The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It was not long, though, before he found another job, with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. The job was lowly enough—as an office boy. And the starting pay was only $5.50 a week, with no allowance for overtime. But its importance was that he was now working for the inventor who held the first patent for wireless telegraphy using electromagnetic waves—Marconi himself, who had also developed the antenna principle. The successor to Marconi’s company would be called the Radio Corporation of America.

  For the next few years, Sarnoff worked for Marconi, steadily moving upward in the ranks: to an assistant radio operator, with a salary of sixty dollars a month, and then to full operator, for seventy dollars a month. Much of his time was now spent in a series of remote outposts and on ships at sea, as a “sparks” for shipping companies that had installed the Marconi systems. In the spring of 1912, he was back in New York, where the John Wanamaker department store had placed a radio station on its top floor. A similar station had been installed in Wanamaker’s Philadelphia store, and the stated purpose of the two stations was to facilitate interoffice communications and ordering between the two branches. Actually, it was more of a public relations stunt. Wanamaker’s had suspected that, like Morris Kohn’s electric train, the presence of a radio station in the store would draw crowds, and they were right. Shoppers congregated outside the glass window of the little studio to watch young David Sarnoff briskly sending and receiving messages between New York and Philadelphia over the newfangled wireless. The station’s top-floor location served a double purpose. The reception was better from there, but it was also true that, in order to see the show, Wanamaker’s customers had to pass through all the other selling floors, which featured other temptations. It was one of the first commercial uses to which radio had been put.

  In the early evening of April 14, 1912, David Sarnoff, wearing his headset and punching his little keys and buttons, was doing his routine job at Wanamaker’s—a job that may have begun to seem a bit boring, and even somewhat demeaning, since he was essentially an entertainer performing for spectators. All at once he received a faint and alien signal. It came, he quickly determined, from the S.S. Olympic, fourteen hundred miles away in the north Atlantic. Once he had asked that the message be repeated, its import was clear. The Titanic, bound for New York, had struck an iceberg at full speed, and was sinking fast. The Olympic was steaming to its rescue. Immediately, Sarnoff focused his radio’s full power on the Olympic’s signal, which repeated the SOS message again and again.

  The Titanic, hailed as the crowning glory of the British shipbuilding industry and the pride of the White Star Line, was the largest, fastest, most luxurious ocean liner in the world. Its building and launching had been much publicized, and it had been touted as “unsinkable.” This was its maiden voyage, and aboard it for the gala crossing were hundreds of prominent Americans and Europeans. One of the worst marine disasters in history was under way.

  While trying to radio other ships that might be in the area, Sarnoff telephoned the newspapers, and within hours special editions were on the streets. As the night wore on, Wanamaker’s kept its doors open, and crowds of friends and relatives of Titanic passengers, along with the merely curious, poured in, begging for news of survivors. Presently a police barricade had to be set up to protect Sarnoff from the mob, and give him the quiet he needed to transcribe his signals. Only a few special people were allowed into the studio with him—Vincent Astor, whose father, John Jacob Astor, was on the ship, and the sons of Isidor Straus, the head of Macy’s, who was also aboard. Meanwhile, in Washington, President William Howard Taft ordered all other radio stations in the United States shut down so that nothing might interfere with the signals Sarnoff was receiving at Wanamaker’s. At 2:20 A.M., Atlantic time, the news was heard that the Titanic had sunk.

  For seventy-two hours, Sarnoff sat at his post listening, as, intermittently, the names of known survivors, who had been picked up by the Olympic and other radio-equipped vessels that had been in the vicinity, came trickling in. Then came the lengthening list of those known to have perished, and the word from White Star officials admitting a “horrible loss of life.” John Jacob Astor’s name was among the casualties. So was that of traction heir Harry Elkins Widener, who went down clutching a 1598 edition of Bacon’s essays, and whose mother would donate the world’s largest college library to Harvard in his memory.

