The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  That Rose would have been included in the Social Register was interesting for several reasons. For one thing, she had obviously gone to the trouble of filling out the necessary little form, which asked listees to supply their “Christian name.” For another, it indicated to some degree her endorsement of the values represented in America’s first attempt to catalogue and codify its upper class (Who’s Who in America would not appear until several years later), a class into which she had so recently and magically been elevated. Was there any ambivalence, any feeling of duplicity here? Apparently not, because for the next two decades Rose and Graham Stokes’s names would appear in Capitalism’s official gazetteer.

  Many young Jews had left Russia with their souls afire with socialism, yearning for the day when the hated czars would be deposed and leadership would be assumed by the working classes. Many still carried with them their keys to das alte Heim—the old home—even though they had seen with their own eyes the old home put to the torch, and knew that the old village had been scorched from the face of the earth and erased from the map. Some even dreamed of going back to Russia someday, when a new order had finally been established.

  But the ferocious pogrom of 1903 in the city of Kishinev, in southern Russia—in which forty-nine people were murdered and more than five hundred maimed and mutilated—had been a grim reminder that life in the old home continued to be a perilous game of Russian roulette. In the wake of Kishinev, mere was also apprehension in New York that another great wave of emigration to America would be set off, further flooding the already crowded labor market—which was exactly what happened. American Jews were torn between compassion for their beleaguered countrymen and fears that their gains in the New World would be placed in new jeopardy. Finally, when the attempted Russian revolution of 1905 failed dismally, most Jewish immigrants resigned themselves to the idea that America would be their home for the rest of their lives, and probably the rest of their children’s lives as well. The question then became: could they work within the existing system, or did the system itself have to be changed?

  There was evidence to show that the American system worked. The former tinker now had his own scrap-metal business. The itinerant cobbler now had his own shoe-repair shop with his name in gold letters on the door, and could afford a vacation in the Catskills. The tailor now had his own dressmaking business, and had bought his family a piano. Rose Pastor had, in the Jewish expression, “made all her money in one day,” and was now listed in the ranks of New York’s society ladies. But she didn’t behave like one. She was one who claimed the system ought to be changed.

  Not long after her return from her grand tour of Europe, Rose Pastor Stokes announced that she had become a socialist. Her mission, she revealed, would not be to Christianize East Side children. Instead, it would be to free the workers of the world from the shackles of “the bosses.” From an improvised platform in Union Square, she spoke of the thousands of other immigrants who were still locked within the confines of the ghetto, who worked long hours at low wages, who did piecework at home by gaslight until they went blind, who offered up their young lives at the golden altar of capitalism, while their employers grew fat and rich. Rose Pastor, it seemed, had found a new calling, as a rabble-rouser.

  By 1910, while still living like a capitalist on Norfolk Street, Rose had announced that both she and her husband were members of the Socialist party. In any strike or demonstration, Rose could be found marching, chanting, making fiery speeches. Though she and her husband often dined out in restaurants, she joined the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ strike, protesting low wages and poor working conditions. In one way or another, she kept herself in the public eye, choosing, for the most part, unpopular causes. In 1914, Margaret Higgins Sanger introduced the phrase “birth control,” and had to flee to England to escape federal prosecution for publishing and mailing “Family Limitation,” a brochure that dealt with contraception. Rose Stokes immediately took up the cause of birth control, and became one of the leaders of the American movement. With Helena Frank, she translated Morris Rosenfeld’s “Songs of Labor” and other poems from the Yiddish. She turned her hand to pencil drawings, all of them depicting the harsh injustices inflicted upon workers by the American capitalists. With a young Russian-Jewish playwright named Elmer Reizenstein (later Elmer Rice), she became involved in the Proletarian Theatre movement, and wrote a never-produced play, The Woman Who Wouldn’t, about a charismatic female labor leader who campaigns tirelessly against the “bosses,” in which character she doubtless saw traces of herself. “For the future—not the distant future—belongs to us,” she wrote to her friend Eugene V. Debs, an unsuccessful Socialist candidate for President in 1912. It began to seem as though Rose Stokes’s chief claim to fame would be as a backer of lost, or losing, causes.

  Still, the Jewish socialist movement was slow to get under way in the United States. For one thing, who had the energy left over for politics at the end of a working day? Where was the time to attend speeches and rallies, and mount demonstrations? What was the point in organizing strikes, when inexpensive thugs could be hired to break them up, and scab labor was so cheap? The answers to all these questions were negative, and adding to the gloomy outlook was a kind of traditional Jewish cynicism and pessimism: after all, for centuries—and not just in disenfranchised Russia—the Jews had been struggling for some kind of political recognition, but without success. Why should their chances be any better in America? True, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in New York City, but they were still in the minority. Even if every Jew in the United States proclaimed himself a socialist tomorrow—a distinct unlikelihood—the Jewish socialists would still be enormously outweighed by the rest of the population. A worldwide socialist movement might prevail someday, but never a Jewish one.

