The Jews in America Trilogy (137 page)

But the lunch with Goldwyn had not gone well.

“What's your new story about?” he asked her.

She replied that she had only written a few fragments of scenes, and could not really talk about the story until she got to the end.

“I don't know much about literature,” Goldwyn said. “But I do know that the plot of a good story can be summed up in a sentence, and you must know the end of the plot before you begin.”

Feeling helpless, Miss Yezierska replied that she didn't work this way. “My characters spin their own plots,” she told him.

“But what's the plot,” he insisted, “the suspense?”

“Suspense?” she said. “What greater suspense is there than the mystery of a guilty conscience?”

Miss Yezierska noticed the great producer's eyes beginning to look somewhat glazed. “Well, get to the point. What's the plot?” he repeated.

“The plot is the expiation of guilt,” she said.

Now Goldwyn was looking as though his lunch was not agreeing with him, and Miss Yezierska then launched into a long, autobiographical jeremiad: “I had to break away from my mother's cursing and my father's preaching to live my life; but without them I had no life. When you deny your parents, you deny the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. You become an outlaw, a pariah.…” The more she talked, the more Sam Goldwyn's apparent gastric disorder seemed to increase, and the more animated she became: “They mourned me as if I were dead. I am like Cain, forever bound to the brother he slew with his hate.…”

Mr. Goldwyn at that point remembered a pressing appointment, placed his napkin beside his plate, and excused himself. He had decided he was dealing with a madwoman.

And yet, because of all the publicity that had surrounded Anzia Yezierska's arrival in the movie capital, she was still regarded as a hot property in Hollywood. She was told that she had “a credit face”—that is, that she looked honest, that she had the kind of face that someone would extend credit to. Though she had written nothing at all since her arrival, William Fox of Fox Pictures approached her with a scheme to steal her away from Goldwyn, offering her an escalating contract to write for him—twenty thousand dollars for the first year, thirty thousand for the second year, and fifty thousand for the third. It was the kind of Hollywood contract that most film writers would have committed mayhem for. But, feeling bewildered, confused, totally out of her element, and beset by agonizing self-doubt—convinced that she could never produce anything worthy of such an imposing salary—she hesitated. She could not adjust to Hollywood's cynicism. She believed that she wrote from inspiration, and her muse had abandoned her. She was suffering from what today would be described as acute culture shock. In the end, she returned the Fox contract unsigned. “Who do you think you are?” William Fox asked her. “Joan of Arc, waiting for the voices?” She left Hollywood, never to return, and went back to New York and poverty.

Her next novel,
Salome of the Tenements
, fared
commercially no better than her first. It was not bought for the movies.
Hungry Hearts
, as a film, did not do well at the box office. She was already a defeated woman. To her parents, she was a failure for not having married and had children. Later, as the Great Depression settled across the country, Miss Yezierska was able to find work with the WPA Writers' Project, where, to earn her paycheck, she was forced to grind out a prescribed number of words a day on a tourists' guidebook to New York City.

The story of Rose Pastor Stokes would end on a not much greater note of triumph. As World War I spread across the face of Europe, drawing the United States inexorably into the conflict—while President Wilson vacillated—Rose remained active, touring, joining picket lines, and making speeches for the cause of socialism. Until the early summer of 1917, Rose and her husband appeared to present a united front politically, but then the first signs of dissension were noted. This occurred after the Socialist party had officially denounced Wilson's war programs, when he had finally declared war on Germany in April of that year. Graham Stokes, who disapproved of the party's antiwar stand, announced that he was quitting to join the army. This was followed by an announcement from Rose that she was also quitting.

But then, a few weeks later, she changed her mind, and announced that she was rejoining the Socialists. Within days, she was back in the political fray, attending Socialist meetings and rallies, chaining herself with handcuffs to striking workers. Late in 1917, she appeared to support a strike in the garment district, marching and chanting with the strikers. All at once, dozens of policemen descended, brandishing nightsticks. There were shouts, screams, and much general confusion at the confrontation, and then the policemen rushed the picket line, swinging. One of the striking women had been leading her small son by the hand. She was pushed aside, and a policeman began clubbing the child. Rose Stokes ran to protect the boy, and to throw her body across his. She was clubbed unconscious. It was the first of several brutal police beatings she would receive over the next ten years.

That was bad enough, but by 1919 Rose Pastor Stokes was in even deeper trouble. It was her fiery Russian style, as much as anything else, that lay at the heart of most of her difficulties.
But there was a new spirit abroad in the land that also had to be taken into account. No sooner was the First World War over than there were outbursts of violence throughout the United States. It was a phenomenon that has been noted by historians and philosophers: in the wake of a great national conflict, with peace restored, a nation—its adrenaline level still high—frequently turns its feverish energy to identifying and unearthing enemies at home. The Versailles peace treaty was signed in June of 1919, but it seemed that civilian furies could not be demobilized as quickly as a platoon, and 1919 became the year of the zealot, an era of revenge against domestic foes, real or imagined. The Hun had been brought to his knees, but now it seemed that there were other heads to be bloodied.

In 1919, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were released from prison, and then deported, along with more than two hundred other “traitors,” to Soviet Russia. An additional 249 Russian “undesirables” were shipped out aboard the S.S.
Buford
. A young special assistant to Attorney General Alexander Palmer was twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover, whose job it was to handle deportation cases involving alleged Communist revolutionaries, and who would help Palmer organize federal raids on Communist party offices throughout the United States. In a New York post office, just before May Day, sixteen bombs were found addressed to prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Palmer. Who was responsible for these was unclear, since America's list of enemies at home was growing—black anarchists, Red terrorists, the Jews, the Yellow Peril, the Roman Catholics, who, it was said, were conspiring to turn the country over to “Black Papism” and even to establish the pope in America. The Italians, too, were considered a dangerous element, and the groundwork was being set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists named Sacco and Vanzetti, who would be executed for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts.

