by Seth Lipsky
Despite the initial excitement and enthusiasm, as the months wore on it became clear that neither the SLP nor the labor movement was ready to let an editor of Cahan’s caliber operate outside party or union discipline. Was Cahan himself ready? He was, after all, a promising writer of fiction who was being tugged at by the world of belles lettres; and he had never really worked on staff for a general interest daily newspaper with a mass audience.
From the start, Cahan opposed using the Forward to carry on the feud with De Leon, though an internal faction felt otherwise. As the most seasoned newspaperman among his colleagues, he had strong ideas about what the paper should be: a freewheeling press that would reflect the richness and complexities of life on the Lower East Side. He was certainly no fan of De Leon, but spilling too much ink over their battles in order to take him down, he contended, would simply alienate readers. “People love a fight,” Cahan later conceded. “When two men fight, passersby stop and look. But that is no solid basis for a newspaper.”
De Leon, meanwhile, was not content to sit back. He viewed the Forward supporters as traitors to the SLP and succeeded in ousting hundreds of them from the party. But they would soon find another, more companionable home. In 1897 Eugene V. Debs, fresh out of prison, founded a political party that he called the Social Democracy of America, which a few years later, after some splits and mergers, would become simply the Socialist Party of America. In the summer of 1897, a convention of socialist press associations, including the Forward, voted to sign on with Debs and affiliate with his party.
Many Forward staffers remained incensed at De Leon and grew increasingly angry at Cahan for imperiously stifling their view that the newspaper should polemicize against him. Several accounts of the period suggest that Anna Cahan wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the idea of her husband as a career Yiddish newspaperman and was encouraging Cahan* to continue to write fiction and pursue a more literary career. By August 1897, Cahan had enough. He left the Forward, intending never to come back.
Anna Cahan’s ambitions for her husband were not without merit. Cahan had been simultaneously developing his talents as a Yiddish-language newspaperman and as an English-language novelist. In the summer of 1895 he had finished writing his first novel, Yankel the Yankee.
It tells the story of an ambitious young Russian Jewish blacksmith who leaves his wife and child behind and arrives in America determined to shed all trappings of Jewish identity and become a thoroughly assimilated “Yankee.” He takes up with a more Americanized fellow immigrant and promises her marriage. The novel concludes with Yankel divorcing his traditional, pious wife. But the social realist Cahan was not going to give his readers a happily-ever-after ending: riding off with his paramour after the divorce proceedings, Yankel realizes that he is “painfully reluctant to part with his long-coveted freedom so soon after it had at last been attained, and before he had had time to relish it.” His ex-wife, by contrast, plans to marry a religious scholar who was their boarder.
After Cahan completed the manuscript in the summer of 1895, he had delivered it to Howells, who promptly invited him to dinner. Cahan, nervous again when he arrived at the Howellses’ residence, dined with the novelist, his wife, and their daughter, all of whom were exceedingly polite but silent on the subject of the manuscript. After the meal, Cahan and Howells went into Howells’s study, where the dean of American literature showered him with praise—so much so that Cahan “grew shy and could not say a word,” as he later wrote. Howells remembered “almost every line of the novel” and “expressed joy” that American literature would have “an important power added to it.”
Howells, who was also a great editor, thought the title ought to be changed—Yankel the Yankee seemed more suited to vaudeville. So Cahan began throwing out names. When Howells heard “Yekl,” he fixed on it immediately. “Not Yekl the Yankee,” he said—“Yekl.” It was an inspired suggestion—a simple Jewish name crowning an American novel. Howells offered to help Cahan place the manuscript, suggesting that he try for magazine serialization before shopping it around in book form. But it wouldn’t be easy. “Our editors have their own notions about literature,” Howells said, in Cahan’s recollection. “They can’t be blamed. They must keep the reading public in mind, and the taste of the great masses is not the same as yours or mine.”
