The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  Whatever Cahan’s blind spots, it is hard to imagine another editor who could have sailed through Europe meeting, on the same trip, with Dreyfus, Lenin, and the Belzer Rebbe, filing warm and illuminating copy about each, only to return to America and pursue his own agenda. Cahan had emerged, at age fifty-one, as a newspaper editor in the grand mode, a personage in his own right but also genuinely inquisitive, broadly sourced, and widely sympathetic.

  Following his doctor’s advice, Cahan did stop at Karlsbad, where Anna joined him, and they enjoyed the elegant resort city. For a while Cahan felt better and a physician found him to be “as healthy as a brick building,” but then the stomach pains returned, which ended the remarkable journey on a rather sour note. The Cahans briefly visited Berlin, where they found the German socialists divided and the Vorwärts confronting the same circulation problems Cahan had been brought in to fix a decade earlier at the Forward. He and Anna left for New York at the end of August and reached home on September 4. By then the new Forward Building was towering over the Lower East Side, and Cahan’s new offices were ready for him to resume editing and begin covering the presidential election of 1912.

  The resounding defeat of incumbent president William Howard Taft and Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt by the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, was quite a news story. For Forward readers, though, the big news was that Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs received more than double the number of votes he had received in the 1908 presidential election—901,551, or 6 percent of total votes cast. The unlikely coalition of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, midwestern idealists, and hard-core leftists, a party that had been cobbled together in less than a decade, was making its mark in the American political arena.

  Not two months later the organized labor movement became embroiled in another crisis when the United Garment Workers Union called for a strike in an effort to win for the workers in the men’s garment–manufacturing industry the same workplace improvements that the workers who made ladies’ garments had won years before. “Tailors on Brink of a Complete Victory,” the Forward declared on February 16, 1913, but its prognostication was more optimistic than accurate. Only the small shops had settled; none of the big manufacturers were yet on board. Pressure was growing for a settlement, and the union feared the workers couldn’t stay on the picket line much longer. Two UGW leaders (one of whom, Max Pine, was also a Forward staffer) came to Cahan’s office a few weeks later and told him that the union wanted to settle. It wouldn’t, however, without the Forward’s support.

  The next morning’s paper carried Cahan’s response. “The Great Tailors’ Strike Settled,” the five-column headline read. “The settlement is not as good as it might have been, but for the future destiny of the tailors it is very good. The great tailors’ union has been formed.” The Forward endorsed a compromise that provided for a maximum workweek of fifty-four hours and a one-dollar increase in weekly wages.

  The rank and file were not pleased. The morning after the settlement was announced, a large crowd gathered in front of the Forward Building to protest the Forward’s support of the unacceptable compromise. Then someone yelled, “To the Warheit!” The offices of the progressive but moderate newspaper that was the Forward’s great competitor were located just a few doors away, at 153 East Broadway. The crowd moved down the block. There Louis Hollander, a leader of a radical, breakaway union known as the United Brotherhood of Tailors and a Jacob Gordin supporter who disliked Cahan intensely, emerged and exhorted the crowd to keep striking. After he spoke, the angry crowd returned to the Forward Building. Who was responsible for their misery if not Cahan’s paper? They rushed inside and began smashing windows. Forward staffers called Cahan, who was home at his Upper East Side apartment, but by the time he arrived, the mob had decamped.

  “The Warheit, the Center of the Revolution,” Louis Miller’s paper crowed the following morning. “Don’t Go to Work!” The United Garment Workers Union gave in and called for the strike to resume. It was eventually settled a few weeks later through the efforts of two young labor lawyers: Meyer London, who would go on to become the second Socialist congressman elected to the House of Representatives, and Fiorello La Guardia, who would go on to become the mayor of New York City.

  The Forward held fast. The incident threw into sharp relief the split within the union between workers from the settled shops and those hungry and tired on the picket line. “The hungry expressed satisfaction with the settlement,” Cahan contended. Later, at a union meeting held in the Forward Building, he described as “unruly children” the restive employees who had caused the damage. “Why didn’t they break the windows of other editorial offices?” he asked. “Because those others are strange to them, whereas the Forward is their own. It’s like their mother, and one makes demands upon a mother, whether they are just or not. And when a bad boy gets unruly and starts breaking dishes, it doesn’t matter. A mother forgets.” Those in attendance applauded.

  The incident, however, took a toll on Cahan. It aggravated what turned out to be a duodenal ulcer, for which he underwent surgery in March 1913. After the operation, he went to Lakewood, New Jersey, to convalesce. His recovery took several weeks, after which he “felt years younger and took juvenile pleasure out of running up the stairs two at a time.” The interval gave him an opportunity to reflect on what he had achieved. The Forward was now the third-largest morning newspaper in the city in any language, with a circulation of nearly 140,000. The same large companies that advertised in general-interest English-language newspapers—Gulden’s Mustard, White Rose Tea, the Public Bank of America, and the Atlantic Talking Machine—took out ads in the Forward, too. Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal were ahead of him in circulation, but the causes into which Cahan threw himself were his own.

