disabled workers, eventually sinking the industry. In July 1982, UNARCO’s successor company filed for bankruptcy, and was quickly followed in September by industry leader Johns-Manville. Owens Corning declared bankruptcy in 2000. Local attorneys sued UNARCO on behalf of injured workers. The discovery process revealed how UNARCO withheld evidence of asbestos’ dangers from its workers.
A trust fund for victims was established from the multiple corporate bankruptcies. From 1989 until 2010, this trust processed 306,939 claims, settling 188,406 for a total of $262,248,992. Once the trust was depleted, attorneys would file cases against asbestos users or those involved in the industry’s cover-up.
Because asbestos- related exposure can take years to materialize, in 2014 Illinois law was amended to remove the ten-year limit for filing cases. The American Tort Reform Association labeled this change a “big-time Christmas present for personal injury lawyers.”
As the dangers became more apparent, governmental regulations were enacted to require safe asbestos remediation. For example, the 1986 federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act required all schools nationally to develop an asbestos management plan and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop regulations on school asbestos removal plans.
In 1995, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Asbestos Abatement Act, to empower the Illinois Department of Public Health to regulate asbestos remediation. It required contractors to register with the state, supervised asbestos worker certification, and established air sampling and other management plans when asbestos is removed.
Asbestos is still mined and used around the world. On March 18, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule to prohibit ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos. The new rule bans most sheet gaskets that contain asbestos two years after the effective date of the final rule.
The asbestos corporate cover-up was not unique. The tobacco industry is a known example, along with the recent lawsuits and deaths over the drug OxyContin. Now, suits are being brought around “forever chemicals” used in cookware, clothing, and cosmetics. Legal actions are revealing that manufacturers knew the dangers decades ago. Consumer caution is important, but so is rigorous, government and agency testing to ensure public safety.
A Deadly Deception: The Asbestos Tragedy in McLean County is open at the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, Illinois, and will continue through the summer of 2027. The exhibit sponsor is the Laborers International Union of North America, Midwest Region. To learn more, please visit mchistory.org.
Mike Matejka is the guest curator for the asbestos exhibit. He is retired from Laborers Local 362 in Bloomington and for 40 years edited the Grand Prairie Union News
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