That night Howells also showed Cahan, with evident pride, a letter he had received from the Russian master Ivan Turgenev, praising Howells for his work. In any event, he was true to his word; he submitted Cahan’s manuscript to Harper’s Magazine, where he had been writing a literary column since 1886. But his pessimism was also on target: Cahan’s book was rejected on the grounds that Jewish life on the Lower East Side held little appeal for American readers. At a second magazine, the editor’s wife signed the rejection. “You know, dear Mr. Howells, that our readers want to have stories about richly dressed ladies and gentlemen,” she explained. “How can they be interested by a story about a Jewish immigrant?”
When the manuscript was sent over to McClure’s Magazine, Cahan asked to see the editor, John S. Phillips, to receive his answer in person. “You describe only Jews,” Phillips said. “Someone who reads your novel is likely to think that there are no other kinds of people in America than Jews.” The purpose of art, he said, was to capture beauty; what was the appeal in Cahan’s factories and teeming streets? Cahan protested, citing examples from Russia’s literary masters who wrote beautifully about peasants, but to no avail. Phillips told him his work showed undeniable talent; it was his subject matter that needed changing.
Cahan despaired of ever publishing his novel in English, so he translated it into Yiddish and, when Howells was out of town, published it in the Arbeiter Zeitung as Yankel the Yankee, under the pseudonym Socius.† The Arbeiter Zeitung’s readers loved it. Letters poured in, complimenting the book and wanting to know who Yankel really was. Some of the letter writers were uncomfortable with the title character: Yankel wasn’t the most sympathetic or likable person. Couldn’t the novelist have painted a more flattering portrait of a Jew?
When Howells returned to New York, he wasn’t happy to hear about Yankel’s appearance in the Yiddish press. Finally, he sent the manuscript to his own editor, Ripley Hitchcock, at R. Appleton. A year earlier Hitchcock had taken on another Howells protégé, a twenty-three-year-old journalist named Stephen Crane. So Howells had a bit of a track record with his publisher in recognizing new talent. Hitchcock liked Cahan’s novel and agreed to publish it. And so in July 1896, Cahan’s first novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, was brought out by the publisher of the famous grammar book that he had used to learn English only fourteen years earlier.
Social realist writer that he was, Cahan made sure that his characters sounded the way immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side actually sounded. No one in American fiction had ever spoken that way. “You can betch you’ bootsh!” the Yankee Yekl says to one of his friends. “An’ dot’sh ull!”
The critics were flummoxed. The Commercial Advertiser, in an unsigned review, described the story as being written in “the most hideous jargon” and complained that “we are asked to give it a place in literature because it represents still another dialect alleged to be spoken on the east side.… There is not a thrill of human sympathy from cover to cover.” In a review in the literary journal The Bookman, the author Nancy Huston Banks declared that “from beginning to end throughout the work there is not a gleam of spirituality, unselfishness, or nobility.… Are such books ever worthwhile? Do they add anything to literature? Above all, are they literature?” But some readers comprehended it. The New York Times reviewer who concluded that Yekl “and his fellow-personages and the life they live are vividly depicted with graphic descriptive skill, with a keen sense of humor, and not a hint of preachiness.” Howells, writing in The World, hailed Cahan as a “new star of realism” and put him on the same plane as Stephen Crane.
Cahan now realized that he could do more than serve as a guide to America
for arriving immigrants; he could also be a guide to the burgeoning immigrant Jewish community for non-Jewish Americans, who were only just becoming aware of its existence. How all of this would translate into earning a living, however, was unclear. Yekl’s sales were tepid at best. This was not due to anti-Semitism, according to the historian Moses Rischin, who has written trenchantly about Cahan’s life. “Novels dealing with the Irish were equally unsuccessful,” he notes. The readers of novels were largely women who “desired to read about aristocrats.” Also taboo, Rischin noted, “were literary intimations about the less romantic aspects of the relations between the sexes.”
Cahan’s financial situation was becoming problematic. Not only had he walked out on the Forward, but the New York City Board of Education, which had taken over the Young Men’s Hebrew Association night school, had fired him from his job teaching English to immigrants because, as he was later told, he had been spotted giving a socialist speech in the street. Cahan no longer had an income. Desperate for cash and unable to rely on his fiction for financial support, he hustled for freelance journalism work and once again submitted articles to the Sun. He also decided to try his luck with the New-York Evening Post and headed over to the paper’s offices, in an old residence on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, carrying an article he had written.
