by Seth Lipsky
A strike called by the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, which began on November 23, 1909, set off a wave of further strikes and galvanized the Lower East Side. At a meeting the night before at Cooper Union, where shirtwaist makers gathered to decide whether to strike, one worker, Clara Lemlich, a small thin woman who looked younger than her twenty-three years, stood up and declared, “I’m tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms.… I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now.” The hall erupted in raucous agreement, the audience rising to its feet. “Do you mean this?” asked the meeting’s chairman, Benjamin Feigenbaum, a frequent contributor to the Forward. He tried to quiet the crowd as he raised his right hand. “Will you take the old Jewish oath?” About two thousand hands shot up in agreement, and two thousand voices swore: “If turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.”†
Within days, 20,000 workers, mostly young women and predominantly Jewish, were on the picket lines. Their uprising captured the imagination of the city and even the world. A judge ordered the women back to work, avowing, “You are on strike against God and nature.” The Women’s Trade League sent the judge’s words to George Bernard Shaw, asking for his reaction. “Delightful,” the playwright cabled back. “Medieval America always in the intimate personal confidence of the Almighty.”
A reporter covering the strike for The New York Sun filed this description of one of the picket lines: “The girls, headed by teenage Clara Lemlich, described by union organizers as a ‘pint of trouble for the bosses,’ began singing Italian and Russian working-class songs as they paced in twos before the factory door. Of a sudden, around the corner came a dozen tough-looking customers, for whom the union label ‘gorillas’ seemed well-chosen. ‘Stand fast, girls,’ called Clara, and then the thugs rushed the line, knocking Clara to her knees.”
The strike dragged on for months, until a settlement was finally reached in February 1910. The union didn’t get all it wanted—and some shops had already settled on their own—but it had won a moral victory. As the Forward put it: “Stay firmly together, sisters and brothers! Respect all the union signs and labels as you do the eyes in your head.… Hurrah for our victorious gigantic army of the multitudes!” Whatever questions there had been about the viability of Jewish-dominated unions were now largely erased.‡
Next came the cloak makers’ strike, which lasted ten weeks, between July and September 1910, during which 50,000 cloak makers, nearly all men, went out on strike. The Forward emerged as the strikers’ defender and launched a fund for them. The paper itself donated $2,000 and by mid-August it announced that contributions pouring in from throughout the country had increased the pot to $16,000. The Manufacturers Association signed a nineteen-point contract, negotiated by the Boston attorney Louis Brandeis, that made the union representative, attorney Meyer London, who had twice run unsuccessfully for Congress, one of the most famous socialists in America. Among the improved working conditions that the union won were a six-day workweek and paid holidays. The Forward proudly proclaimed (it was actually evident to all) that it had played a central role in the cloak makers’ victory. The Protocols of Peace, as the agreement was known, was the biggest achievement to date for the New York labor movement, and it would serve as a model for labor contracts for years to come. Hundreds of thousands joined in a victory march from Washington Square all the way up to Columbus Circle.
Two months later, on November 12, 1910, the Forward threw Cahan a belated fiftieth birthday party at Carnegie Hall. The paper’s circulation had passed the 100,000 mark, and there was plenty to celebrate. The hall was packed. The Forward reported that thousands had to be turned away. Cahan was escorted in not only by Morris Hillquit and Lincoln Steffens but also by Charles Edward Russell, who had just run on the Socialist Party line for governor of New York, and by the lexicographer Alexander Harkavy. When Cahan was presented to the crowd, a forty-piece orchestra launched into La Marseillaise, the French national anthem that had become over time the anthem of the international revolutionary movement as well. The audience leaped to its feet to give him a standing ovation.
Many speeches extolled the honoree, including one by Hillquit:
At his birth Nature said to Cahan: “I have given you the ability to speak, to write, to be active. If you choose, you can be rich, you can become a businessman.” … But Cahan replied: “Wealth means to live without effort, from the hard labor of others. That is not for me. I want a life of activity, a life of spiritual work, a life of dedication to the oppressed masses, a life of truly useful work for my fellow man.” And Cahan kept his word.