May Day parades were broken up by the police. In the summer of 1919, race riots broke out in twenty-six American cities. On July 19, white soldiers in Washington, D.C., led a raid on the capital's black ghetto sections. On July 27, Chicago exploded when a disagreement at a Lake Michigan beach led to an armed foray into the city's Black Belt, at the end of which
fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks lay dead, with hundreds of others seriously injured.

On the labor front, it was a year of chaos, with, all told, more than four million Americans either on strike or locked out. On September 9, the police of Boston went on strike, and Governor Calvin Coolidge reacted by ordering the Massachusetts State Militia into Boston, and firing all 1, 117 of the striking officers. On September 22, steelworkers at the Gary, Indiana, plant of United States Steel went on strike. The steel strike lasted 110 days, and ended with none of the workers' demands met.

The blacks, Catholics, Orientals, and Jews aside, it was apparent to most right-thinking and red-blooded Americans where the blame for all this unrest and mischief lay—on Communist Russia, the Bolsheviks. Everyone knew that the Bolsheviks had a long-range plan to take over the world and subject it to communism, and that free America was one of communism's principal targets. All at once, in 1919, the proliferation of strikes against American industry provided all the evidence that was needed that a Communist takeover was indeed at hand. In state capitals across the country, laws were passed against “seditious speech,” and thousands were arrested and jailed for this offense, including a Socialist congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. In the state of Washington, the newly formed American Legion raided the headquarters of the International Workers of the World, and was roundly praised for this all-American action.

Each strike and riot of that year sparked a new Red Scare. Hundreds of people suspected of harboring Red sympathies were arrested, thrown into jail, and had their property confiscated. Informers abounded, ready with lists of Known Reds and Suspected Reds, on which they placed the names of all the people they didn't like. Innocent gatherings to hear lectures were translated as cell meetings. Because of a pointed finger and a cry of “Red!” a job could be lost and a reputation ruined. And if an employer could claim—and it was the easiest thing to do—that his employees' strike was “Red led” or “Red inspired,” patriotism came to the fore, and the police could be brought in to break it up with fists and clubs and pistols.

Of course, this is not to deny that a number of strikes
were
Communist led and Communist inspired.

From the time of America's entry into the war, meanwhile, the American Socialist party had been deeply divided between prowar and antiwar factions and, more important, between a moderate right wing and a radical left. The split had become formalized in 1919 when the Third International was founded in Moscow, dedicated to propagating the Communist doctrine throughout the world, and with the stated purpose of producing a worldwide revolution, with the Comintern vowing to unite all Communist groups on a global scale. During the war, Rose Stokes had aligned herself with the left-wing Socialists. But by 1919, with the split complete, Rose stopped calling herself a Socialist, and declared herself a Communist, helping to found the American Communist party. She quickly became a member of its Central Executive Committee.

Her trouble, however, had begun the previous year. It had all started innocently enough, in the early spring of 1918, when she was invited to speak before the Woman's Dining Club of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 16. By now, most of Rose's lecture audiences regarded her as more of a national curiosity and celebrity than as a political force—a poor Jewish girl who had married a prominent Christian, a woman who, despite the wealth and luxuries capitalist America had given her, still remained an avowed foe of capitalism. In responding to the Woman's Dining Club invitation, Rose advised that she would be happy to accept, but warned that if she spoke she would speak “as a Socialist.” The club's board of directors met to discuss this matter, and at least two members—notably Mrs. Maude B. Flowers and Mrs. Florence E. Gebhardt—vociferously opposed putting Rose on the program. America had been in the war with Germany for less than a year, and socialism smacked of anti-Americanism. But these ladies were in the minority, and Rose's terms were accepted. She arrived in Kansas City on the appointed date, and held forth on the dais for about an hour and a half, including a question period.

She spoke, as she always did, extemporaneously, and in those days before tape recorders, one of the problems would be that no one who attended that meeting, including the lecturer herself, would ever be able to reconstruct verbatim just what Rose Pastor Stokes had said to the ladies of Kansas City. As in any audience, different people remembered different things, but there was no question that certain people found some of
her remarks offensive. Some heard her say that she opposed the American war effort. Others inferred that she also opposed the drafting of young men into the United States Army. A reporter from the
Kansas City Star
, who had attended the meeting, had his own version of what had happened, which was published the following Monday, March 18:

So she's back in socialism. Mrs. Stokes [is] for the government and anti-war at the same time. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes, whose address before the Business Woman's Dining Club Saturday night was characterized by a navy officer as disloyal and anarchistic, denied both charges today.

“As to my being ‘terribly in favor of anarchy,'” she said, “I only wish Emma Goldman could hear that. How many, many times I have disputed that subject with her. I don't think that charge needs any further notice.

“As to the other things which have been published about the address Saturday night, even those who may have disagreed received it in a spirit of fairness and without any manifestation of disapproval. If there had been anything in it to warrant harsh criticisms, it seems strange that five hundred persons could have heard it through in such a spirit.”

Mrs. Stokes said today that in the Saturday night address she emphasized the fact that America was forced into the war.

“Briefly,” she said, “my statement was that while a very small minority of persons in America are in the war to make the world safe for capitalism, the overwhelming number of persons are in it to make the world safe for democracy. And that, ultimately, is the most significant issue of the great conflict.”

Mrs. Stokes said today that she resigned from the Socialist party when the United States entered the war, because she disapproved of the anti-war platform of the party adopted at St. Louis, but a few weeks ago became a member again having decided the St. Louis platform, in the main, was right.