Cahan handed his manuscript to the office boy and took a seat—a ritual that was familiar and no doubt wearying to him. But a door soon opened, and a young man emerged who proceeded to shake Cahan’s hand with warmth and enthusiasm, telling him what a fine novelist he was and that he had read Yekl with great pleasure.
The young man was Lincoln Steffens, who in the early fall of 1897 was serving as assistant city editor of the Evening Post. Six years younger than the thirty-seven-year-old Cahan, Steffens would prove to have, like Cahan, a talent for leadership and would go on to become a progenitor of the genre of reform-oriented investigative journalism known as muckraking. A Californian by birth and the son of a wealthy businessman, he had graduated from the University of California, then spent time studying in France and Germany. He returned to America as a worldly and idealistic young man.
Steffens quickly arranged for the Evening Post to publish Cahan’s article, then invited him for a walk. They talked about literature, Stephen Crane, and William Dean Howells, and before they knew it they had arrived at Steffens’s home on West 56th Street. Steffens invited him inside and introduced him to his family. The immigrant Cahan had acquired another influential friend in America’s Protestant literary establishment, as well as a deeper appreciation of the possibilities that his new home held out to even its newest citizens.
The Evening Post published only a few of Cahan’s articles, and he remained on the lookout for more assignments. Steffens steered him to more work at the city’s oldest newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, a paper rarely read on the Lower East Side. Steffens would shortly follow Cahan there to be his editor, creating one of those magical newsrooms that come together only once in a while and that are remembered and talked about for years to come. The Commercial Advertiser was then one of the smaller papers in the city, with a circulation of just 2,500. But it had a lineage as a conservative voice. At one point Thurlow Weed, an anti-Mason politician, had edited it. When Cahan got there, its proprietor was the railroad magnate Collis Huntington, who sustained the money-losing paper “for its influence, the resultant prestige accruing to the family name, and as a hobby.” Steffens got Cahan the work through one of the Advertiser’s drama critics, Norman Hapgood, who, decades later, writing for a Hearst publication, played a part in exposing the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford.
Cahan’s five years at the Commercial Advertiser, from 1897 to 1902, are sometimes overlooked, being overshadowed by his fifty years at the Forward. But it was there that the young socialist ideologue and labor activist became a newspaperman. Cahan’s first editor was Henry J. Wright, who gave him his first lesson in classical newspaper reporting: he sent him to cover a rally for Benjamin V. Tracey, the Republican nominee in the first New York mayoral election in which the victor would be the chief executive of all five boroughs. Cahan tried to get out of the assignment on the grounds that he was a socialist and could not possibly write about a member of the bourgeoisie. Wright told Cahan he just wanted a straightforward report on Tracey’s speech and appearance and on the response from the crowd; once that was done, Cahan could write his conscience. Cahan covered the rally and wrote up the story, complete with his unfavorable opinion of Tracey. Wright rejected it. “Belles lettres is one thing and newspaper writing is another,” he explained.
That November Steffens came on board as city editor, with a mandate to make the paper more lively and position it somewhere between the sensationalism of the Journal and The World and the dry, just-the-facts approach of The New York Times. Steffens promptly cleaned house, firing two-thirds of the reporters. In their place he hired young Ivy League graduates who had little newspaper experience but grand literary ambitions; he planned to mentor them along with the fiery Russian already on his staff.
“ ‘We’ had use for anyone who, openly or secretly, hoped to be a poet, a novelist, or an essayist,” Steffens wrote in his autobiography. “I could not pay them much in money, but as an offset I promised to give them opportunities to see life as it happened in all the news varieties.… When a reporter no longer saw red at a fire, when he was so used to police news that a murder was not a human tragedy but only a crime, he could not write police news for us. We preferred the fresh staring eyes to the informed mind and the blunted pencil.” Before long Steffens felt his experiment was working. “We are doing some things that were never done in journalism before,” he wrote to his father in March 1898.
