The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Lillian Wald—in her off-duty hours, at least, when not teaching tenement dwellers how to unstop drains, dispose of garbage, deal with rats, or swallow unpleasant-tasting medicines—affected a rather grand and patrician manner, favoring large flowered hats and face veils. Still, she came to be much loved on the Lower East Side, and as her legend grew she was transformed into something of a latter-day Florence Nightingale. Had there been candidates for sainthood in the Jewish faith, she would have been one of them. Not so Miss Richman, whose goals—helping the new immigrant to assimilate—were essentially the same. It was probably the difference in the two women’s personalities that accounted for the different ways in which their activities were regarded. Lillian Wald was soothing, motherly, comforting, a hand-holder. Julia Richman was a whip-cracker, with no patience for sloth and inefficiency, a woman of easily elicited opinions, with no hesitancy about saying exactly what was on her mind, on almost any subject.

  And of course the two women’s fields of expertise set them apart, from the point of view of the people they were both trying to serve. Lillian Wald’s concerns were more concrete and immediate—healing the ailments of the human body. Julia Richman’s bailiwick was more subtle and elusive—Americanizing the immigrant mind.

  Like Lillian Wald, Julia Richman grew up in a world of moderate affluence. Her family, who had emigrated from Germany two generations earlier, had prospered to the point where they were solid city burghers. Her father owned a paint and glazing business and had, among other things, supplied all the original glass for the old Cooper Institute, a particularly lucrative contract. The family was also very ancestor-proud, and could trace itself back to 1604, to the city of Prague, in what was then Bohemia, and Julia liked to note that her family tree was studded with illustrious physicians, teachers, and rabbis.

  She had been born October 12, 1855, the middle child of five, in New York City, where the family lived at 156 Seventh Avenue, in the heart of the then-fashionable Chelsea district. She had attended P.S. 50 and then, after the family’s move to suburban Long Island, Huntington High School. At Huntington, though she got excellent grades, she was known as something of a tomboy and a show-off. With her long skirts pinned between her legs, she would climb tall trees and swing from their branches. She was also a bit of a troublemaker, and was famous for her imperious manner and quick temper. At age twelve she discussed the future with a young contemporary, and the following exchange is reported to have taken place:

  The friend: “Julia, I’m pretty, and my father is rich. When I finish high school I’ll marry a rich man who will take care of me.”

  Julia (indignantly): “Well, I am not pretty, my father isn’t rich, and I’m not going to marry, but before I die all New York will know my name!”

  Growing up in a rigidly disciplinarian Jewish household, Julia and her sisters were instructed in the domestic arts by an exceptionally demanding mother. Each girl, for example, was required to take her turn at setting the table for family dinners—no small chore, considering the fact that the dinners consisted of six courses and involved seven place settings. Once, after setting the table as instructed, Julia called her mother into the dining room to inspect the results. Mrs. Richman circled the big table slowly, checking each item. All the silver and glassware, china and napkins were properly placed, but Julia’s mother spotted one discrepancy. The lace tablecloth hung a bit lower on one side of the table than the other. “Julia,” said her mother, “take everything off the table, put it all back in the drawers and cupboards where it came from, straighten the cloth and start over.” Julia did as she was told. It was a lesson, she liked to recall in later years, that had taught her the importance of “exactness.”

  She was more independent, however, when it came to choosing a career. Much to her parents’ dismay, she announced, at age fourteen, that she intended to become a schoolteacher. Her Victorian father was particularly distressed at this decision, since teaching inevitably meant spinsterhood; in those days, a teacher’s pregnancy was grounds for dismissal. But Julia prevailed, and, at fifteen, she enrolled at New York’s Normal College.* She graduated in 1872, after completing what was the standard two-year teaching course, but because she was not yet seventeen years old—the minimum age for a teacher then in New York—her license to teach had to be withheld until her birthday.

  Julia Richman’s first teaching assignment was in a classroom full of boys, where, since many of her pupils were her own age and older, she had certain difficulties instilling the kind of discipline she had in mind. Soon, however, she was transferred to girls’ classes, and here she did considerably better. Presently it was being said of Julia Richman that she was “born to command,” and as her reputation grew so did her executive ability—and, no doubt, her ego. She began moving steadily upward in the public school system—first to vice-principal of P.S. 73 and then, in 1884, to principal of the girls’ department. She was not yet thirty, and she was the youngest principal in the city’s history, as well as one of the first women—and the only Jewish woman—principals.

  She was already a woman to be reckoned with. As an extracurricular task, she had volunteered to teach the Sabbath school at her family’s temple, Emanu-El. Here she found herself obliged to deliver religious instruction to one particularly obstreperous young man. She took her problem to her supervisor, recommending that the youth be suspended or punished. Her supervisor wrung his hands and said to her, “But we can’t do anything about him. Don’t you realize he’s the son of one of our richest members?” Miss Richman handed in her resignation on the spot.

  In 1903, Julia Richman was appointed district superintendent of schools, and here were more firsts. She was the first woman school superintendent in Manhattan, again one of the youngest of either sex, and again the first Jewish woman to hold such an exalted position in the city’s school system. Her prediction was beginning to come true, and all New York was beginning to know her name.

