While researching his book Better For All the World, The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, Harry Bruinius came across an old Greenwich Village magazine named The Quill. One of its co-founders was a Barnard College graduate named Millia “Billie” Davenport, the daughter of Charles Davenport, the leading eugenicist in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, and one of the main characters in Harry’s book.
Billie Davenport, together with her husband Arthur Moss, Harold Hersey, and other self-styled Greenwich Village “bohemians,” launched The Quill on June 30, 1917 from their office on Sheridan Square. Subscriptions were $1 for a year, or 5 cents a copy.
The first cover featured a sketch of the newly-married Billie and Arthur.
Earnest Romantic notions of art and literature – as well as, later, an aggressive, ironic voice – filled the pages of The Quill for the next four years. Here is how they described their venture in the first words of their first editorial:
The object of this magazine is a simple one…it aims to put forth the best work produced by those who, rather than compromise their ideal in Art, have chosen to cling to the best that is within them, no matte what the consequences are. The need of such a medium is great. Other magazines have flourished, with somewhat the same purpose and gone down to defeat. It may be that this will pursue the same course, but at least it will be able to say that it perished for a burning cause, and that it served as a medium for a few of the souls that are not dead. The contributions are to be unlimited in nature, the obvious qualification being good workmanship. The editorial policy is neither here nor there. The Quill will not do battle for Causes or Movements, for it does not believe in them. It will not preach. It will not offer any panaceas for the sorrows or joys of life; rather will it serve as a meeting place for the few who are struggling ever and ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that is not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by those whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for others to obey… an art, let us say, that springs out of the emotional depths, of creative spirit, courageous and unafraid of rotting power of limited scope… an art whose purpose is flaming beauty of creation and nothing else.
