Greenwich Village: From Bohemian to Capitalist

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There’s nothing new about business co-opting hip life. In his 1934 book, Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley recounts how the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village fueled America’s consumer culture.

Greenwich Village was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine. By 1920, it had become a system of ideas that could roughly be summarized as follows:

1. The idea of salvation by the child.
Each of us at birth has special potentialities that are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standardized society. If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.

2. The idea of self-expression.
[Our] purpose in life is to express [ourselves], to realize [our] full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.

3. The idea of paganism.
The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.

4. The idea of living for the moment.
It is stupid to pile up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering.

5. The idea of liberty.
Every law, convention, or rule of art that prevents self-expression should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crusade with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves.

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