The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  The editorial was a paean to the compulsion of Jewish immigrants to put the education of their children ahead of all other matters. It also lamented “saddening examples … here in this land of hoo-hah and dollars and sense” in which hard-working immigrants produce a “poor Jewish boy who flatters the rich and crawls to the politicians who are enemies of the people.” It called such boys “traitors to their parents.” The Proletarian Preacher was back.

  Another change in that first issue was a slight softening of the Forward’s fervently antireligious stance. In an opinion column, Cahan described “the three stages in the life of a free-thinker: (1) when he passes a synagogue and gnashes his teeth; (2) when he passes a synagogue and smiles; (3) when he passes a synagogue and, though inclined to sigh because the world is still in such a state of ignorance, nevertheless finds himself taking an interest in such moments as these, when men stand together immersed in a feeling that has nothing to do with the egoistic life.”

  Readers responded to the new Forward immediately. An avalanche of letters arrived at the paper’s offices, most laudatory, some disapproving. Nearly all expressed, in some form or another, surprise, if not bewilderment: Why was the socialist Forward concerning itself with such popular matters? Cahan was delighted. It didn’t matter if they loved his paper or hated it, as long as they kept reading it.

  The changes continued. Cahan pushed aside the long dissertations on socialism and ran human interest stories on marriage, divorce, and jealousy. He opened the paper to nonsocialists. He wrote a series on tolerance. As Hearst and Pulitzer had done before him, he added pictures and banner headlines and ran contests—asking, for example, for the best definition of luck (the winner: “Mazel is somebody else’s schlimazel [bad luck]”) or the best account of “how I rid myself of superstition.” More and more letters poured in, often containing details of the readers’ personal lives. The Forward was becoming more than just a paper of record; to the legions of recent immigrants devouring its pages, it was a sympathetic, seasoned voice, an enlightened cousin who had been in America just that much longer and could serve as a guide to the country’s strange ways.

  Circulation shot up, tripling within four months of Cahan’s return. By midsummer, 19,000 copies of the Forward were being sold every day. Cahan, his veins now coursing with news black, took to the streets of the Lower East Side, spending hours each Sunday eavesdropping on conversations in barbershops and cafés, chatting with the owners of newspaper stands and their customers. “I wanted to know what sort of impression the new Forverts was making on the public,” he wrote later, “how they reacted to the various articles; what was good, what had to be changed, and what sort of other news it would be advisable to introduce. That was mainly my ‘job’ late Sunday morning. You can sit and listen to the conversations, and sometimes you can slip in a few questions yourself.”

  There were so many new immigrants in the neighborhood that Cahan could often do this reconnaissance work anonymously. But he was bursting with pride and enthusiasm for his new journalistic enterprise. “Sometimes somebody did recognize me,” he recalled. “But that also wasn’t so bad.” He was, at heart, still a reporter. “Several times I got up very early to see what was going on in the Jewish neighborhood at that hour—how the stores were opened, how the market on Hester Street took shape, how poor people searched through garbage barrels, how tailors ran to work at six in the morning. In this way I used to put together articles that appealed to our readers—often in a deeper and more delicate way than what usually interests them in a newspaper.”

  Cahan’s fiction writing took a backseat. The Forward was becoming his great American Jewish novel, a kind of epic in itself—entertaining, dramatic, and didactic.

  Some of his fellow newspapermen were horrified: they thought he was transforming their beloved Forward into a lowbrow, crass publication, watering down its socialist ideals, “lower[ing] himself to the masses instead of lifting them up.” Cahan, in a favorite reply, would say. “If you want to pick a child up from the ground, you first have to bend down to him. If you don’t, how will you reach him?”

  As the Forward grew, the cost of putting it out skyrocketed as well. It desperately needed more advertising. Then at the end of the summer of 1902, workers at the American Tobacco Company, a big advertiser in the Forward, organized a strike. In solidarity, the paper refused to carry the company’s ads. The gesture put the paper even further in the red.

