The Jews in America Trilogy (128 page)

The spring of that year had not been a particularly momentous or exciting one. Aside from the record-breaking immigration figures, no great events were shaking the earth, no burning issues consumed the public consciousness midway through the peaceful first decade of the twentieth century, which had been named the “Century of Progress.” The popular and colorful Teddy Roosevelt was comfortably into his second term
at the White House, having been reelected the year before by an unprecedented majority. That year, through Roosevelt's initiative, delegates from the empires of Russia and Japan had met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and agreed upon terms for peace that would end the Russo-Japanese War, and for this achievement, Roosevelt would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

The battle lines, meanwhile, were being drawn between Americans who insisted that they would never forsake their horse-drawn landaus and victorias and those who were taking to the highways in the noisy new motorcars with their internal-combustion engines. Obsolete carriage horses were being turned loose—into the streets of cities like New York, where they quickly died, creating a certain sanitation problem—in favor of Packards, Reos, and Wintons, while stables were being converted into garages, and coachmen into chauffeurs.

In the world of fashion, huge wide-brimmed hats surmounted with arrangements of silk flowers, artificial fruits and vegetables, even stuffed birds, were coming into vogue, and with them came the flaring gored skirts that swept the street on all sides. The artist Charles Dana Gibson had portrayed a number of tiny-waisted, fresh-faced girls wearing bosomy pleated and ruffled shirtwaists, and the shirtwaist would dominate fashion for nearly a generation as part of the Gibson Girl look. In Manhattan's garment district, the shirtwaist business was booming, and the Jewish girls who worked in these factories were known as “shirtwaist girls.” The term “sweatshop” was not yet in common use, and would not be until the tragedy of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911, in which 146 people, most of them shirtwaist girls, lost their lives.

Then, in the middle of what had been an uneventful spring, the American reading public was treated to banner headlines detailing what was billed as a real-life “Cinderella story.”

It all began on April 5, 1905, when the staid and stately
New York Times
—which never put engagement announcements on its front page except in the case of European royalty or international celebrities—broke its long-standing precedent. Obviously, the
Times
felt that the news of this particular betrothal was of unusual significance. Its front-page headline read:

J. G. PHELPS STOKES

TO WED YOUNG JEWESS

Engagement of Member of Old

New York Family Announced

BOTH WORKED ON EAST SIDE

An entire new century, after all, was now under way, a century that seemed filled with golden promise and limitless possibilities, in which anything could happen, and in which the newsboy heroes of Horatio Alger's tales—“Tattered Tom” and “Ragged Dick”—were regarded as inspirational. Fairy tales, it seemed, could indeed come true, and the story certainly seemed to contain all the necessary elements of a fairy tale.

The backgrounds of the engaged pair, the
Times
pointed out, could not possibly have been more dissimilar. The young Jewess in question—and in its choice of phraseology, even from the Jewish-owned
Times
, there was a hint of condescension—was not even a member of one of New York's proud uptown Jewish families (such as the Ochses and Sulzbergers). She was, of all things, a Polish immigrant, and poor.

This Cinderella's name was Rose Harriet Pastor, and she was on many counts an extraordinary young woman. At the time of her engagement to Mr. Stokes she was twenty-five years old—not technically beautiful, but slender and petite with delicate features including a thin, patrician nose, pale skin, green eyes, and an impressive mane of Titian hair that she wore, in the Gibson Girl fashion of the day, pulled back at the nape of her neck in a loose chignon. She had been born in a tiny village called Augustów, near Suwalki, on what is now the Russian-Polish border, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the daughter of Jacob and Anna Weislander. When Rose was still an infant, her father died and her mother remarried, and Rose took her stepfather's surname of Pastor. As thousands of Jewish families were doing to escape the pogroms, the Pastors emigrated from Poland in 1881, when Rose was two, and settled in London's Whitechapel. Here, in the East End ghetto, the little girl helped her mother sew bows on ladies' slippers for the next ten years. But, when the time came, she was also sent to school, which would give her a distinct advantage when
the family was able to afford its next move, in 1891, to America. By that time, English had become Rose Pastor's first language, and she spoke it with a pleasant British accent.

