The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  Astonishing as it may seem to us today, as late as 1915, one year into the war, Cahan accepted an invitation from the German Press Office to lead a delegation of journalists to Germany, from which he sent back favorable dispatches to the Forward’s readers. Cosponsor of the junket was Philipp Scheidemann, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party and a regular contributor to the Forward.‡ When Cahan returned home from the “Mecca of socialism,” he told a meeting of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that, whatever one might say with respect to German militarism, German socialism was the hope of the world.

  As the war in Europe intensified and spread, it rent the Lower East Side. Louis Miller threw the Warheit’s support behind England and France, only to have his furious readers burn piles of the newspaper in the streets. By 1915 Miller was forced out of the Warheit, replaced by an ex-staffer of the Forward, Isaac Gonikman, who was prepared to place the Warheit firmly behind Germany.

  The Forward had started out in the pro-German camp. Even after a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915, Cahan hung on, hectoring President Wilson to “adopt Germany’s proposal that he forbid Americans to travel on vessels carrying munitions.” He acknowledged that “the principle of freedom of the seas would suffer. But a human life is more important than anything else. Man was not created for a principle; principles were created for men.”

  Cahan’s quixotic pro-German campaign was brought to a halt early in 1917, with America on the verge of entering the war on the side of the Allies. He received a letter from the office of the U.S. Postmaster General saying that if the Forward continued to criticize the government’s support for the Allies, it would lose its second-class postage rates. Cahan unrepentantly replied that though the paper would “not renounce its convictions,” it “would desist from publishing them.” Socialists, he declared, “obey the law even if they disagree with it.”

  For all his experience, sagacity, and idealism, events in Europe were converging to make Cahan and the international socialist movement look like fools. In England, Belgium, Russia, Austria, and France, the socialists swung behind their governments’ nationalistic policies and acted firmly in their countries’ national interests. In an interview Cahan gave to The New York Call, he reflected ruefully on this phenomenon.

  It is a fact, and we may as well look it full in the face, that the French socialist is, in the horrifying circumstances of the war, a Frenchman first and a Socialist afterwards, if at all, just as the German Socialist is a German first. In time of peace many of these men, animated by their class feeling at home, were Socialists to the core and capable of dying for their ideals. But no sooner did they hear the bugle call and scented danger for their country than their Socialist sentiments were suspended and they became Frenchmen or German like their fellow countrymen of the dominating classes. There is no such thing as class consciousness in the trenches.

  Pollock insists that “at no time could Cahan’s motives be suspect” and quotes Cahan as having written, in late 1914: “If there should be an actual threat of a European monarchy attacking the United States we all would fight for America with our hearts and soul … because America has the freest institutions in the world. That would be a real struggle for freedom.”

  Cahan was by no means the only great editor to be made to seem naïve by the war; nor was it only editors of leftist publications who had this experience. On August 2, 1914, the Chicago Tribune, owned by Colonel Robert McCormick, issued one of the most famous editorials of all time, “The Twilight of the Kings,” suggesting that the ordinary man had no stake in this war:

  Before establishing hell on earth, the pietistic kings commend their subjects to God. Seek the Lord’s sanction for the devil’s work.

  “And now I commend you to God,” said the Kaiser from his balcony to the people in the street. “Go to church and kneel before God and pray for his help for your gallant army.”

  Pray that a farmer dragged from a Saxon field shall be speedier with a bayonet thrust than a winemaker taken from his vines in the Aube; that a Berlin lawyer shall be steadier with a rifle than a Moscow merchant; that a machine gun manned by Heidelberg students shall not jam and that one worked by Paris carpenters shall.

  Pray that a Bavarian hop grower, armed in a quarrel in which he has no heat, shall outmarch a wheat grower from Poltava; that Cossacks from the Don shall be lured into barbed wire entanglements and caught by masked guns; that an innkeeper of Salzburg shall blow the head off a baker from the Loire.

  “Go to church and pray for help”—that the hell shall be hotter in innocent Ardennes than it is in equally innocent Hessen; that it shall be hotter in innocent Kovno than in equally innocent Posen.

  The editorial saw the villains as monarchies, rather than capitalists, and ended with the famous peroration, “This is the twilight of the kings. Western Europe of the people may be caught in this debacle, but never again. Eastern Europe of the kings will be remade and the name of God shall not give grace to a hundred square miles of broken bodies.… The republic marches east.”

  What finally brought American socialists, including Cahan, into the Allied camp was the February Revolution, which took place in Russia in March 1917. It resulted in the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the establishment of a Provisional Government by a coalition of liberals and socialists led by Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist member of the Russian Duma. “That which has long been awaited has finally come,” the Forward joyously proclaimed on March 16. “A free Russian people, a free Jewish people in Russia! Is this a dream?” Once the revolution broke out, the newspaper’s position on the war underwent an immediate, 180-degree change. “As if by magic,” wrote Forward columnist “B. Razman” (Ben-Zion Hoffman),

  the debates and discussions on the Jewish street regarding whom the Jews should sympathize with in the present war have disappeared. There is nothing more to discuss. It is now clear where sympathies lie. Feelings dictate, reason dictates that a victory for present-day Germany would be a threat to the Russian Revolution and dangerous for democracy in Europe.