  Miss Richman was now regarded with no small amount of awe in educational circles. As a result, she was given the almost unprecedented option of selecting her own school district to supervise, and after considering several others, she made a choice that was as audacious as it was dramatic and newsworthy. She chose the most difficult and challenging district of all: the Lower East Side, the ghetto of Jewish poverty, where older and tougher male superintendents had dreaded being assigned.

  Here, under the mantle of her stewardship, would fall the education of some twenty-three thousand children, along with the supervision of six hundred teachers, and the running of fourteen different day and night schools. The “children,” meanwhile, were of all ages—from six-year-olds to men in their twenties and thirties who were just starting to do the equivalent of first-grade work. What made teaching on the Lower East Side especially difficult, of course, was that most of the pupils could not speak English.

  Immediately, Julia Richman began to impose upon her district her own personal style. She was on early advocate of “progressive education”—a concept that was then quite new—but her vision went beyond that. She saw the combined role of her schools as extending farther than the limits of the classroom walls, and out into the East Side community at large. She believed that her schools’ influence should be stretched out into the crowded streets and tenements and little shops. She believed that the daily lives of the East Side poor—not just the children but their parents and grandparents as well—should be embraced by the school system. In addition to academic subjects, she decided that her pupils would be instructed in such matters as hygiene, sanitation, table manners and etiquette, the importance of learning American customs, the American legal system, and civil obedience. She even—though the notion shocked her fellow educators whenever she brought it up—toyed with the idea of introducing sex education into the curriculum.

  She swept aside everything and anything that smacked of pro forma ritual. “It is much easier,” she once said, “and so much prettier to teach the oath of allegiance to the flag
than to teach a community to keep the fire escapes free from encumbrances.” At the same time, she exercised her passion for “exactness,” and her surprise visits of inspection to her schools were dreaded throughout the district. Her beady eye caught everything—improperly washed blackboards, broken pieces of chalk, unsharpened pencils. One of her staff moaned, “Every time she visits a school it is like Yom Kippur!”—the Day of Atonement.

  Naturally, with a role as broad and sweeping as the one she assumed for herself, a woman such as Julia Richman was bound to make enemies. And make them she did. But along the path of her career she had also managed to make friends in high places. Under the umbrella of her superintendency, for example, she had gathered the New York Police Department, and one of her targets became community vice. A particular bane was a group of young men who, in the idiom of the day, were called “cadets” (pimps) and who were charged with being in the business of leading young girls into “lives of degradation.” The cadets and other young hoodlums hung out in and around Seward Park, and Miss Richman was soon spearheading a cleanup of that area. In at least one Richman-inspired raid, two hundred fifty truants from her schools were arrested, along with a quota of cadets. At the same time, she busied herself with other good works. She rented a house in the ghetto and had it converted into a social center for her teachers. She made an incursion into Lillian Wald’s territory, and supervised the conversion of an old ferryboat into a floating sanitarium for consumptives, who were believed to profit from fresh salt air. In her spare time, she helped found the National Council of Jewish Women, an organization whose original purpose was to protect young Jewish girls from white slavers, who, lying in wait for them at the docks, had their own plans for degradation. She was also the first president of the Young Women’s Hebrew Alliance, and for a number of years she edited a magazine called Helpful Thoughts. Helpful Thoughts was directed at the children of Jewish immigrants, and devoted its contents to what its title promised—helpful thoughts by which children could be Americanized and could assimilate as quickly as possible. She lectured tirelessly, and wrote magazine articles on her educational theories. None other than Louis Marshall—the foremost Jewish lawyer in New York, who, along with Jacob Schiff, was the leader of the German-Jewish community—had praised Julia Richman for her “years of acknowledged usefulness.”

  Mr. Marshall, however, was very much an outside observer, and had spent no time on the receiving end of Miss Richman’s “usefulness.” To those who had, she seemed more like a martinet. By 1906, the year of the Adenoids Riot, Miss Richman was very much an authority figure on the Lower East Side, and for this she was in no small way resented. With her clipped, precise speech, her imposing bosom, her carefully marcelled mane of dark red hair, in her spotless white gloves and expensively tailored if understated suits, she was also a commanding physical presence. At fifty-one, she was definitely in her prime, if not at the height of her popularity, and in the wake of the riot there were allegations that somehow her school district could have prevented the misunderstanding; as there had been in the past, there were a number of noisy demands for her replacement or resignation. But Miss Richman moved on to another useful—if unpopular—project: free eye examinations for all her pupils and, if necessary, free corrective eyeglasses. (Jewish immigrants were particularly fearful of eye examinations; those who failed to pass them at Ellis Island had been refused entry.) As usual, she ignored her critics.