Once in the United States, the family traveled to Cleveland, where they had distant relatives. Soon afterward, Rose's stepfather died, and this, as it would turn out, would also be indirectly to her advantage. Though it forced her, at age twelve, to go to work to help support her mother and the younger children, it also made her her family's mainstay, and made her grow up quickly. For the next twelve years she worked fourteen hours a day in a Cleveland cigar factory, in a production line, rolling wrappers around cigars.

Since cigars are rolled when wet, it was damp, messy, and unpleasant work. And it was also monotonous. To relieve the monotony, she read. She discovered that she could sit at her worktable, rolling cigars with one hand, with a book in her lap, turning the pages with the other. Whenever her supervisor moved along the line, inspecting the girls' work, Rose would tuck the book under her apron.

She read constantly, avidly, whatever she could get her hands on. Had her Orthodox stepfather lived, this sort of behavior would never have been condoned. Bookishness was considered dangerous for Jewish girls, who, in any spare time they had, were supposed to study the womanly arts of housekeeping for future Jewish husbands. But Rose spent all her spare time reading. Indeed, the fact that she had not married by the age of twenty-five indicated that she had become something of a bluestocking.

She had also begun to write poetry. Her verse was light and airy and simple, much influenced by Emily Dickinson. In one poem, called “My Prayer,” she wrote:

Some pray to marry the man they love
,

My prayer will somewhat vary:

I humbly pray to Heaven above

That I love the man I marry
.

While the sentiments in Rose Pastor's verses did not bear much heavy analysis, they were unquestionably pleasant ones, and she began to submit her poetry to the
Tageblatt
. After a few initial rejection slips, the paper began to buy and publish
her verse. Then, in 1903, the
Tageblatt
invited Rose to come to New York to write an advice-to-the-lovelorn column on its English-language page, offering her a salary of fifteen dollars a week. This was a princely sum in an era when an Irish chambermaid might, if she were lucky, earn that much in a month, and when a copy of the
Tageblatt
itself sold for one cent. It was much more than Rose was making rolling cigars, and much more interesting work. Rose Pastor accepted the job eagerly, and her family followed their breadwinner to the East Coast, where she, her mother, and brothers and sisters took a small flat on Wendover Avenue in the Bronx.

Interestingly, in view of Rose Pastor's later career, the
Tageblatt
was the more politically conservative of New York's two leading Jewish dailies. Its rival, the
Forward
, was often fierily and outspokenly socialist and trade unionist, which, as we shall see, Rose Pastor herself would one day become. But the
Tageblatt
took the stance that socialism was “ungodly,” and often tried to convince its readers that Jewish labor organizers like David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman were actually Christian missionaries in disguise. The
Tageblatt
also devoted much space to the uptown do-gooder activities of Jacob Schiff and Julia Richman. Naturally, the
Tageblatt
received more approval and support from the uptown capitalists than the
Forward
did.

Meanwhile, there was nothing at all political about Rose Pastor's early
Tageblatt
columns. Under the title “Ethics of the Dust Pan,” they were not so much advice to the lovelorn as collections of sentimental homilies:

Life is a riddle to which love is the answer.

You suffer today because you have sinned yesterday.

A broken heart is better than a whole one where love has never crept in.

Who is too anxious to please pleases not at all.

Or little jokes and plays on words:

Good men become better by traveling, bad men, worse.

When a man is in a pickle, even his sweetheart
jars
him.

In addition to her regular column, Rose was occasionally assigned to do an interview or a feature story, for which she was given even larger by-lines. For one of these she was asked to investigate the phenomenon of the handsome young aristocrat named James Graham Phelps Stokes, who was doing volunteer social work for the University Settlement House on the Lower East Side. She was also asked to find out if there was any truth to rumors that, as a result of a disagreement with the board of governors, Mr. Stokes was about to withdraw his support from the University Settlement and move on to a new post.

From Stokes, Rose Pastor obtained a denial of the rumors, which the
Tageblatt
—with a certain penchant for making up stories out of whole cloth—had actually started. But it was also clear, from her story when it appeared, that she had been very much taken with Mr. Stokes personally. Breathlessly, and even a bit incoherently, she wrote:

Mr. Stokes is a deep, strong thinker. His youthful face “takes” by virtue of its fresh, earnest, and kind expression. One glance at his face and you feel that Mr. Stokes loves humanity for its own sake, and as he speaks on with the sincerity which is the keynote of his character you feel how the whole soul and heart of the man is filled with “Weltschmerz.” You feel that he “has sown his black young curls with bleaching cares of half a million men.”