  Help arrived. Some “kangaroos,” people disillusioned with De Leon who hopped from one socialist party to another, had cash on hand from a failed attempt to start a new Yiddish paper. They agreed to bring their money to the Forward with one significant condition: the paper had to become “more socialistic.” This Cahan refused to do. He quit instead.

  After this resignation, Cahan had no exciting new venture to focus on. The Forward had commanded his full attention. Anna, who still viewed him as a serious fiction writer, urged him to return to his typewriter. Whether because of this disagreement or one of a more personal nature, they decided it was best if they lived separately for a while. Anna remained in the city, moving from their relatively pricy apartment to a simple furnished room to save on expenses, while Cahan decamped to the country. He had long wanted to give rural life a try, ever since his fleeting fantasy, upon his arrival in America, of living with the agricultural settlers of the Balta Am Olam.

  He chose Woodbine, New Jersey, a small town in Cape May County, at the state’s southernmost tip. Woodbine had been settled by eastern European Jews in 1891 as an agricultural community, with financial assistance from Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Cahan had always wanted to investigate the settlement, and now he began writing about it for the Commercial Advertiser. After a visit from some apologetic members of the Forward Association, he began contributing articles to the Forward as well. In April 1903, he moved to New Milford, Connecticut, and threw himself into such avid bird-watching that the locals called him the “bird-man.”

  “In the bird manual you would read (and see the picture) of types of birds that you had never seen in reality.… When you recognized one of these birds [outside], your heart would pound with joy,” Cahan wrote. This was something he had neither the time nor the inclination for in Russia, but here it made him feel more connected to his new home—to its very land as well as its people. “In my native land the birds had been strange to me. I knew their names from Russian literature, but how this or that one looked or what kind of songs they sang—of this I had no idea.”

  It was the Kishinev massacre that brought Cahan back to the Forward. On April 6–7, 1903, forty-five Jews were murdered and more than one thousand injured in a pogrom in the provincial capital of Moldova. It was the worst violence against the Russian Jewish population in more than twenty years. Upon learning of it, Cahan jumped on a train to New York and headed straight for his old office on Division Street, where he contributed to a series of editorials on the pogrom that ran in the Forward. The editorial on April 30 asserted that what happened at Kishinev was of a scale beyond anything the Jews had previously experienced and said a march was planned for May 1.

  “In the march on the first of May,” the editorial said, “lies the honest hope, the only hope, that there will come a time when no pogrom will exist in Russia any more.… For every evil Christian who has spilled Jewish blood in Kishinev, hundreds of Christian revolutionaries stand ready to let their own blood be shed in the struggle against the darkest force of all dark forces.”

  It is unclear whether Cahan was the author of this editorial, but the sentiments were unrealistic, as others understood. Theodor Herzl, born the same year as Cahan, was about to convene the Sixth Zionist Congress. His belief in the necessity of a Jewish homeland was years ahead of Cahan’s thinking, and it would be nearly fifty years before Cahan fully accepted Herzl’s view.

  Working furiously, Cahan remained in New York for a few more days, then returned to New Milford, where Anna joined him several weeks later. There they stayed for t
he spring and summer. In the weeks after the pogrom, Cahan published a long, detailed account of the event in the July issue of The North American Review, a prestigious Boston-based literary magazine. He described the vast scale of the anti-Jewish riots and how they had spread from district to district, and he highlighted the role of the Russian authorities in enabling the killings. He linked the violence against the Jews to “the stupendous growth of the revolutionary movement,” which had begun in the late 1870s, flared in the early 1880s with the assassination of Alexander II, and appeared to be gathering steam with every passing decade. He concluded:

  Russia seems to be on the eve of important events, and the danger of the present situation does not lie “in a society made up of a handful of people,” as M. von Plehve assured the correspondent of a Paris newspaper, but in a state of things under which, to borrow a phrase from an “underground” Russian leaflet, “Cossack whips are snapping, and unsheathed sabers are gleaming at every turn”; in a state of things under which the white terror of the knout, the prison cell, and the gallows gives birth to the red terror of the pistol and the dynamite bomb. It is one of those situations, in fact, to which apply the words of Emerson: “Of no use are the men who study to do exactly as was done before, who can never understand that today is a new day.”