“A fifty-year-old smiling public man” is how Ronald Sanders describes Cahan at this point in his life (a play on William Butler Yeats’s description of himself as “a sixty-year-old smiling public man”§), a poet turned politician full of private longing and outward calm. Cahan’s “outer life had become the expression of two generations of Jewish immigrants in America, their beacon and guide,” Sanders continues. “Who could deny that this destiny was the projection of something that had risen from deep within himself? And yet something remained locked within, as ineradicable as it was inexpressible, which insisted that all this activity, all this success, all this mastery of an American reality, was false, a violation of its own hidden truth.”
The day after the big event at Carnegie Hall, the Forward began advertising Cahan’s new history of the United States—the subscription premium that he and Schlessinger had cooked up several years earlier. Two volumes were eventually published, covering Columbus’s voyage and the early years of European presence on the North American continent, seeing them through a Marxist prism that strikes the contemporary reader as rather quaint. What is significant about Cahan’s historical account is how it reflects his enthusiasm for the idea of America and what it stands for. As Leon Wexelstein‖ wrote about Cahan in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury: “Above all, he kept pounding into the minds of his readers the fact that Americans were perfectly human.… Constantly he admonished Jewish mothers to steer clear of any fright that their children might become Americanized. There was nothing to fear, he said, for it was a good thing.”
Only four months later, at approximately 4:40 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, 1911, some five hundred employees, mostly young women ranging in age from midteens to midtwenties and from Jewish and Italian immigrant families, were preparing to leave the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of the city’s largest sweatshops. The company had refused to sign on to the agreement that ended the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union strike of 1909. It occupied the top three floors of a relatively new ten-story building at the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, one block east of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. As hundreds of young workers were collecting their belongings and getting into their coats, a fire broke out on the eighth floor, quickly setting the wood-frame interior and masses of fabric ablaze and turning that floor and the two above it into an inferno. Some workers were able to make it down the stairs and the elevators, but the elevators quickly stopped functioning because of the heat and flames, and some stairways, which the owners had locked as a way to guard against employee theft, were inaccessible. The single fire escape buckled from the crush of workers and the heat of the fire. Firemen arrived, but their hoses reached only to the seventh floor; their ladders, only to the sixth. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers—129 women and 17 men—had been either burned or suffocated to death, or had jumped out of the windows to their deaths in a desperate attempt to save themselves.
“One girl after another fell, like shot birds, from above, from the burning floors,” the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote in the Forward’s special edition, published that night.
The men held out a longer time, enveloped in flames. And when they could hold out no longer, they jumped, too. Below, horrified and weeping, stood thousands of workers from the surrounding factories. They watched moving, terrible, unforgetta
ble scenes. At one window on the eighth floor appeared a young man with a girl. He was holding her tightly by the hand. Behind them the red flames could be seen. The young man lovingly wrapped his arms around the girl and held her to him a moment, kissed her, and then let her go.… A moment later he leaped after her, and his body landed next to hers. Both were dead.…
It took a whole hour before the firemen could enter the burning building, and by then it was all over. The sidewalks were full of dead and wounded, and no one could be seen at the windows any longer.
“The Morgue Is Full of Our Dead,” read the Forward’s banner headline. But it was Cahan’s words, published in the Forward two days after the fire, that seared: “The entire neighborhood is sitting shiva. Every heart is torn in mourning. Who is the Angel of Death? Who is the thug? Who is the mass murderer? Must we again say it is that gluttonous ravager of humans—capital?! … The blood of our victims screams out at all of us. The souls of our burned ones demand we must compel our cloistered government to fulfill its duty.”
A mass funeral was held a week later, on April 5. “Come and pay your last respects to our dead,” the Forward wrote. “Every union man with his trade, with his union.” One hundred thousand people did so, taking to the streets of the Lower East Side in the rain.
* * *
* I. J. Singer died in 1944, at age fifty.
† A contemporary variant on the famous verse from Psalms 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its power.”
‡ Clara Lemlich eventually betrayed the free labor union movement and joined the Communists.
§ Yeats’s line is from his poem “Among School Children.”
‖ Leon Wexelstein was the father of the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone.