  In fact, there was one more thing to discuss in 1917. On November 2 of that year, the British foreign secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, sent a letter to Baron Walter Rothschild, which Rothschild would send on to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It famously stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The declaration was partly the result of the genuine Christian Zionism of men like Balfour and Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, who found the notion of a Jewish return to their historic, biblical homeland religiously stirring.§ But it was also the result of shrewd diplomacy by Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born British Zionist and chemist who had helped the British war effort by coming up with an efficient way of producing acetone, a key ingredient in the cordite explosives essential to the British war effort. The British, and to a lesser extent the Germans, saw numerous advantages in promising the Jewish people a return to their ancient homeland. By making a declaration in favor of the Zionist movement, Balfour argued, “we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.” Sir Mark Sykes insisted that “the friendship of the Jews of the World” was critical to winning the war, and that “with Great Jewry against us, there’s no possibility” of victory. Weizmann was perfectly happy to encourage the British in this belief.

  The Balfour Declaration, as it came to be known, was the most important letter in modern history supporting the Jews as a people. Yet it was not without controversy within Jewish communities throughout the world. Many, including Cahan, failed to grasp its moral dimension and the practical possibilities that it opened up. He greeted it with an editorial that was full of condescension. Entitled “The ‘Victory’ of Zionism and the Socialist Enlightenment of the Masses,” it asserted that the “mighty change that socialist enlightenment has brought about in the
psychology of the Jewish masses” has “protected them from the mass hysteria” that such expectations as the Zionist dream had “created in their souls for thousands of years.”

  The editorial did contain at least a slight bow to changing times. It noted that the Forward had “already remarked”—some two years earlier, on July 3, 1915—that “the time is now such that ‘one can speak no more of the impossibility of realizing the Zionist ideal.’ ” But the 1915 editorial went on to say:

  This changes none of our problems: to organize the masses of Jewish workers in the ‘diaspora’; to lead their class-struggle; and to work toward the goal that they can live in peace with the masses where they are. Then they, the millions and millions of Jewish workers who find themselves in all countries, will remain there side by side with non-Jews, even if there should be a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

  The 1917 editorial quoted a particularly condescending line from the 1915 editorial:

  Economic interests will ensure that millions and millions of Jews will, when Jews will have their own state, still follow the old Jewish saying, “One should lie among Jews in the grave but make a living among goyim.” … And they will have to struggle about exchange among non-Jews, and they will have to search for justice and equality and brotherhood among non-Jews.… All left-wing Zionists are in accord with us in this, and this is also the current instinct of the wider Jewish masses. They are not taking part in messianic hysteria as they once would have. This is a victory of the socialist enlightenment.”

  It turned out, however, that the “wider Jewish masses” had their own ideas about the Jewish state. They found the Zionist vision extraordinarily inspiring, and in retrospect, the response of Cahan and his newspaper to the Balfour Declaration would be seen as a blunder that revealed how out of touch Cahan was with the residents of the Lower East Side and the voters in the twelfth congressional district. Cahan began to appreciate this when, in the closing weeks of the war, he went to Europe as a reporter of the Forward and, more generally, as an advocate for the Jewish community in America. He was in Paris for the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. While he was there, he interviewed Chaim Weizmann and Stephen Wise, who were part of a prestigious international committee of Jews advocating for a Jewish state, and pronounced himself “personally … sympathetic to the movement for a fully independent Jewish home” but worried that the Zionist agitators would endanger “the attainment of equal rights for Jews in their true homes in the European lands.”

  That Jews back home were now thinking differently about Zionism from Cahan and his movement was underscored by the fate of Meyer London, who during his second congressional term was asked to introduce a resolution endorsing the Balfour Declaration. Even though he represented a district with thousands of Jewish voters, London demurred, with a remark that echoed the Forward’s dismissive editorial: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” This was certainly one of the contributing factors to London’s loss of his seat in the 1918 election. He did manage to get returned to Congress in the election of 1920, but when another congressman introduced the resolution in September 1922, London voted against it. He was not reelected that November. It would be too much to suggest that London’s failure to get behind the idea of the Jewish state was the sole source of his political troubles, but it would not be too much to suggest that both he and Cahan had fallen well behind the curve of sentiment among American Jews with respect to Zionism. After making two trips to Palestine, Cahan would eventually come around. We cannot know if London would have had a similar evolution: on Sunday, June 6, 1926, he was struck by a car while crossing Second Avenue at 15th Street and died later that day of his injuries, at the age of fifty-four.