  The next cause, as it turned out, involved the twenty-nine-year-old superintendent of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia. His name was Leo Frank. While Cahan was in New Jersey recovering from his operation, Frank was arrested for the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old employee of the company named Mary Phagan. The crime took place in the factory building on Saturday, April 26, 1913, sometime after Phagan had picked up the envelope with her week’s wages from Frank. Her body was discovered in the factory basement the next day, in what one historian characterized as “a condition which provided grist for the sensation-seeking press of the city.” The case became a national sensation. Frank was arrested, and during his trial nothing more than circumstantial evidence was presented and testimony was given that was later found to be perjured. Nonetheless he was convicted on August 25 by a jury that had deliberated in a room outside of which a mob was shouting for Frank’s blood. He was sentenced to hang on October 10, which was delayed to April 17, 1914, and then delayed again as the appeal process went forward.

  The Forward threw everything it had into the Frank story. Cahan went to Atlanta and personally interviewed Frank, filing from Georgia an editorial on anti-Semitism in the South. “We believe the reasons there are the same as those that have recently developed an anti-Semitic spirit among French Canadians. They are the same circumstances responsible for the present boycott of the Jews in Poland.” Jewish success in business in the South, he argued, had humiliated a class of former plantation owners who’d grown rich off slavery and now couldn’t compete. Frank, to Cahan, had expounded a different theory, having to do with the politics and pressures on the prosecutor. In some ways, Frank, a gentle soul, seemed as he sat in his cell to echo the behavior of Dreyfus, “trying harder to understand his position than to fight it,” according to Pollock’s account.

  Appeals to Georgia’s higher courts and to the U.S. Supreme Court were unsuccessful. Faced nonetheless with the overwhelming evidence that Frank’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice and with a national outcry against the verdict, Georgia governor John M. Slaton on June 21, 1915 commuted his sentence to life in prison. On the night of August 16, a lynch mob kidnapped Frank from th
e state prison in Milledgeville and hanged him from a tree in a small town about two hundred miles away.

  Cahan, in an editorial, blamed Frank’s killing on “irrational race hatred; fanatic, ingrained enmity to everything that is ‘strange’; barbaric customs of quondam slave-owners who spare no human life; in addition, corrupt police, corrupt administrations, corrupt courts.” All, he wrote, had “conspired to rob the life of a human being.” He asserted that “in no other country in the world will it be understood how Frank’s death was possible.” Long a defender of the idea that America was freer and more welcoming to Jews than other countries, and personally thanked in a note by Frank for his “many kindnesses,” Cahan was devastated by Frank’s conviction and the murder. He devoted more than two hundred pages to the Frank case in his memoir, and it clearly haunted him for the rest of his career.

  The tragedy also haunted Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. Reluctant at first to speak out about the trial, Ochs had been persuaded by Albert Lasker, the Jewish advertising giant, to launch a defense of Frank. The inability of the Times to affect the outcome of the trial and the appeals dismayed Ochs; Cahan also felt this sense of powerlessness. And Ochs was appalled by the fact that his newspaper’s involvement in the case had enraged many in the South and most likely contributed to Frank’s lynching. He retreated into a certain quietude regarding Jewish issues that would extend for much of the rest of the twentieth century, in marked contrast to Cahan and the Forward.

  During the years the Forward had spent covering the Frank case, dramatic events were convulsing Europe. The heady optimism among European socialists that Cahan had witnessed during his 1912 visit had evaporated; the continent was at war. Jean Jaurès, the former newspaperman and French Socialist leader who had introduced Cahan to Dreyfus, had been killed, murdered by a French nationalist who accused him of wanting peace with Germany.

  The Great War had not yet reached America, and in the fall of 1914, the big story for the Forward was the election of Socialist Party candidate Meyer London, after several failed attempts, to Congress from the Lower East Side’s newly reconfigured twelfth congressional district. When the news of his victory was announced to the crowd of 40,000 gathered in front of the Forward Building, a band played “La Marseillaise” and, according to the editorial in the Forward on November 4, 1914, “people fell on each other’s necks and kissed each other with tears of joy.” Both Cahan and London made speeches to the cheering crowd.†

  A young Yiddish journalist, Melech Epstein, described the scene:

  Stories of Tammany violence and fraud were flooding the neighborhood. At dusk, crowds had been moving toward Rutgers Square, facing the Forward Building. They filled Seward Park and the side streets, waiting impatiently for the election returns to be flashed on the screen in front of the Forward. About eleven o’clock the Orthodox Tageblatt, a few doors from the Forward, published an extra announcing the victory of Henry M. Goldfogle, the Tammany candidate. The crowd refused to accept the finality of this announcement, and thousands remained in the square waiting hopefully. At about 2:00 a.m., after much bickering, Tammany leaders conceded London’s election.… London was brought to the square at 4:00 a.m. to head an impromptu demonstration.… Marchers carried out straw brooms to symbolize that Tammany’s rule would be swept out.