9
On April 28, 1912, Cahan and Anna sailed for Europe aboard the SS George Washington.* The ostensible reason for their trip was that Cahan wished to consult a physician in Vienna for an ulcer that had become almost unbearably painful. But he had other plans for their European trip as well. He had just laid the cornerstone for the Forward’s new home at 173–75 East Broadway, a ten-story Beaux Arts building that Sanders described as seeming “to bestride the Lower East Side like a colossus.” It would house not only the editorial offices but also, on the top floor, the composing room, where the linotype machines and the printing presses churned out the paper every day. The bottom floors had space for a meeting hall with a thousand-person capacity and for the headquarters of several unions and fraternal organizations. On the front of the building, just above the second floor, a series of reliefs featured the likenesses of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Friedrich Adler. At the top of the building, in large letters, the paper’s name appeared, an advertisement that could be seen from blocks away and that would capture the imagination of American Jews for generations thereafter. Alfred Kazin, in his memoir A Walker in the City, writes about crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan as a young man, where “only the electric sign of the Jewish Daily Forward, burning high over the tenements of the East Side, suddenly stilled the riot in my heart.”
At around this time the Forward’s circulation hit 120,000. The socialist newspaper devoted to the interests of working-class American Jews had succeeded beyond Cahan’s most optimistic dreams, and he arrived in Europe as a journalistic celebrity, with access to the most notable figures of the day, whom he planned to interview for his readers. Today, when the Internet allows anyone to post information online, it’s difficult to imagine a time when newspaper journalism mattered and when those who produced it were well known not only in their own countries but also across the globe. It was a world brimming with ideas and energy, a vital, complicated world that within just a few years would be thrown into the turmoil of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the civil war between Red and White Russians.
Cahan was thrilled to discover that the Paris that had so charmed him nineteen years earlier as a delegate to the Socialist International had maintained its allure. He met with many old friends and made some new ones, notably the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, who had been, as editor of La Petite République, one of the defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Alsatian Jewish artillery officer who had been framed by anti-Semitic fellow officers, falsely accused of offering military secrets to the German embassy in Paris, court-martialed, convicted of treason, and, in 1895, publicly humiliated.
Through Jaurès, Cahan arranged to meet with Dreyfus himself. Ever the newspaperman, he clearly comprehended the possibilities for the interview. Dreyfus had spent almost five years in prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana before he was pardoned in 1899, after a huge public outcry, and he had not been fully exonerated until 1906. The Dreyfus affair—which included the public battles between those who contended that Dreyfus was innocent and those who blamed him and the Jews for France’s ills—had torn the country apart and received worldwide attention.
Cahan had been at the Commercial Advertiser when the verdict was brought in. Writing about it years later in the Forward, he recalled sitting, “restless and unsettled,” near the telegraph editor. “Finally, one of the two telegraph operators gave the telegraph editor a yellow piece of paper upon which he had typed out the last of the dispatches from Rennes. The telegraph editor read it over and with an empathic expression passed me the piece of paper. The verdict was ‘guilty,’ but with a recommendation for ‘mercy,’ and the sentence was ten years imprisonment.”
Most of Cahan’s Gentile coworkers knew little of the trial, Cahan recalled, but for Jews it was a watershed event, a kind of public martyrdom. “ ‘You probably want to be with your Jewish friends,’ Steffens said to me. I left for Herrick’s Café at 141 Division Street, where our comrades gathered.” Now, thirteen years later, Cahan would be meeting the man at the center of the storm, a hero to millions of Jews around the world.
Cahan was “inexplicably nervous,” he recalled, when he showed up at the door of the second-floor apartment in which Dreyfus, who had been reinstated as a major in the French army in 1906 and was by this time a colonel, lived. The gray-haired gentleman who greeted him looked nothing like the serious young officer depicted in the famous 1894 portrait. He was warm and friendly in person, and a “pleasant, almost childish smile” appeared on his face as he and Cahan conversed in German. Dreyfus “viewed himself as merely a symbol,” Theodore Pollock writes in his biography of Cahan. “The important victory in his vindication, he said, had been the separation of Church and State in France.” He felt there was “less anti-Semitism in the France of 1912 than in the other European countries.” A dazzled Cahan spent two hours with Dreyfus, who was happy to provide him with the autographed picture he requested. The visit was a classic example of an aspect of newspaper life that Cahan had come to enjoy.