Mr. Stokes is very tall, and, I believe, six feet of thorough democracy. A thoroughbred gentleman, a scholar, and a son of a millionaire, he is a man of the common people, even as Lincoln was. He is a plain man, and makes one feel perfectly at ease with him, nor does he possess that one great fault that men of his kind generally possess—the pride of humility. He does not flaunt his democracy in one's face, but when his democracy is mentioned to him, he appears as glad as a child who is told by an appreciative parent, “You have been a good boy to-day.”

There was a great deal more in this vein, and later Rose Pastor would blame careless cutting and editing for the odd syntax and incomplete sentences, but even after deep cutting it was a two-column story, and, reading it, her editor could not resist saying to her teasingly, “If I thought as much of Mr. Stokes as you seem to do, I would take care not to let anybody know it.”

She had, however, already let Graham Stokes know it. He had asked to see her copy before it was printed, and she had submitted the story to him for his approval. Clearly, he not only approved of it but was also more than a touch flattered by it. The story, and its author, made such an impression on him that, instead of returning her pages to her in the mail, he personally carried them back to her by hand. Then he invited her to dinner.

Later, Rose Pastor would confess that it was a case of “love at first sight.”

The object of her affections, meanwhile, possessed all the qualities of a Prince Charming. James Graham Phelps Stokes, who was known to his friends as Graham, was thirty-one, Yale '92, over six feet tall, darkly handsome, with the profile and athletic build of a Greek god. He sailed, he rode horses, and at college he had been a track and tennis star. For years he had been regarded as one of New York's most eligible bachelors. He belonged to all the city's most exclusive clubs, including the City Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Riding Club, the University Club, the National Arts Club, the Century Association, and the Saint Anthony Society, which was Yale's most elite fraternity. He was High Church Episcopalian. He and his family were firmly ensconced in the New York
Social Register
, and had been since the inception of that publication. The family had had its portraits painted by John Singer Sargent.

Though the
Times
and other newspapers, reporting the singular engagement, persisted in calling Graham Stokes a “millionaire,” young Stokes himself modestly denied this. On the other hand, there was no question that his father was. Graham was one of nine children of the banker Anson Phelps Stokes, and the Stokes family mansion at 229 Madison Avenue on the crest of Murray Hill, the city's most fashionable address, was one of New York's great showplaces. For a country place, Anson Phelps Stokes had built Shadowbrook, in Lenox,
Massachusetts, a hundred-room turreted granite castle that occupied an entire mountaintop and was second in size only to the Vanderbilts' Breakers at Newport among America's great resort “cottages.” Once, when he was a student at Yale, one of Graham Stokes's brothers had wired to their mother at Shadow-brook,
ARRIVING THIS EVENING WITH CROWD OF NINETY-SIX MEN.
Mrs. Stokes had wired back,
MANY GUESTS ALREADY HERE. HAVE ONLY ROOM FOR FIFTY.

And young Graham Stokes himself could hardly have been poor. He was president of the State Bank of Nevada, and he also owned a railroad, albeit a small one, the Nevada Central, with rolling stock consisting of only three locomotives and one passenger car.

Graham Stokes's lineage was as imposing as his family's wealth; he was “a descendant of families prominent in the Colonial history of New England,” as the newspapers put it, in a day when New England ancestors mattered mightily to status-conscious New Yorkers. Both the Phelps and Stokes families had been early settlers in the Massachusetts colony, and when they were joined by marriage in the early nineteenth century, it became a family tradition to use both names in the surname, where the words “Phelps Stokes” were spoken with an audible, if not an actual, hyphen. In addition to James Graham Phelps Stokes, there were also Caroline M. Phelps Stokes, Ethel Phelps Stokes, Mildred Phelps Stokes, and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. The names had been further glorified through distinguished membership in the clergy. One of Graham Stokes's younger brothers, the Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., was secretary of Yale University, and pastor of New Haven's most fashionable church, Saint Paul's Episcopal. Finally, there were even connections with the British aristocracy. Through her marriage to an English viscount, Graham's sister Sarah Phelps Stokes had become the Baroness Halkett.