It was a perfect fit for Cahan. He loved pontificating to his bright-eyed young colleagues, and they were in awe of the older Russian socialist who had accomplished things of which they only dreamed—and who was a published novelist to boot. In the afternoon, after the paper had been put to bed, they would gather around a long table in the newsroom, where Cahan would hold forth on the higher virtues of Tolstoy and Chekov. “I love you … clever good fellows, but you are children in the fields of art,” he told them.
When Steffens asked Cahan what he would like to write about, he replied, “Give me assignments that will bring me in close contact with life.” So Steffens assigned him to the police headquarters, then located on Mulberry Street, near Houston. All the dailies had reporters there. Cahan loved the assignment, which gave him the education in American urban living for which he longed. “The duties of a police reporter had a two-fold character: One part of the work was connected to the police itself—to the ‘politics’ among the officials,” he wrote in his memoir. “The second part of the work consists of paying attention to the police bulletins and reporting the various sensational events announced in them: a murder or another major crime, a suicide, a tragedy, a fire.… Chiefly, the second part of the work interested me, but the first part did also. Everything interested me.”
There Cahan met one of the greatest reporters in the city, the Danish-born Jacob Riis of the Sun, the leading muckraker in America and an ardent advocate for the poor.
Riis was not a tall man, and not a fat one either. He was in his forties, with a blond moustache and glasses. He spoke with a slight Danish accent. Steffens introduced me to him as a writer, the author of Yekl and a man “with ideas.” We spent about half an hour together, and we didn’t like each other. To me, Riis seemed like a person with outdated notions.… I saw that he didn’t like my socialism much, and even less my low opinion of certain American writers. I felt that he considered me a pretentious young man. But he treated me courteously, and he showed me and explained everything related to my work. He introduced me to the reporters from the other newspapers and to all the officials at Police Headquarters, from the Chief of Police to some of the clerks.
On this first day at the police headquarters, Cahan experienced another rite of American passage:
he used, for the first time, a telephone. After a meeting of the police board, Cahan needed to write up the story, and Riis told him that he didn’t have enough time physically to bring his copy to the office. “You have to call it in,” Riis said.
“At the words ‘call it in’ I got hot and cold flashes,” Cahan recalled. “Up to that time I had never held a telephone in my hand.… In my last year at the Vilna Teachers’ Institute, in 1881, I learned about the telephone in a new physics textbook. Only when I came to New York did I see a real telephone.… I don’t think I would exaggerate by saying that in the whole Lower East Side then there were only a few telephones.”
Cahan managed to find a phone in a drugstore on Houston Street, a few blocks from Mulberry. But
I did not trust my own abilities on the instrument. In despair, I asked the druggist to speak for me. The druggist was friendly, but he was an Italian (the area was already at that time a part of the Italian quarter), and he had a real Italian accent, with hard “r”s that cut me like dull knives. Some of his English words I could barely understand. But every second was precious.… In short, I dictated my report to him word for word and he repeated it into the phone. He was so excited about the job that he pronounced the words resoundingly in a loud voice. In this way we took turns “singing” for about ten minutes—for a third of a column.
Cahan’s time at the Commercial Advertiser greatly broadened his horizons—he was entranced by the great variety of people he encountered. At the same time his colleagues were particularly interested in his Russian Jewish background. He had more than his share of cronies at the paper. He had lunch with Steffens nearly every day and took long walks with him. Another was Hutchins Hapgood, younger brother of the drama critic Norman Hapgood, who was fascinated with the religious life in the “Jewish quarter.” According to Moses Rischin, author of a marvelous monograph on Cahan’s years at the Advertiser, when Hapgood’s fascination became evident, Cahan “would act as his liaison agent and interpreter, introducing him to some of his friends and acquaintances.” Steffens shared his interest. “I had become as infatuated with the Ghetto as eastern boys were with the wild west,” the editor recalled. He even put up a mezuza on the door to his office.