The Jews in America Trilogy (131 page)

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 her 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.

In 1912, with Ernest H. Lehman, she was working on another book, about methods of teaching Jewish ethics, which the Jewish Chautauqua Society of Philadelphia planned to publish. Among her other projected plans was the establishment of a correspondence course for teachers in religious schools. Her memoirs, to be titled
Forty Years in the New York Public Schools
, had been promised to the Macmillan Company.

In June, Miss Richman sailed for Europe with a group of friends, intending a summer holiday. At the outset of the trip, with her usually splendid constitution, she felt fine. But during the crossing she felt increasingly ill. Seasickness was blamed, but when she landed at Cherbourg her condition was so poor that she was rushed by train to the American Hospital in Paris. There her condition was diagnosed as appendicitis, with “complications.”

It was of these that she died a few days later.

*
Miss Richman's fire was fictional. Three years after they were written, the Triangle fire made her words seem prophetic.

4

AN OCCUPATION FOR GENTLEMEN

Despite the well-intentioned efforts of the do-gooders and reformers, and a general improvement in the immigrants' economic status, there was still plenty of crime on the Lower East Side. It was almost inevitable in an area so densely packed with humanity. East Siders grew accustomed to hearing the periodic sounds of human screams rising from tenement streets and windows, and quickly learned to ignore them. The scream might mean a simple domestic argument, or it might mean that someone was being murdered, but in any case it was wisest not to become involved. If one did, and the police came, the innocent bystander was often hauled off to jail with the offender. Much of the crime was youthful hooliganism. Certain blocks were considered Irish territory, others were Italian, and still more were Jewish. None of the three groups got along with the others, but the Irish and Italian street gangs, being Catholic, tended to side together against the “Christ-killers.” The Jewish youths rarely carried knives, but the Irish and Italians did, and taunts and insults between the gangs frequently led to fights, stabbings, killings, followed by vendettas of revenge.

In the summer months, each ethnic gang had staked out a particular strip of East River shoreline where the boys swam naked from the docks. These preserves, however, were always being invaded by bands of youths from enemy territory, and there were water fights and drownings. Jewish youths, instilled from the time of infancy with the idea that education was the best avenue out of the ghetto, were not often truants. But the Irish and Italians were less scrupulous about school attendance, and the Jewish youth forced to walk home from school through a hostile neighborhood often found himself confronted with a knife-wielding band of Irish boys demanding that he drop his trousers to show whether or not he was circumcised. If he were not circumcised “enough,” the enemy gang would try to perform the operation for him. Doughtier Jewish boys soon learned to give out as good as they got. If you could put up a good fight, after all, you earned for yourself that intangible asset, respect.

It had been discovered that there was money to be made out of this touchy ethnic situation. For a few pennies a day, a beleaguered Jewish boy found that he could purchase the “protection” of an older or tougher Italian or Irishman. Or the tougher Jew might hire out to protect a frailer coreligionist, and become, in effect, his bodyguard. The protection notion quickly spread to involve the business community as well, and the shopkeeper and café owner learned that hiring a protector on a monthly basis was practical insurance against having his premises looted or vandalized. On this level, the protection business became quite lucrative, and many Jewish entrepreneurs—as well as Italians—became involved in it. No one seems to have given much thought to the legality of the protection business—or racket, as some called it. Paying protection was a nuisance, but a necessary one, part of the overhead and the cost of doing business, and the price was simply passed on to the consumer.