  Typically for a Cahan piece, it sketches a broad picture and takes a forward-looking stance in favor of revolution—and explains it, in language suited to a sophisticated public journal, by citing, of all people, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Cahan, this revolution would be an American one as much as a Russian one.

  In the fall of 1903, the Cahans moved back to New York. He was immediately besieged by requests that he return as editor of the Forward, and he gave it careful consideration. His fiction writing had stalled, and his finances were in a mess. Writing about the Kishinev pogrom had reawakened both his ideological and journalistic passions. Moreover, in the past year, he had discovered that guiding a paper like the Forward was just as creative a project as writing a novel. This was a time when writers such as Cahan were using their literary powers for other purposes. Herzl had been diverted from playwriting to become a dramaturge of history. Cahan, in the process of leaving journalism, was called back to it because of a pogrom. Jewish destiny, American journalism, and the literary impulse were coming together. Once he was assured that he would have the control he wanted, he allowed his name to be put forth as a candidate for editor. His election was unanimous. At forty-three, Cahan once again took the helm of the Forward. He would stay there for the rest of his life.

  On the heels of the Kishinev pogrom, the failed revolution of 1905, and the Russo-Japanese War, Russian Jews arrived in America in record numbers. By 1905 New York was home to one million Jews; it had the biggest Jewish population of any city in the world. These immigrants, some active in the Jewish Labor Bund, swelled the membership of labor unions sponsored by the Forward. Flush with revenue, the Forward purchased a three-story building on East Broadway. The revolution of 1905 had been abortive, but it was fodder for the Forward, whose circulation soared.

  These turn-of-the-century greenhorns were quite different from those who had arrived in the first great wave of eastern European immigration in the early 1880s. Sanders points out that those earlier immigrants were by and large young single men, more often than not radicals who were uninterested in religion. Or as one character remarks in The Rise of David Levinsky, “Judaism [had] not much of a chance.” Those arriving at the turn of the century, however, came as families, and some brought their religious practices with them. These were Cahan’s new readers, and he well understood that the Forward had to reflect their concerns and interests as well.

  Soon after he returned to his desk at the Forward, Cahan learned that his mother had died, toward the end of 1903; he found out about it in a letter from his father. Cahan went with his brother, Isaac, to synagogue and “stood mutely by his side as the younger Cahan intoned Kaddish.” Another connection to his life in Europe had been severed. How he felt about it, we just don’t know. In a five-volume autobiography filled with details about his schooling, his political activism, and his socialist comrades, his family is rarely mentioned.

  Cahan was now focused on turning the Forward into a publication that would teach his new readers how to become Americans and embolden them to embrace their new country’s modernity. He defended America and its freedoms to die-hard socialists, all while denouncing capitalist exploitation of the laboring masses and advocating socialist solutions to the problem. He wrote articles about table manners, matrimonial difficulties, and baseball, the last of which was motivated by a letter he received in the summer of 1903 from a father who asked for advice in dealing with a son who wanted to play this peculiar American game. Teaching a youngster to play chess or checkers is one thing—at least that sharpens the mind. “But what kind of purpose can such a crazy game as baseball have?” the man asked. The Forward came out in favor of baseball, so long as the youngster stayed out of trouble and pursued his studies. In his article addressing the issue, Cahan cited the example of a recent Jewish Rhodes scholar. “We should especially not raise our children so that they will grow up to be foreigners in their own birthplace. An American who is not swift and strong with his hands, feet and his entire body is not considered to be an American at all.”

