The Jews in America Trilogy (130 page)

Interestingly, the
Hebrew Standard
had also editorialized that the uptown German Jews were “closer to the Christian
sentiment” around them, and had nothing in common with the “Orientalism” of the East Side's “miserable darkened Hebrews.” Was the
Standard
addressing itself to a “white” Jewish readership? Or was this just another indication of the kind of Jewish schizophrenia that seemed to be sweeping the country? In any case, it was another dark omen that the Cinderella Story, and the Romance of the Century, might in the end turn out to be something else again.

“Fame!” Rose Pastor had written in one of her verses for the
Tageblatt:

Fame!

What's in the name

To make men hurry and scurry so;

To make them hanker and worry so;

Rushing forever past friend and foe

Rushing so madly through maddening crowd
,

Heedless of human hearts crying aloud;

Hearts that are hungry
—
and still theirs are proud!

Passing the true for profitless gain;

Giving up all for the naught of a name
—

For fame!

But now, of course, Rose Pastor Stokes herself was famous, and her marriage—giving up her Jewishness for the naught of a name—had provided a whole generation of East Side Jewish girls with a romantic idyll of how, with a simple “I do,” it was possible to leap out of grinding poverty into success and luxury. Upon returning to New York from their summer-long honeymoon in Europe, Rose and Graham Phelps Stokes set themselves up in a top-floor apartment in a building on the corner of Grand and Norfolk streets on the Lower East Side, just nine blocks east of the Bowery. They had chosen this far from fashionable address, Rose explained to an interviewer from
Harper's Bazar
, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it was close to the University Settlement, where both planned to continue to work. For another, it was hard by the teeming Eastern European Jewish ghetto, and the poor whom they intended to uplift. To her interviewer, Rose dismissed the apartment as “tiny,” though it had a comfortable quota of six rooms—a library, a dining room, a sitting room, a large and well-equipped
kitchen, and two bedrooms—and a bath. The building had an elevator, run by “a German woman in a blue calico gown.” Rose pointed out that the apartment rented for “only” thirty-eight dollars a month. But the interviewer noted that, though Rose Stokes described her decor as “simple,” there were “finely bound books” on the bookshelves of the library, a piano in the sitting room, “handsome vases” filled with fresh flowers on the tables, some bronze pieces, Oriental rugs on the floors, and Millet etchings on the walls. Mrs. Stokes explained that she had “literally” no servants, “the only help being the janitress, who is called in on sweeping-days.”

The Stokes apartment, and its location, also had a symbolic significance, Rose explained. With it, she hoped to demonstrate how, with a few simple touches, even the most cramped dwelling place in the ghetto could be made pleasant and attractive. Rose explained how, with little economies, it was possible to live on a modest budget. For example, she used very little meat, substituting “eggs cooked in innumerable ways.” She used lots of uncooked vegetables, plenty of milk, good bread and butter and fruit, but neither coffee nor tea. Another economy was to eliminate table linen. Instead of napery—“quite an item in the household expenses”—she used “pretty Japanese napkins” of white paper, which could be bought at twenty cents the hundred, disposed of after each meal, and “which entirely eliminate laundry work.” She went on to say that she hoped her apartment would have a second symbolic function: that it would “arouse public interest, and force more general recognition of the unfair condition of life and labor that weighs down our neighbors.” This was why she was taking a reporter from
Harper's Bazar
, and a photographer, on a tour of the place.

But which was it to be? An example of how the poor could get by with substituting eggs for meat, using paper napkins instead of linen, milk instead of coffee or tea, and thus be able to afford Oriental rugs and fresh flowers? Or a demonstration of the fact that the rich lived better than the poor—a fact that few of the poor had not grasped? Rose Pastor Stokes seemed not to have realized that she could not have it both ways; that her elevator building, her janitress, her six rooms with private bath, her steam heat and electricity were amenities that would have seemed incomprehensible to the average tenement dweller
down the street, where a family of five lived in a single windowless cell, a single fetid toilet served an entire building, the family bathtub was the kitchen sink where only cold water ran, and a fire escape in good weather provided the luxury of a second room. She seemed not to realize that, for a family bringing in only six or seven dollars a week, an apartment costing “only” thirty-eight dollars a month would have been out of the question. This appeared to be at the heart of Rose's problem. Now that she was indeed famous, she seemed not quite to know what to do with her fame.

As the year 1905 drew to a close, meanwhile, there was a certain amount of speculation within the upper reaches of New York society as to whether the new Mrs. James Graham Phelps Stokes would be listed in the next edition of the
Social Register
. Or whether, for having married a Jewess, Mr. Stokes would be dropped from the little list of who mattered in New York's white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant upper crust.

These questions were duly answered when the 1906 issue of the
Register
made its annual autumn appearance. Both newlyweds were listed, along with their prestigious clubs, at the unlikely address of 47 Norfolk Street, close to what was now their joint settlement-house work—though they also indicated a more prepossessing summer address: a place called Caritas Island, off the Connecticut shore near Stamford. Thus, Rose Pastor earned another distinction of sorts. She had become the first person of known Jewish descent to be included in New York's official “stud book,” unless one counted August Belmont, who “passed.”

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 named 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.”