  By then, fate had taken things in hand. Whatever else the Balfour Declaration represented, it was at least in part an effort to gain wider support for the Allied cause in World War I. Even as Eugene Debs went to prison for his opposition to the American war effort, the Forward emerged as a supporter. Not that Cahan was turning on Debs; in December 1921, when President Warren Harding commuted Debs’s sentence to time served, Cahan would be present at the White House when Debs visited. But it would not be unreasonable to imagine that behind Cahan’s austere and autocratic exterior a good bit of introspection—perhaps even an awakening—was going on, and the question is where to find it. Could it be in his relationship to an individual who did not in fact exist, except in Cahan’s own imagination?

  * * *

  * It was the third largest vessel in the world. Two weeks before the Cahans left for Europe, the George Washington had radioed from the North Atlantic a warning about an enormous iceberg. Another vessel, the Titanic, which was passing through the icy seas, failed to heed it and struck the iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912.

  † Meyer London’s portrait still hangs in the offices of the Forward.

  ‡ When the Kaiser abdicated on November 9, 1918, Scheidemann would announce the formation of the German republic; he would become its second chancellor as part of the Weimar Coalition in 1919. He would leave Germany when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

  § Simon Sebag-Montefiore argues that the “Declaration should really be named for Lloyd George, not Balfour. It was he who had already decided that Britain had to possess Palestine—‘oh, we must grab that!’ he said—and this was a precondition for any Jewish homeland.” Later in 1917, as British forces entered Palestine, Lloyd George “demanded the capture of Jerusalem ‘as a Christmas present for the British nation.’ ”

  10

  In 1933 a mountain climber named Frank Smythe was attempting a conquest of Mount Everest. But the stress was too great, and although he came within one thousand feet, he failed to reach the summit. On his descent, according to an account in The Wall Street Journal, Smythe stopped “to eat a mint cake.” In the course of the meal, he did something strange: he cut the cake in half, to share it with “someone who wasn’t there but who had seemed to be his partner all day.” It turned out to be an example of a phenomenon known as the “third man,” the sensation, during extremely stressful situations, of the presence of another person.

  It would be too much to suggest that the character Abraham Cahan created during the most turbulent years of his life is an example of this famous phenomenon. But it is no doubt more than a coincidence that during his period of great stress, Abraham Cahan created, in David Levinsky, a literary character who seems so real as to be almost uncanny and who casts a cynical eye on everything for which Cahan ostensibly stood.

  Cahan had started writing—or at least thinking about—The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912. Years later, when writing his memoir, he never laid out the story of how he had created Levinsky, and so the best account we have is the one in Pollock’s unpublished biography. McClure’s Magazine, the famous muckraking periodical, had assigned Cahan to write two articles on Jewish immigrants’ success in the rapidly expanding garment trade, something that Cahan had already been thinking about. He wrote the first piece just before he became involved in the United Garment Workers strike, as a fictional “autobiography” of a Russian Jewish immigrant, and it was published in McClure’s in April 1913. He wrote the second piece just as he was being hospitalized for his ulcer surgery in March 1913, and it appeared in McClure’s in May. The Autobiography of an American Jew: The Rise of David Levinsky was so well received that McClure’s requested two more pieces. Cahan wrote the third while recovering from his surgery—he dictated it to a stenographer—in Lakewood. And he wrote the fourth after he returned to New York; they were published in the magazine in June and July.

  McClure’s appears to have conceived of the series as a way to expose the ascent of Jews in American commercial life—in a not particularly complimentary fashion.* Cahan, however, seems to have grasped early on the possibility of achieving something transcendent. One has to wonder, as he was recovering from his surgery and from the wounds to his repu
tation from the stoning of the Forward Building by Yiddish-speaking union members: Did he sense error in his life? Did he intimate what lay ahead? In the following decade he and his comrades would not only be challenged on the labor front but would be proved wrong in respect of the world war, the Russian Revolution, and Zionism.

  Cahan clearly realized, while recovering in Lakewood, the possibilities that the McClure’s assignment had opened for him. Over the next few years, he reworked and expanded the stories into a novel about a poor Jew from Russia who falls away from religion, comes to America, and triumphs in the secular world, only to lose his soul—or at least to feel lonely, isolated, and profoundly sorry for himself. The Rise of David Levinsky was published by Harper & Brothers in September 1917, one month before the Bolshevik Revolution.

  David Levinsky was born in the fictional town of Antomir, in northwestern Russia, and was raised, after the death of his father, by his deeply religious mother. His early life is not dissimilar to Cahan’s. As a young yeshiva student, he is traumatized by the murder of his mother as she defends him against harassing Gentiles. He loses interest in his Talmudic studies, and as word of pogroms in neighboring towns spreads through Antomir, he dreams of joining the exodus of Russian Jews to America. Falling ill, he is taken in by one of the better-off families in Antomir and falls in love with their daughter, Mathilda, and discovers the power of sexual allure. Well-educated, Russian-speaking Mathilda teases the shy yeshiva boy by trying to tuck his sidelocks behind his ears, and he angrily demands that she stop—only to yield to her advances as she encourages him to learn Russian and become an educated man. Eventually she pays his way to America, and he vows to become a success and make himself worthy of her.