Cahan had by this time become a great editor, though his great struggle against Communism lay in the future. At the same time he was already becoming something of an anachronism, for he had not yet grasped the real meaning of the Dreyfus affair. The one who had was Theodor Herzl, the newspaperman who had witnessed Dreyfus’s public humiliation by the French military back in 1895, following his conviction. By the time Cahan met Dreyfus, Herzl had been dead for eight years, having launched the greatest movement in the history of postbiblical Judaism.
In Vienna, Cahan looked up Victor Adler, the founder of Austria’s socialist movement, who was then in the midst of challenging a proposal by the government to enlarge the army. From Vienna, Anna traveled alone to visit her family in Kiev, while Cahan went to Budapest and then back to Vienna, where he managed to glimpse Leon Trotsky, from a distance, sitting in a café. The two men would not actually meet until Trotsky visited New York in 1917 and paid him a courtesy call. Cahan did meet with Israel Zangwill, the British writer whose play The Melting Pot had been a great success in America a few years earlier. Zangwill was also politically active in Jewish issues, a supporter of Theodor Herzl but far from a pure Zionist. In 1905, tw
o years after the Kishinev pogrom, feeling that the need for a Jewish homeland had become urgent, Zangwill had cofounded the Jewish Territorial Organization, whose purpose was to find land outside Palestine on which to establish a self-governing Jewish colony. Between 1907 and 1914, ten thousand Jews immigrated to Texas as part of the organization’s Galveston Plan, largely funded by the American industrialist Jacob Schiff. Cahan met Zangwill in Vienna, where the writer was attending a conference of territorialists. There Cahan also met the doctor he’d come to Europe to consult. The doctor found nothing seriously wrong with him but indicated that a trip to the baths at Karlsbad wouldn’t hurt.
From Vienna, Cahan went alone to Cracow, where, he had heard, Lenin was living incognito on the outskirts of town. Cahan was quickly able to set up a visit and soon found himself in the presence of the revolutionary leader. He was surprised that a man known for ruthlessness had such an outwardly kind appearance. Lenin knew a great deal about the American economy, but Cahan filled him in on the social and political scene, and Lenin urged him to send the latest American census figures once he returned to New York. In parting, Lenin presented Cahan with copies of Pravda, which he had just started editing from Crakow—one editor proudly showing off his product to another.
Cahan’s next stop was Lemberg, near Brody, where he had stayed for three weeks before his fateful departure from Russia thirty years earlier. He was startled by the signs of progress, including new buildings, that he found in Brody. He located his old quarters but not the family of his landlady. “When I had immigrated to America,” he wrote in his memoir, “I pictured a fifty-two-year-old as an old man, and thirty years appeared to be an eternity. Here I was—the old man!” Stricken with homesickness, he realized that “home” was now America.
There was one last visit to be made: to Belz, to interview the most renowned Hasidic figure of the time, the Belzer Rebbe. When Cahan arrived at the rebbe’s home, the entrance to his study was crowded with Hasidim who had been waiting for hours for a brief word with the rebbe, or even just a quick glimpse of the sage, but Cahan was ushered right in. The editor pressed the rebbe on political questions and found him better informed than he had expected. The rebbe was dismissive of political Zionism: he did not believe that the Zionists could be sufficiently pious, and he opposed their attempts to recruit the Jews of Austria-Hungary to their cause, which only stirred them up. “Today,” he told Cahan, “our politics is that Jews must hold their heads bowed.” The rebbe was interested in America and praised former president Theodore Roosevelt, well known as a philo-semite, as a “righteous man,” but he worried aloud about the state of Jewish souls in the United States, fearing that they were not being religiously nurtured. Cahan brought up the subject of unions, trying to gauge the rebbe’s reaction to their rise in America, but he deftly evaded the subject. The Rebbe spoke dismissively of newspapers, gesturing to his bookcases filled with religious works and telling Cahan that “when whole days are spent on such difficult subjects, the lesser things have no value.” According to Pollock, Cahan felt himself in the presence of a great personality; after spending an hour with the rebbe, the editor had to elbow his way out the door, just as he had had to elbow his way in.