  Still, a few Jewish socialist leaders emerged during the early years of the century—Meyer London, Morris Hillquit. In 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union had been organized under Joseph Barondess, and a few scattered strikes for higher wages and better working conditions had been staged in the Jewish-owned “needle trades,” but without much in the way of results. Workers—most of them women—in the garment industry still labored for three or four dollars a week, and strikes were quickly broken up by hired Irish, Italian—and some Jewish—thugs who charged the picket lines and frightened the women.

  Then, in 1909, there began to be talk of a “general strike” in Local 25 of the ILGWU, which was the shirtwaist makers’ union. Thanks to Charles Dana Gibson, it seemed as though every American woman wanted a whole wardrobe of shirtwaists, and by 1909 New York’s production of shirtwaists had reached fifty million dollars annually. At the same time, the young women who pieced the goods together and fitted them with ruffles, bows, and trimmings were required to pay for their own needles, thread, and fabrics, while for every ten-dollar shirtwaist a seamstress turned out, she was paid two dollars. The girls had to rent the chairs they sat in, and had their pay docked if they were more than five minutes late to work. The general strike was an ambitious idea, considering the fact that when it was proposed, Local 25 could boast of only about a hundred members, and had a little less than four dollars in its treasury.

  Still, a meeting to discuss the matter was called for November 22 at Cooper Union. Apparently the timing was right, for thousands turned out—not only the shirtwaist makers, but all sorts of rank and file from the men’s and women’s clothing, fur, hat, glove, shoe, and trimmings industries. Rose Pastor Stokes was there in her blazing coif of red hair, shouting, “Arise! Unite! Down with the bosses!” The labor leader Samuel Gompers was the keynote speaker, and he was followed by others. But as the evening wore on, and speaker followed speaker, a mood of torpor and lethargy began to pervade the audience. Jewish pessimism was setting in again; like so many other rallies, this one appeared to be coming to naught, and between rounds of halfhearted applause a few people began sneaking out to head home for the night. Then all at once a teenage girl name
d Clara Lemlich sprang to her feet and raced to the stage. Speaking in Yiddish, she cried out, “I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now!” To a hushed audience, she swore, “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.”

  This spunky performance seemed to galvanize the audience. Suddenly it was on its feet, stamping, shouting, cheering, waving fists. Then it was out into the street with more shouting, cheering, hand-clapping, and singing of songs. The next morning, the strike was on.

  Something about the idea of a major strike being led by a seventeen-year-old girl caught the fancy of all New Yorkers. Even Rose Stokes had been upstaged, and no work stoppage in the city had ever received so much publicity. Well publicized, too, were the working conditions in the shirtwaist factories that girls were protesting. Most shops closed, and when scabs were sent in, workers from other unions joined the Jewish girls to help fight them off. Hundreds of strikers were arrested, but rich and social people from uptown—including the regulars, Alva Belmont and Anne Morgan—provided money for their bail. Checks poured in from all over the country to help the strikers, and the students of Wellesley College in Massachusetts sent a check for one thousand dollars to the strike fund. Week after week the strike went on, and every day there was a new report in the newspapers, usually dealing with the young girls’ stamina and bravery in the face of their merciless employers. In the New York Sun, McAlister Coleman wrote:

  The girls, headed by teen-age 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 in front of 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, striking at the pickets, opening the way for a group of frightened scabs to slip through the broken line. Fancy ladies from the Allen Street red-light district climbed out of cabs to cheer on the gorillas. There was a confused melee of scratching, screaming girls and fist-swinging men and then a patrol wagon arrived. The thugs ran off as the cops pushed Clara and two other badly beaten girls into the wagon.

  I followed the rest of the retreating pickets to the union hall, a few blocks away. There a relief station had been set up where one bottle of milk and a loaf of bread were given to strikers with small children in their families. There, for the first time in my comfortably sheltered, upper West Side life, I saw real hunger on the faces of my fellow Americans in the richest city in the world.

  Official New York took a stand of pious disapproval of the shirtwaist-makers’ strike, and denounced the act of striking itself as un-American, immoral, and even unholy. In sentencing a striker, one city magistrate declared, “You are on strike against God and Nature, whose firm law is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow.” But public sympathy—and that of the press—prevailed. Bail costs for the strikers ran as high as twenty-five hundred dollars a day, but somehow they were met, and the strike continued until February of the following year—nearly three full months.

  When it was finally settled, though, it was hard to tell whether there had been a victory or not. A number of improvements in working conditions were promised by the shirtwaist companies, but the strikers’ principal demand—that the ILGWU be recognized—was denied. In the course of the strike, however, membership in the union had swelled from a hundred to more than ten thousand. From that point onward, the ILGWU would have to be reckoned with as a force in the garment trade.

  Throughout the rest of 1910, and into the winter months of 1911, strike seemed to follow strike among the Jewish trade unions—not only those within the garment industry but also those of the bakers’, printers’, and painters’ unions. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire provided the union movement with powerful new impetus.

