by Seth Lipsky
By the end of the month, Cahan was receiving enough mail to run the Bintel Brief feature daily. Not all the letters concerned domestic issues. One early letter seems almost to have been written by a young Abraham Cahan:
Permit me to convey my shattered feelings in our workers’ paper. I’m still a greenhorn in America … and now I can’t forgive myself for being here. My head and heart grow numb whenever I read in your paper that thousands of workers are standing on the barricades in Russia fighting for their lives.… I know that I’ve committed a crime, that I’m a deserter, that I’ve run away from the field of battle. Oh, how I would like to stand alongside my brothers again in the war!… But the great ocean does not permit us to hurry to the scene without a ticket … and I have no money for the journey.… I beg of you, dear editor, answer me, what should I do?
Cahan’s reply was succinct: “Well, we can give no better advice than to fight right here in America for a social order in which a man wouldn’t have to work like a mule for five dollars a week.” The young Cahan had been so bedazzled by revolutionary socialism that he “walked in a daze as one newly in love”; he was now becoming a social democrat. Whatever struggles were going on within Cahan, in the Bintel Brief column he was crisp and to the point: the important struggle today was for unionization here in America, not for revolution on the Russian barricades.
Many of the Bintel Brief letters came from Jewish mothers and wives who sounded thrilled to know that the paper they trusted would offer them advice on deeply personal issues that they couldn’t discuss with their friends. “I must write to you about my situation because I see no other way than through your newspaper,” begins one typical letter. “I am one of those women whose husbands spend less time with them than they spend hanging around in the barber shop. I am certainly not the kind who stays in the grocery store all day.”
Readers rushed to read about themselves and their neighbors in the paper, and the Bintel Brief quickly became the newspaper’s most-read and best-known column. The circulation of the Forward soared to more than 52,000 by the end of 1906. But the letters were more than a circulation-driving stunt. They gave the paper an organic life, a collaborative interactivity that anticipated by just about a century the phenomenon of social media, in which new content is created by people who started out as readers of existing content. The column also performed an important public service, and occasionally created some high drama. Through the Bintel Brief, mothers were able to locate children whom they hadn’t seen for more than twenty years. Twice, engaged couples discovered through the Bintel Brief that they were, in fact, sister and brother. “Many of these encounters took place in the Forverts editorial offices,” Cahan recalled. “And often, when the readers knew in advance that a mother and son who had not seen each other for many years were to be reunited, a crowd would be waiting on the street near our building in order to watch the happy mother with her newly found child.”
In May 1906, at a conference of Jewish socialist organizations, those who opposed Cahan’s editorial direction confronted him on it. Three hundred people crammed into a basement hall on East Fourth Street to hear the criticism and to hear Cahan defend the new Forward. Having a big crowd played to his strengths; warming up, he poked fun at his rivals, calling them pedestrian and uninspired, “comparing their litany to the tune of a Salvation Army Band.” The audience laughed, and no one seemed surprised when the resolution condemning Cahan’s policies didn’t muster enough votes to pass. Cahan refused to be intimidated, but throughout his career he was dogged by charges that he had diluted his socialist principles for the tawdry and the titillating. In one cartoon that appeared in a competing paper, Cahan calls Karl Marx an old geezer and forces him to carry off his socialist cornerstone, which is then replaced by boxes filled with Bintel Briefs.
8
Even as Cahan was flush with the success of the Forward, he felt the pull of fiction. He had planned a vast novel—which he had intended to call The Chasm—about the exodus of the Jews from Russia to America and the gulf between them and the German Jews who had arrived decades earlier. Two anonymous columns in The Bookman noted Cahan’s plans, but nothing materialized. Cahan did, during this period, bring out his longest book to date. The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia, which was published in 1905 by A. S. Barnes & Company and ran to 430 pages, was set in Russia during the years leading up to the assassination of Alexander II; it imagines a young Russian prince who falls in love with a Jewish revolutionary and joins the cause. The two protagonists are last seen, or heard, tapping notes to each other on the walls of the prison into which the czarist government has cast them.