  A few days later voters filled Madison Square Garden to celebrate. “I do not expect to work wonders in Congress,” London said at the event. “I shall, however, say a new word and I shall accomplish one thing that is not in the platform of the Socialist Party. I hope that my presence will represent an entirely different type of Jew from the kind Congress is accustomed to see.” This was in marked contrast to Hillquit, who in his 1908 campaign made clear that he would principally represent the Socialist Party and would not be “the special representative of the alleged special interests of this district”—which is to say, the Jews of the Lower East Side.

  London’s victory was soon overshadowed by the groundswell of international events. World War I was about to shatter Europe, and it would make America a great world power. The war would dwarf the local and national issues that concerned the Lower East Side residents of the twelfth congressional district; it would also push to the side Cahan’s passions for the spread of socialism throughout the world. The war presented American Jews, and the Forward, with a peculiar challenge. Americans generally sympathized with the Allies (led by Britain, France, Russia, and Italy), while American Jews tended to be more sympathetic to the Central Powers (led by Germany and Austria-Hungary). It was in Germany that Cahan, as his train passed through Breslau back in 1882, felt that “for the first time I could see the marks of a highly civilized nation.” And Germany was, after all, the enemy of the Russian czar. The socialists were generally opposed to any American involvement in the war, but they were also tugged in the direction of Germany, which was, as Pollock puts it, the “fountainhead of socialist thought and doctrine.… Even when Germany invaded Belgium and bombed Antwerp, these aggressive acts were overshadowed in Jewish minds by the Russian threat to devour Galicia, with its large Jewish population.”

  In his semiautobiographical novel Mercy of a Rude Stream, Henry Roth captures this sentiment in the scene where Ira Stigman’s immigrant mother reacts to news of the outbreak of war and reports of German brutality:

  The Great War came closer. The Huns impaled babies on their bayonets—though Mom ridiculed stories of German atrocities. “What, the Russ is better? Czar kolki iz a feiner mensch? [The bullet czar is a better person?] Who in all the world is more benighted than the Russian mujik [peasant]? Who doesn’t remember their pogroms, the Kishinev pogroms, in 1903? … More likely the Russ impaled the infant on his bayonet.”

  Cahan was neutral at first, and in this editorial, which ran in the Forward on September 3, 1914, under the headline “Barbary,” his typical condescension and literary histrionics were on full display:

  The blood curdles, the brain splits, the heart grows paralyzed from the shameful barbarism occurring in the war! The tongue turns to leather, the lips grow numb, when only one-thousandths of the shames are pronounced. Good heavens, what’s going on? Is the word “humanity” entirely a mistake? … Here in America, we cry more than anything over the barbarism of the Germans, because America is against Germany more than anything. The truth is that the worst crimes are attributed to the Germans not because they, as Germans, are the worst barbarians in nature—but because until now they have been the strongest in the war. But no side is better!

  Over time he became less neutral and eventually came out four square for the defeat of Russia, stating flatly:

  I am convinced that in the interests of progress generally and Jews specifically, a Russian defeat would be fortunate: I am convinced that it would be fortunate for all of Europe and for the entire Jewish population if Germany would take all Poland and Lithuania too, from Russia.

  The sentiment was reckless, given the support of the majority of the American public for the Allies. But no doubt reflecting his inner turmoil, Cahan was perfectly capable of issuing quite contradictory statements, as in this editorial published in late August 1914:

  If this were only a war between Germany and Russia, certainly not one socialist in the world would not desire Germany to win. Unfortunately, however, England, Belgium, and France are fighting against Germany. A German victory would weaken despotism in Russia, but would strengthen despotism as directed against Belgium, France, and England.

  Germany certainly did its best to woo American Jewry, playing on fears about the fate of Galician Jews in Austria-Hungary should they find themselves overrun by Russia. It also hoped to win the support of an imaginary consortium of international Jewish bankers. The German campaign met with some success. A New York lawyer and notable Francophile named Maurice Leon lamented, in a letter to the prominent American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Stephen Wise:

  Nearly all the public expressions that have come from the Jews in this country have been an
ti-Russian. That seems to be the Jewish way of being pro-German. Practically the entire Jewish press of the United States has adopted that policy. The leaders in that movement have for the most part more or less avowed German sympathies. All that the Jews have in the way of liberty they owe to the influence of France and England. Yet I have looked in vain for any expressions from prominent Jews in this country laying emphasis on their pro-English and pro-French sympathies. With few, very few exceptions they have all adopted the watchword given out by the international German-Jewish Money Trust, “Anti-Russian.”