  Letters such as these, sent by immigrants puzzled by American life to the newspaper that they relied upon as their guide to the manners and mores of their new home, led in 1906 to the emergence of the most famous of all columns in the Forward, the Bintel Brief (“bundle of letters”). The column might not have gotten off the ground if it hadn’t been for newspaper competition.

  In 1905 Louis Miller, a founding member of the Forward staff, wrote a vigorous defense of a play by Jacob Gordin, called Taharas Hamishpocha (Family Purity). The play criticized the Orthodox newspaper Tageblatt and its readers for religious hypocrisy. Cahan disliked the play and refused to publish Miller’s defense of it. So in November Miller left the paper and helped launch a new Yiddish daily, the Warheit (Truth), which seemed to have one mission: to oppose the Forward. By then Yiddish readers could also pick up the Morgen Journal (Morning Journal), a spirited paper that was aimed at Orthodox readers.

  Cahan felt the competition nipping at his heels and was on the hunt for new features to pull in more readers. As a fiction writer, taken with Steffens’s notion of the “living novel,” he had asked readers to send in autobiographical stories for publication in the newspaper: “Send us interesting true novels,” the Forward implored its readers in December 1903. But the few that the paper received were not sufficiently compelling.

  In December 1905, Louis Miller, who might have disagreed with Cahan on certain points of socialist theory but shared a journalistic instinct, received a letter at the Warheit from a recent immigrant. The man was worried that when he could finally afford to bring his wife over from Russia, he would discover that he no longer loved her. Miller ran the letter as a feature article under the headline “Broken Heart,” and a subhead that proclaimed “Not an invented one, but a real tragedy from real life.” He invited readers to respond with suggestions for the man. They did, in droves. Soon Miller was gleefully running as a regular feature letters from readers asking for advice, together with selected reader responses.

  One can only imagine Cahan’s reaction to Miller’s success. The personal was, after all, his bailiwick. A few weeks later, he responded with a variation on Miller’s theme. Leon Gottlieb, the editorial secretary at the Forward, brought Cahan two letters to the editor “which didn’t seem suited for any particular department,” as Cahan recalled, because they were of a “personal nature rather than a communal one.” Cahan, as Gottlieb recalled, said, “It’s a Godsend.” One letter was from a “poor working woman” who believed that a neighbor had stolen her deaf son’s watch and pawned it; she had written a letter to the neighbor and asked that the Forward print it, anonymously, in hopes that
it would shame the woman into giving her the pawn ticket. “I’ll go on being the same good friend to you that I’ve been the whole three years we’ve lived on the same floor—only mail the pawn-ticket to me!” she wrote. “Give me back my bread.” The other letter was from a man who had asked another man with whom he was eating breakfast to say the Grace After Meals on behalf of both of them, “because he had a beard and was a pious Jew.” The man replied that he’d be happy to do so—for a payment of three cents, a symbolic purchase of the man’s matzoh that remained on the table. “Now I ask you,” the letter concluded, “what kind of man is that?” A third letter had come from a woman looking for advice on how to help her son stop stammering. These were just what Cahan had been looking for—true human interest stories about the lives of ordinary working people that could have come from the pages of a novel.

  Unlike Miller, Cahan decided to respond to the letters himself, rather than leave it to his readers. The letters and Cahan’s replies were printed on January 20, 1906, with the editorial note, “Among the letters the Forward receives … there are many which have a general ‘human interest,’ as American critics call it. Starting today we will select these and print them separately, with or without comments, under the name A Bintel Brief.” In response to the letter from the woman about the stolen watch, he wrote an impassioned statement about the tragic living conditions of the working class: “What a picture of workers’ misery is to be seen in this letter!” To the man who had to pay for his Grace After Meals, he expressed his hope that the “pious Jew” was simply a practical joker. And to the mother with the stammering son, he gave practical advice, for which the Bintel Brief would soon become legendary: “There are special methods for dealing with this, and specialists who concern themselves with them. But we’ll have to write in greater detail about this another time.”