The Times, in a favorable review, concluded that Cahan hadn’t intended to tell a story so much as to “draw a graphic picture of conditions.” Cahan had given a long, detailed narration of a pogrom, ending it with a bitter, sardonic paragraph of Jewish shame. He described the moonlight over the ransacked Jewish quarter, where the occasional house that remained standing belonged to a Christian. Officers on horseback “were moving about musingly, the hoofs of their horses silenced by layers of down” from the gutted quilts of the ghetto. “Seated on empty boxes and barrels, their fingers gripping new accordions, their eyes raised to the moon, a company of rioters on Little Market were playing and singing a melancholy, doleful tune. The Jews were in their hiding places.”
Although Cahan had great insight into the concerns and needs of his fellow Russian Jewish immigrants, he was not without a capacity for error. On July 9, 1904, five days after the death of Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, the Forward published an editorial that was certainly respectful of Dr. Herzl but was also condescending toward and dismissive of the Zionist cause. “Does the Zionist idea have any reality to it?” the editorial asked. “Can one agree with them while they have a blunt, impractical idea?” The editorial asserted that such questions were “outside our sphere here.” The question “is not if their idea is our idea, but if they are serious, if they hold this idea of theirs dear.” The Forward opined that they did, however tragically wrongheaded they were. “We deplore how some pure inspiration is spent on such empty things, but the inspired themselves we love and respect.”
The Forward noted that Zionists themselves had often criticized Herzl. “About socialists,” it added, “there is nothing to say, because the entire concept of Zionism is child’s play to them.… We, the socialists, doff our hats as the coffin passes by, with respect to the departed as a person, as a devoted leader of a movement, regardless of what we feel and think of the movement itself.”
Cahan would eventually change his opinion about Zionism, but in the first decade of the twentieth century, his attention was largely focused on local politics and the effort to elect a Socialist to Congress. In 1904 the Forward had supported Eugene V. Debs for president on the Socialist Party ticket. Debs received more than 400,000 votes, which was almost 3 percent of the votes cast. In 1906 Cahan threw the newspaper into the effort to elect the socialist Morris Hillquit to Congress from New York’s ninth district, which included the heavily Jewish Lower East Side. Hillquit, whom Cahan knew from his union-organizing days (he had helped establish the United Hebrew Trades), had cofounded the Socialist Party of America with Debs in 1901. On election night, by one account, 60,000 people jammed into Seward Park in front of the Forward Building to watch the election results be projected onto a white sheet via a stereopticon from inside the newspaper’s offices. Throughout the evening, updated information was interspersed with anti–Tammany Hall cartoons that, Cahan biographer Theodore Pollock noted, were “lustily applauded.” But this enthusiasm did not translate into electoral victory. Hillquit received only 3,616 votes, fewer than half of the 7,265 cast for Tammany Hall’s candidate, Henry Goldfogle. The Republican candidate came in a distant third, with 2,733 votes.
While the ideas and ideals of socialism were popular among Jewish immigrants, the party itself remained organizationally and institutionally weak. Jewish lab
orers often had to exert herculean efforts just to hold down a job and put food on the table; they seldom had time left over to devote to party politics and neighborhood organizing. And there were larger issues as well. “Modern Jewish life has been characterized by a mixture of idealism and skepticism,” Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers. “The fervor for socialist revolution could be very high among some of the immigrants, yet this fervor was often undercut by a nagging pessimism as to the possibilities of any Jewish politics. Even if the entire Jewish working class were converted to socialism tomorrow, how would that change anything fundamentally in the country?”
Anti-Semitism, however muted, still lurked as an issue for the Socialist Party. In 1901 the labor historian John Commons posed the question of whether Jews were constitutionally disinclined to unionism. “The Jew’s conception of a labor organization is that of a tradesman rather than that of a workman,” he wrote in that year’s Industrial Commission report.
