Political and social issues occupied Rice's attention in this period as well. World War I and Woodrow Wilson's conservatism confirmed him in his criticism of the status quo. (He had been firmly converted to socialism in his teens, he said, by reading George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Maxim Gorky, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.) He frequented Greenwich Village, then the most bohemian part of New York City, in the late 1910s and became friendly with many socially conscious writers and activists, including the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson and the illustrator Art Young.