page_title: Agnes E. Meyer
section_title: Journalist and speaker
hierarchical_section_title: Agnes E. Meyer / Career and influence / Journalist and speaker
caption_attribution_description: English: The earliest example of visual poetry in America—is the original maquette for a printed version published in the avant-garde magazine 291. The work is both a drawing and a poem by caricaturist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961) and the American journalist and art patron Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887–1970). The Gallery had acquired the printed version—the April 1915 issue of 291—a year earlier.
context_page_description: Agnes Elizabeth Ernst Meyer was an American journalist, philanthropist, civil rights activist, and art patron. Throughout her life, Meyer was engaged with intellectuals, artists, and writers from around the world. Meyer's marriage to the financier Eugene Meyer, son of Marc Eugene Meyer, provided her with wealth and status that enabled her to influence national policy, such as social welfare programs. Meyer lobbied for the creation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and for the U.S. government to provide federal aid to states for education. President Lyndon Johnson credited Meyer for building public support for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which for the first time directed federal assistance towards school districts that served children from low-income families. She advocated for equal employment and educational opportunities, regardless of race. Meyer's investigative journalism showed the inequities of racial segregation in schools in the Washington metropolitan area.
  The purchase of The Washington Post in 1933 gave Meyer and her family the capacity to affect American opinion for several generations.
context_section_description: Shortly after graduating from Barnard, Meyer was hired by the old New York Sun as one of the newspaper's first woman journalists. Katharine Rhoades, Marion Beckett and Meyer were known as "The Three Graces" of the Alfred Stieglitz art circle.
  In 1915–1916, she created and published the literary art magazine 291 with Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Paul Haviland. Its second issue featured a full-page printed version of Mental Reactions, the earliest example of visual poetry in America, in which Meyer's poem is cut into individually trimmed blocks of pasted-down text and strewn across the page. Her husband Eugene Meyer, after resigning as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1933, purchased the bankrupt Washington Post, to which Agnes frequently contributed articles about the problems of veterans, migrant workers, overcrowded schools, and African Americans. After World War II, she wrote Out of These Roots: The Autobiography of An American Woman.
  In June 1945, she wrote a five-part series for the Post titled "Orderly Revolution." It was a glowing tribute to a young Saul Alinsky, who was then an obscure community organizer in Chicago. He was also a frequent visitor to the home of the Meyers in Washington, and to their estate in Westchester.
  During Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s, Meyer delivered speeches that characterized the campaign as a threat to academic freedom. She spoke at the convention of the American Association of School Administrators in Atlantic City, New Jersey, calling his behavior an affront to the dignity of a free people. Speaking at the Barnard Forum, Meyer argued that "security is not an aim in itself," that without freedom it "reduces life to that of the prison." Her gender politics were more traditionalist and typical of the decade, however, seen when she wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly in which she asserted “Women have many careers but only one vocation – motherhood. . . . Women must boldly announce that no job is more exacting, more necessary, or more rewarding than that of housewife and mother. Then they will feel free to become once more the moral force of society through the stabilization of the home.”
  Meyer's investigative journalism showed the inequities of racial segregation in the Washington metropolitan area schools. President Lyndon Johnson credited Meyer for building public support for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which for the first time directed federal assistance towards school districts that served children from low-income families.
caption: Marius de Zayas and Agnes Meyer, Mental Reactions, visual poetry, 1915
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