Many Socialists were at pains to distance themselves from the particularities of the Lower East Side and ally themselves with the movement at large. When Hillquit ran again for Congress in 1908, he declared at a rally, “The interests of the workingmen of the Ninth District are entirely identical with those of the workingmen of the rest of the country, and if elected to Congress, I will not consider myself the special representative of the alleged special interests of this district, but the representative of the Socialist Party.” Gradually the Socialist Party began to gain traction, particularly in New York and Milwaukee, where, in 1910, Victor Berger was the first Socialist to be elected to Congress. In 1900 fewer than 100,000 votes had been cast for the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs; a dozen years later, almost one million people voted for him, representing 6 percent of all votes cast.
Hillquit’s and Debs’s repeated defeats did not dampen Cahan’s enthusiasm for the Socialist Party and only increased his scorn for the major parties and their candidates. “They don’t begin to ask, ‘What is better for the people?’ ” he wrote during the presidential campaign of 1908, which pitted the incumbent Republican William Howard Taft against the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan. “The supreme question with them is: ‘How will we win most quickly.’ ” Bryan’s formal nomination by the Democratic Party—the third time the party ran him for president—elicited from Cahan a comment that dripped with sarcasm. “Thank God!” he wrote. “A stone has been rolled off our hearts.”
In one article, Cahan described a concession in a Broadway theater in which two wax figures, one of Taft, the other of Bryan, were hooked up to devices that played their voices. As one left the theater with their words ricocheting in one’s brain, Cahan wrote, “your mind’s eye travels to the West, where a third presidential candidate travels from town to town.… His words come from a human heart … words of light, truth and hope! The name of this third man is Eugene V. Debs.” For all that, however, Debs did only marginally better in 1908 than he had done in 1904. So the Forward’s election coverage stressed gains made by Socialists in local elections in New York.
Cahan’s controversial introduction of the techniques of yellow journalism, which he had learned from his contemporaries William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, kept the Forward’s circulation numbers climbing. “300 People Burned in a Theater”; “Pittsburgh Millionaire, Bachelor, Gets 2 Wives After Death”; “8 Bandits Ravish Girl in Mid-day on Washington Street”; “70-Year-Old-Worker Takes Job and Drops Dead”; “Wife and Mother Blamed in His Suicide”; “She Burned Out Her Husband’s Eye with Carbolic Acid” were typical Forward headlines from that period.
If the yellow streak in Cahan’s journalism brought him much criticism in socialist circles, he ran these stories alongside serious, thought-provoking editorials, including one extolling Abraham Lincoln’s ideas on labor (which were later emblazoned on a wall in the lobby of the Amalgamated Bank, a labor-backed institution on Union Square), and another dilating on Charles Darwin’s contributions to the study of nature, sociology, and philosophy. Cahan also brought the world of literature to his readers, publishing fiction by, among others, Sholem Asch and Avrom Reisen, two leading Yiddish writers.
In 1921 Cahan would hire Israel Joshua Singer as his Warsaw correspondent and later send him east to report firsthand on life in the Soviet Union. Though he is overshadowed today by his famous younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, I. J. Singer was the better-known sibling during his short life.* His wildly popular novel The Brothers Ashkenazi was first serialized in the Forward and was published in English by Alfred A. Knopf in 1936, soaring onto the same New York Times best-seller list as Gone with the Wind. I. J. Singer joined the staff of the Forward when he arrived in America in 1934, and when his brother arrived in 1935, he helped him get a job there, too. In 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer would win the Nobel Prize in Literature for work that first appeared in the Forward’s pages.