  Then came the tales of heroism and courage. Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus had each refused to enter a lifeboat without the other, preferring to go down together. Benjamin Guggenheim, of the copper-smelting family, had ordered his valet to dress him in his evening clothes, and refused to don a life jacket, since he wanted to go down like a gentleman.* There were tales of cowardice, too—of men who shouldered women and children aside to clamber aboard lifeboats first, of men who had dressed in women’s clothing in order to do the same, of at least one man who had forced his way into a lifeboat wielding a pistol. In all, the total number of lives lost came to a staggering 1,513, and of the 2,224 aboard only 711 had been saved.

  The Titanic disaster riveted public attention on the importance of radio. Many ships not equipped with radios had been much closer to the distressed liner than the Olympic, and had there been a means of contacting them the loss of life might have been far less. Quickly, the United States Congress passed the Radio Act, which required that all ships carrying fifty or more passengers be equipped with radios, and even those ships that carried fewer than fifty people hurried to install radios in order to stay in business. The Titanic’s sinking also riveted the world’s attention on the Marconi system. But most of all it drew attention to the alert young hero of the day, David Sarnoff, who had manned the little station at Wanamaker’s throughout the ordeal, and who now found himself an international celebrity, hero, and genius. The Titanic, David Sarnoff once said, “brought radio to the front, and incidentally me.” Not quite two months earlier, he had celebrated his twenty-first birthday.

  It was certainly the pivotal moment in his career, and one of the great moments of his life. His official biographer, Eugene Lyons (who also happened to be Sarnoff’s first cousin, which may account for Lyons’s occasionally awestruck tone as he describes his relative’s accomplishments), tells us only that after the seventy-two-hour ordeal, without sleep, was over, Sarnoff treated himself to the luxury of a Turkish bath. But one may legitimately speculate about what may have been going through his head during those long hours. David Sarnoff was not the only man in New York who knew how to use a radio. Why, then, was he not relieved for three solid days? The fact seems to be that he refused to be relieved, and so it would not be too cynical to ask: whose sense of personal drama was operating here? There he was, for example, the Russian-born lad from the ghetto, whose mother ran a newsstand and spoke little English, who had never finished high school, and yet who, with the passing of each suspenseful hour, was writing his own myth, creating his own American hero out of a fluke of fate.

  Here he was in his little studio atop Wanamaker’s, suddenly rubbing shoulders with Vincent Astor, heir to one of the greatest non-Jewish American fortunes, and the Straus brothers, scions of one of New York’s proudest German-Jewish families—people whom, under ordinary circumstances, he would never have hoped to meet. It was not that Astor and the Strauses were more closely touched by the tragedy at sea than the hundreds of other anxious relatives of Titanic passengers who were being held at bay outside the studio by armed police. Nor were Astor and the Strauses in any way equipped to be of special help in the situation, nor were they there because they held high political office. Instead, these men had been admitted to David Sarnoff’s studio under an unwritten subclause of the American Constitution, which provides that, in the land of equal opportunity, some people have more opportunity than others. These men were important. And David Sarnoff was important to them. Sarnoff’s opportunity, as he sat tapping out and receiving his messages, was that he was offering an umbilical cord, a lifeline, between these important
men and their important parents.

  Following his Turkish bath, Sarnoff was rushed by taxi-cab—it may have been his first taxi ride—to Sea Gate, where radio communications were being set up between the mainland and the Carpathia, the ship that had finally collected all the Titanic survivors. By now, of course, he was the wunderkind of Wanamaker’s, the man of the hour, and great cheers went up when Sarnoff arrived to take over the operation of the impromptu station. “He’s here!” people cried. “He’s here! Sarnoff is here!” as the flashbulbs popped.