  At the time, Julia Richman was living at 330 Central Park West on the Upper West Side—a neighborhood that was directly antipodal to her school district—and her address was certainly a part of her problem. (By contrast, Lillian Wald had settled in a fifth-floor walk-up on Jefferson Street, asking only for the luxury of a private bathtub.) Where Miss Richman lived was also a ghetto of sorts, but it was a ghetto of affluence. The western flank of Central Park and the side streets leading off it had become a wealthy German-Jewish residential district. The development of the passenger elevator had led to the building of a number of tall, imposing apartment houses on the Upper West Side with grand-sounding names, such as the Chatsworth, the Langham, the Dorilton, and the Ansonia, and the apartments they offered were usually spacious with high ceilings, commanding views of the city in all directions, and many servants’ rooms. New York’s Christian upper crust might still prefer their Upper East Side town houses, but the city’s German-Jewish elite—historically leery of investing in real estate—tended to choose apartment living. (It was not until many years later that luxury apartment houses were built on the Upper East Side.)

  At addresses like Julia Richman’s lived families who had been poor immigrants themselves a little more than a generation earlier, but who now wore top hats and frock coats to their Wall Street offices. In the years during and after the Civil War, former rural foot peddlers had made the great transition into banking, retailing, and manufacturing. Their names were Guggenheim, Lehman, Straus, Sachs, Altman, Loeb, and Seligman. For years, the little knot of families had intermarried with one another, and by the early 1900s they composed a tight network of cousins and double cousins. Within the group, of course, there were stratifications. The German Jews of Frankfurt origin considered themselves superior to the Jews of Hamburg, but the Jews of Frankfurt and Hamburg considered themselves superior to those of Munich, or anywhere in the south. The Seligmans thought of themselves as better than the Strauses, since the Seligmans had become international bankers while the Strauses, of Macy’s, had remained “in trade.” The Guggenheims, who were Swiss Jews, were a problem. They were the richest of the “crowd,” but they were considered socially somewhat gauche. Julia Richman’s family belonged very definitely to this small set, which called itself the “One Hundred,” to distinguish itself from the Christian “Four Hundred” of Mrs. William Astor. Julia’s sisters, furthermore, had all made proper in-the-group marriages—Addie Richman to an Altman, whose family ran what was considered to be New York’s finest department store, and Bertha Richman to a Proskauer, whose family included prominent lawyers.

  By 1906, the dividing line between “uptown” (German) Jews and “Lower East Side” (Eastern European) Jews had become the source of much hard feeling, and Julia Richman was, in both manner and appearance, very uptown. Her uptownness was assumed to account for her heavy emphasis on discipline and correctness, and for her high-handed habit of involving herself in matters—such as the police force—that had previously been considered out of the jurisdiction of the schools. Lillian Wald at least seemed sympathetic to the East Siders’ most pressing needs. Julia Richman seemed more interested in getting the East Siders to conform to her own exacting standards, in imposing her own toplofty values, in changing centuries-old ways of thinking, seeing, living, being.

  To complicate matters further, the Lower East Side had become something of a fashionable cause, or Cause, in New York City. Rich Christian ladies, such as Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont and Miss Anne Morgan (sister of J. P.), made sable-clad forays into the Lower East Side to dispense their Christian charity to the “poor, deserving Jews.” These Lady Bountifuls were distrusted and suspected of being missionaries bent on conversion, and it was hard to distinguish Julia Richman, in her stone marten scarves, from one of these.

  It was also suspected that her efforts at uplifting were—like those of her family and social set—self-serving, and based essentially on a bad case of embarrassment. The Eastern European Jews were especially sensitive on this point, and with good reason. Julia Richman’s values were seen as those of the wealthy few, and she seemed to be trying to force-feed her notions to the hungry masses, who, in their own eyes, already had perfectly acceptable standards of their own, which they saw no need to change. Marching into their midst with her pronouncements on the importance of clean fingernails and lessons on how to curtsy, this uptown woman not only came from enemy territory, she also symbolized capitalism, a force that traditionally oppressed rather than uplifted the poor. She lived on a street that was already being called the Jewish Fifth Avenu
e.

  On top of everything else, she represented a form of Judaism that the Eastern Europeans did not fully understand and were not ready to accept. She actually practiced a religion very different from theirs. As early as 1845, thirty-three young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Manhattan just a few years before banded together to establish a Reform congregation, which they named Emanu-El. The very term “Reform,” of course, indicated that these Germans felt that there was something about traditional Judaism that needed updating and correcting. Reform had had its seeds in Germany, but had come into full flower in the United States, where it was regarded—by the German-American Jews, at least—as an essential step toward assimilation into the American culture.

  Reform Judaism was touted as “the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith,” but it really represented the new dominion of America over the Old World. Among the revisions advocated by Reform was that houses of worship no longer be called synagogues, but instead be known as temples. The principal day of worship was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, to conform with the religious habits of the American majority. The use of Hebrew was virtually dropped from the order of service, in favor of English. Keeping kosher households was deemed both archaic and impractical—as well as un-American. (The great American leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had shocked the Jews of Cincinnati by putting on a banquet at which shrimp and crawfish were among the delicacies offered.) In fact, inside the new Reform temples, with their pulpits and pews and chandeliers, where hatted women worshiped alongside unhatted men and not in separate curtained galleries, the atmosphere was often indistinguishable from that of an American Christian church. The strictly Orthodox, kosher-keeping Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians viewed all these developments as examples—sinister and shocking ones—of how quickly the faith could erode in America if one were not ever watchful.