The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby

13. Mondialization

Mondialization 158 158 13 Mondialization B y the end of May , Caresse had gathered all the material that she needed for Portfolio .She flew to Paris to visit Billy and Josette, now married . The threesome spent the better part of June together and motored down the Loire Valley to view the chateaux and to sample the local wines.1 For July, Caresse joined Polleen and young granddaughter Lorraine at the Villa Capponi in Florence. She was back in Washington, D.C., by September , after a stop in Dublin. Caresse still entertained the hope of producing an Irish Portfolio. Once Portfolio  was printed, Caresse started preliminary work on the “Negro” Portfolio. Over the next few months, she finally acknowledged to herself that she could not afford the risk of funding another issue of the magazine. She decided to shut down. The trips to Europe for promoting an international exchange of culture had been gratifying but unprofitable.However , her firsthand observations of the devastating consequences of war moved her to become a political activist. She was not exactly geared for a grass roots campaign. The more I traveled and met and talked with the intellectuals of Europe the more I realized the great hope they cherished that the United States might offer to the world some spiritual ideology to which they could all adhere, working toward peace through a united intelligentsia.2 She regarded herself as a leader, an ambassador of good will, and a peaceful Mondialization 159 troublemaker. But if she wanted to influence an antiwar movement, she needed to reach a wider audience than the readers of Portfolio. Serendipity was on her side. In January , a young couple, Rufus and Janice King, came to her editorial office in Washington looking for an independent publisher who would print and distribute a political manifesto that they had written. King, recently graduated from the Yale University law school, had served in the Coast Guard during World War II.3 Mainstream publishers had summarily rejected their manuscript,entitled“Manifesto for Individual Secession into World Community.” Although Caresse knew she would never make a penny on it, she felt that she had just been presented with “the corner-stone of a new world order.”4 Caresse promised to print it when she returned to France that spring. She was off to a new start. Caresse was in Paris byApril,and the -page version of“Manifesto”was published on May , , under the Crosby Continental Editions imprint. Rufus King soapboxed world citizenship at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, and in Paris,he helped Caresse with distribution.One reader was Garry Davis, a young man of twenty-one whose experiences as a bomber pilot during World War II had transformed him into a pacifist. Inspired in part by the tract written by the Kings, he publically renounced his citizenship at the passport division of the American embassy and staged a protest all on his own. He parked himself on the steps of the Trocadero, then the site of the United Nations, thus designated international territory. From there he proselytized about the need to prevent the build-up of armaments and to replace national identity with global community. Caresse printed pamphlets on his behalf, and Rufus King offered him legal counsel. For a year, Davis managed to remain visible with the help of such high-profile French citizens as Jean-Paul Sartre,Albert Camus,Roger Sarrazac,and André Gide. Caresse printed world citizen “passports.” When Caresse returned to Washington in June, she had acquired a new kind of notoriety, this time for signing on as a world citizen. In the daily paper, she published an open invitation to anyone who wanted to discuss world citizenship. The forum would be held at her editorial offices in her house at  Q Street, N.W. About fifty people showed up, a cross section of human society, the religious man, the artist, the soldier, the diplomat, the housewife, the business man, the student; it pointed the way to a new and better understanding among men and women.5 As down-to-earth as Caresse was about the venture’s capacity for producing Mondialization 160 financial headaches, she was flying high over what she considered to be the spiritual benefits for all who participated. Caresse got a small clue of the difficulties she might encounter when the June , , issue of the Sunday News featured a photograph of her with...