  The whole experience of having been elevated, so suddenly, to a position of power and importance must have had a profound effect on him. Certainly from that point onward David Sarnoff’s life would take on something of the quality of a fairy tale, with all the curious twists of fate, irony, and coincidence associated with that genre—at least to hear him tell it. The luck of being in the right place at the right time to pick up the Olympic’s signals seemed to take on a mythic significance to him. He began too see himself as a kind of Horatio Alger hero—Ragged Dick, the poor newsboy, who had by chance been able to rescue the drowning millionaire, and had been rewarded with promotions into the highest ranks of commerce. As Sarnoff himself began his rise to the pinnacle of the American communications industry, he would supply his life with plot twists that an Alger might have envied—that seemed, in fact, almost too good to be true. In those seventy-two hours, the indefatigable Sarnoff had learned that America was the land of golden opportunity only when the opportunity was recognized, and seized. And that, once one has attained the spotlight and the center of the stage, one must cling to fame for dear life and never let it go.

  Rose Pastor Stokes was still trying to cling to her own early fame, and, it began to seem, to cling to her marriage as well. Back in her Tageblatt days, Rose Pastor had written of

  Love—

  Oh, give me love!

  Love—the love that will always prove

  The beautiful force that will always move

  The life of the beautiful soul I love;

  A love that will flow from the heart I call,

  A heart from whose generous fountains fall,

  A love that is love and true love for all;

  But whose love, oh, joy! would be most for me.

  Then let fair fame be whatever she be,

  I fix my choice most profitably—

  On love.

  Among the little homilies contained in her “Ethics of the Dust Pan” column had been, “The crowning glory of a woman’s life is the attainment of love, not the object of it,” and, “The woman’s heart makes the home and the man makes the woman’s heart,” and, “Nothing endears two beings so much to each other as a quarrel.” How, one might ask, was Rose Pastor Stokes’s love life—how was her marriage faring—against the backdrop of all her political activities? There was the increasing evidence that all was not well, and that quarrels were not endearing Rose and Graham Phelps Stokes to each other.

  It was noted that, though Graham Stokes remained a member in good standing of the Socialist party, he was seldom seen marching beside his wife in the various strikes and demonstrations in which she so actively participated. Nor did Graham Stokes accompany his wife on her lecture tours as she, Debs, and Elmer Rice sought to spread the socialist doctrine across the country. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian-Jewish writer who knew the Stokeses, used their story as the basis for a novel, which she called Salome of the Tenements.

  In the book, the wealthy, Christian character based on Graham Stokes is called John Manning, and the poor Jewish girl, based on Rose, is named Sony a Vrunsky. Here is the way Sony a Vrunsky describes her husband: “The Anglo-Saxon coldness, it’s centuries of solid ice that all the suns of the sky can’t melt.” In an angry moment, Sonya calls her husband an allrightnik—that is, a materialist, a person of no sensitivity, and, most of all, a person with neither learning nor spiritual values. Of herself, however, Sonya declares, “I am a Russian Jewess, a flame—a longing. A soul consumed with hunger for heights beyond reach. I am the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires. I am the unlived lives of generations stifled in Siberian prisons. I am the urge of ages for the free, the beautiful that never yet was on land or sea.”

  Whether such exchanges actually took place within the household on Norfolk Street is open to question, but in describing the Stokes marriage Miss Yezierska wrote that the two were “the oriental and the Anglo-Saxon trying to find a common language. The over-emotional Ghetto struggling for its breath in the thin air of puritan restraint. An East Side savage forced suddenly into the strait-jacket of American civilization. Sonya was like the dynamite bomb and Manning the walls of tradition constantly menaced by threatening explosions.”

  That Rose Stokes was indeed a highly emotional woman there can be no doubt. Once, strolling down a pushcart-crowded street, she had seen and spoken to an old woman selling candles from a basket set up on the doorstep of a store. As they were chatting, the man who owned the store appeared at the doorway and kicked the woman’s basket, scattering her candles into the street. At the sight of this gratuitous cruelty, Rose wrote later, “I felt the deep world-sorrow; a flood of feeling overwhelmed me—I burst into tears and cried all the way home. It is a sad world, this; so much pain and sorrow; so much poverty and suffering is the lot of those who are, perhaps, God’s best beloved. And, oh, how it clutches at the heart-strings—the thought that all this pain and misery is man’s through his brother man.” There is evidence that Rose Stokes wept easily. There is also evidence that she had an unusually quick temper.