  If none of the strikes of this period had quite the impact and drama and appeal of the one led by Clara Lemlich, they had another unexpected side effect—a kind of collective search of the Jewish conscience. Many of the owners of the struck businesses were themselves Jewish, and were aware, painfully, that the long series of strikes was only furthering the Christian notion of Jewish contentiousness—that one reason why Jews had trouble assimilating into American life was that they could not even get along with one another. Owners of Jewish businesses were also increasingly sensitive to accusations of Jewish avarice and Jewish acquisitiveness—the “pound of flesh” syndrome—and to an impression that was being created that Jews exploited their own kind. Was this sort of thing, as they said, good for the Jews? Was this the way Jews wanted to present themselves to the rest of the community—as a breed of hagglers, backbiters, complainers, bullies? A Jewish labor writer, Will Herberg, tried to deflect this sort of criticism when he wrote in the American Jewish Year Book that Jewish employers and employees shared a “common social and cultural background,” and within it “an age-old tradition of arbitration, of settling their often bitter disputes within the Jewish community.… They shared too, as a heritage of centuries of self-enclosed minority existence, a marked concern for the reputation of the Jewish community with the outside world [italics added].”

  True enough. Still, feelings of Jewish guilt cannot be entirely credited for the fact that the multitude of Jewish-on-Jewish strikes were eventually settled, and that the settlements generally, little by little, left the workers better off. But ethnic guilt did make the settlements more painful and personal.

  Rose Stokes, meanwhile, had become an increasingly vocal spokeswoman for the Jewish radical Left. She took eagerly to the lecture platform and traveled about the country expounding her doctrine of socialism, while her more publicity-shy husband stayed behind in New York with his work at the University Settlement. Now Rose would be in Chicago, now Pittsburgh, now Saint Louis, and wherever she went she created headlines. Her press, now, was almost always openly hostile, which provided Rose with another outlet for her bewildering energy—writing letters of clarification and denial to editors of newspapers, a practice that, as we shall see, would soon get her into deep trouble. If Rose had a fault it was that she was passionately sincere—well-meaning, theatrical, and usually in over her head.

  Audiences in goodly numbers usually turned out to hear what Rose Stokes had to say. After all, by virtue of her marriage, the Jewish Cinderella had become something of a national celebrity, and many people were simply curious to have a look at her. But the trouble was that Rose had a slight credibility problem. It was hard to take her all that seriously. Here she was, after all, with a rich husband—a doctor to boot, who could practice medicine if he chose, but didn’t because he didn’t have to work—who owned a railroad, who’d provided her with an apartment in the city and a house in the country on Long Island Sound. And she was railing against intolerable working conditions and the venality of bosses. The feeling was: yes, there were problems, and yes, the problems were serious ones, but they were hardly Rose’s problems anymore. What was this privileged lady, this creature of capitalism, kvetching about?

  One woman who was not impressed by Rose’s oratory was Miss Julia Richman, who, when she referred to Rose at all, called her “That Woman,” or “That Crazy Russian.” After all, Rose was trying to stir up dissent against the very form of government that Julia Richman was trying to get her students to embrace. Still, by 1912, Miss Richman had begun to feel that much of her life’s mission had been accomplished. The Great Pushcart Era of the Lower East Side was coming to an end, for one thing. Though this was the result of immigrants’ moving steadily into the middle class, Miss Richman tended to believe that she deserved personal credit for this development. Feeling that hers was a job well done, she announced he
r retirement that year “to make room for a younger woman.”

  She was fifty-six years old, but foresaw many years of public service and general usefulness ahead of her in other fields. She planned, for example, to continue lecturing and writing articles. In 1908, her book Good Citizenship—a civics textbook designed for fourth-graders in an urban setting—had been published by the American Book Company. It dealt primarily with how city fire, police, and sanitation departments did their jobs, and its moral tone was high. She reiterated her familiar themes. On the importance of keeping fire escapes clear, she wrote: “[The fire]* taught the folly and the awful danger of blocking up fire escapes so that they are impassable when needed most.” Turn-of-the-century sweatshops had often been unfairly blamed for periodic epidemics of contagious diseases, and Miss Richman echoed the quaint medical theories of the day:

  The desire to save money often leads men to break the law.… Rather than pay more rent for extra space in which to place his workmen, the manufacturer of clothing, for example, gives out a portion of his work to be done elsewhere.… Most of the workers are poor foreigners.… A single case of [a] disease among the workers in a sweat shop, will throw off enough germs to infect all the other workmen.… The contagion does not end here, unfortunately. Not only may each man who becomes ill carry the disease into his own home, but the germs in the workroom may fall upon the clothing made there, and they are carried with it into the stores where it is sold, and from there into the homes of the people who buy it.

  And of course the pushcarts did not escape her ire:

  Worse even than the slovenly housekeepers are the men who sell fish and vegetables from wagons or push carts and drop the refuse from their stock upon the pavements. Yet they are the very ones who should be most careful to keep the streets clean, since they do business in them, free of charge, to save paying rent as others must do for a store.… Scattering refuse in the street is a sign of bad breeding; it is also forbidden by law.