While Cahan was proud of the literary fiction he published, the overall tone of the Forward was intentionally folksy and colloquial. He instructed his writers to write the way they spoke, even if that meant including the English words (such as boy or the popular diminutive boychick) that Lower East Side residents used in Yiddish conversation. Like those who spoke and read the language, Yiddish was being assimilated into the English-speaking culture. His openness to English words left Cahan open to the charge, throughout his career, that although he created the most successful Yiddish newspaper in history, he simultaneously killed the language.
Adolph Held, a Forward business manager who doubled for a time as news editor, described editing copy during World War I.
We used to write that one side had advanced ten kilometers and another retreated ten kilometers. One day Cahan came in and said to me, “Held, does your mother know what kilometers are?” I answered, “I doubt it, my father has to read the paper aloud to her.”
“All right,” he said, “so when you write about kilometers and they come to that line, she can’t go any further.… From now on I’ll come in every day and write a column of war news without all those hard words, so your mother can understand what’s happening in the world.”
Cahan could be ruthless with his blue pencil, excising language he didn’t like and people with whom he was feuding. In the fall of 1907 he relaunched his public battle with the playwright Jacob Gordin, criticizing his latest theatrical effort in the Forward. Gordin in turn denounced Cahan from the stage. Then Cahan decided to run a several-week-long series in the Forward titled “Gordin’s Place as a Yiddish Playwright,” attacking his plays, accusing him of plagiarism, and reprinting anti-Gordin articles from European newspapers. It was almost as though Cahan had some sort of personal vendetta against the man. His timing was spectacularly bad: unknown to most, Gordin was dying of cancer. When the playwright died in April 1909, Cahan ran a respectful front-page obituary bordered in black, but his attacks on Gordin were not soon forgotten.
While Cahan’s personal style sometimes left much to be desired, it didn’t seem to affect the fortunes of his newspaper. His formula for running a successful Yiddish newspaper, as articulated in a 1920 advertising flyer, was “Jewish in WORD—American in THOUGHT.” It seemed to be working. Within a decade of Cahan’s assuming the editorship, the Forward emerged as the largest Jewish newspaper in the world. In May 1909 it announced on its front page that it had reached a circulation of 83,474, which was well above English-language newspapers such as the Baltimore American and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the same issue, Cahan wrote an editorial with the headline “Our One-Quarter-of-a-Million Readers,” claiming that because each copy of the Forward was read, on average, by three people, the true circulation could be considered about a quarter of a million.
The Forward’s manager, Benjamin Schlesinger, was a shrewd businessman in addition to being a labor leader. He had been one of the founders and was a former president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and his position at the Forward strengthened the ties between the paper an
d the labor movement. It was Schlesinger’s idea to attract new subscribers by offering premiums. The first was a Yiddish-English dictionary, compiled by Alexander Harkavy, a well-known lexicographer. The uptick of subscriptions made the dictionaries disappear quickly. For the second premium, Schlesinger convinced Cahan that a Yiddish-language history of the United States was in order, adding that Cahan was just the man to write it.
Around this time, the Socialist Party sent out a survey to its members. The Forward published some of the results, including the answer to the question “How did you become a socialist?” The largest number of respondents, 39 percent, attributed their political awakening to one source: newspapers. Cahan’s critics might say what they wished about his so-called watered-down socialism, but it was working to popularize the idea.
In January 1909 Cahan received a letter from Colorado with the news that his brother, Isaac, had succumbed to tuberculosis. In his autobiography, Cahan mentions the death of his sole living relative almost in passing. It’s difficult to know what effect it had on him or how hard he worked to shut out the past. It would have been easy enough to bury himself in work. The Forward was covering—and in many cases, leading or mediating—strikes by unions of bakers, children’s jacket makers, pants makers, retail clerks, ladies’ shirtwaist (blouse) makers, and cap makers. Cahan exhorted his readers to fulfill their “holy duty” and tell their grocers that they should not attempt to “swindle” them by selling them “scab bread for union bread.” One bakery after another capitulated, and by February 1910 there were only one hundred nonunion bakers in the city.