  Anzia Yezierska, meanwhile, the author of the roman à clef of Rose Stokes’s marriage, had herself experienced the plight of her novel’s heroine, and Rose’s own. Miss Yezierska, too, had felt herself trapped between two cultures, and had made the mistake of dreaming that some fairy godmother’s magic wand—some Prince Charming with a glass slipper—might appear to lift her out of the squalor of the ghetto into the perfumed world of American success. She did not understand—in fact, resented—the hard crash-course in assimilation that the ghetto offered; the ghetto in New York was like a school itself, in which each ill-clad newcomer—or greenhorn, as they were called—was treated like a freshman by upper-classmen, and hazed and taunted unmercifully until he or she adapted to the new rules or found, like David Sarnoff, some avenue of escape. On her first day of school in America, not speaking a word of English, Anzia Yezierska had found herself in a classroom where all the other students understood what the teacher was saying, and only she did not. Instead of trying to swim with the tide as best she could, as others had done, she was angry and humiliated and dropped out of school. America, she decided, was not as advertised.

  To make matters worse, she had to endure an Old World patriarchal father who was a Talmudic scholar and spent his days with phylacteries and holy texts, and who railed at her because she was unmarried: “A woman alone, not a wife and not a mother, has no existence.”

  Anzia Yezierska had arrived in New York from Poland in 1901 at age sixteen, and, after the brief experiment with education, went to work as a housemaid for a wealthy Americanized Jewish family who refused to speak Yiddish with her, even though they spoke and understood it perfectly. After a month of scrubbing floors and doing laundry, she asked for her wages, and was shown the door. Her next job was in a sweatshop, where she attached buttons to blouses from dawn to dusk; when she finally protested the long working hours, she was dismissed. Her third job was in a factory, which at least gave her the luxury of evenings on her own.

  After a dozen years in New York, she finally reached the point where she was thinking in English sentences. She began to write short stories, and to submit them to magazines. Her writing was amateurish and overwrought—“Here I am … lost in chaos, wandering between worlds”—but her theme, the immigrant experience on the Lower East Side, was one that struck some editors as strong and original, and her stories began to sell. At last, as a woman approaching middle age, she publi
shed her first novel on the immigrant theme, called Hungry Hearts.

  Hungry Hearts earned her some respectful reviews, but very little money—only two hundred dollars in royalties. But then, out of the blue, as James Graham Phelps Stokes had come to Rose Pastor, came Prince Charming in a golden chariot. It was none other than Sam Goldwyn of Hollywood, with an offer of ten thousand dollars for Hungry Hearts. Goldwyn, furthermore, wanted her to come to Hollywood to collaborate on the script, offering her a salary of two hundred dollars a week, plus all expenses. At last, the American Dream had landed at her doorstep.

  Off she dashed to Hollywood, followed by headlines that read, IMMIGRANT WINS FORTUNE IN MOVIES; SWEATSHOP CINDERELLA AT THE MIRAMAR HOTEL; and FROM HESTER STREET TO HOLLYWOOD. At the Los Angeles railroad station, she was met by Goldwyn’s publicity staff, who ushered her, terrified, into her first press conference. Then it was off to parties at the homes of such local luminaries as Will Rogers, Rupert Hughes, Elinor Glyn, Gertrude Atherton, and Alice Duer Miller. Paul Bern, who would later marry Jean Harlow, was assigned to direct Hungry Hearts, and her first illusion was shattered when she was told that her novel, intended as a heart-wrenching tragedy of poverty and despair, needed “laughs and a happy ending” to turn it into a successful motion picture. When she protested this butchery of her idea, she was told, “Screaming and yelling won’t help. You’ve signed the contract that they can adapt the story as they think best. You were lucky that they used as much of your story as they did.” She was shocked to meet a seasoned Hollywood writer who told her glibly that all the studio had used of his last story was the title. He told her that he was planning to change the title and sell the story again. Anzia Yezierska was given a large office at the studio, a big desk, and a secretary, and was told, “Write!” She found that she could not write a single word.