The men’s and women’s clothing industry in New York was growing rapidly in the period of large-scale immigration of Jews from Russia, Poland, Galicia, and Romania to America. The bulk of the workers in the “needle trades” were immigrants who poured their toil, sweat, and blood into the industry. The standard of living of those newcomers was very low. Back home they had suffered through poverty and pogroms. Their home towns in the old country were sinking ships from which they had fled in shock and fear to the free land of America.
But here they felt uprooted, lonely, alienated. Forming unions was a remedy for many of them. They huddled together closely like a barn full of sheep who see the wolf’s teeth waiting to kill and devour them.
When Socialist orators came to the Jewish neighborhood, like Cahan, Zametkin, Miller, Hillquit, and Barondess, they were greeted not simply as leaders, but like gods.
The radicals considered it their highest priority to organize the unions, which were seen as a means to spread Socialism and, in the interim, as necessary temporary protection for Jewish workers against awful exploitation by the owners, those “inside manufacturers”
hiding behind the backs of the sweatshop contractors, who were often poor themselves. It was a great honor for a Socialist to be permitted by the UHT or the Jewish section of the SLP to work in a union and help out when there was a strike. Permission was granted only to those comrades who could be trusted to do such work. Socialists who worked in the unions got close to those workers who were serious and dedicated union members. We would talk to them often, and they eventually joined the SLP.
The speeches that we gave to spread our ideas went something like this: Workers! Brothers and Sisters! Everyone who earns a living from labor should belong to his union. The union is the sole organization that takes care of your needs and protects your health. A lone worker by himself is only a tiny creature facing his boss in any disagreement.
If he dares to complain he finds himself out on the street. But when he is part of a union he is supported by a large number of other workers, surrounded by people who are ready to help him at every step. He doesn’t have to stand alone in his struggle; all the others stand together with him. Only by uniting can workers achieve higher wages. A worker is powerless by himself. The owners have tried to destroy the unions right from the start. They have used every possible means to crush the labor movement: public opinion, the press, the legislatures, the courts, and the jails.
Every manufacturer thinks that the business he runs is his own, and that no one has the right to interfere and to tell him how to conduct it.
But the unions can obtain shorter work hours for the workers, better conditions, safer tools, and a larger share of the profits they produce than they could get individually on their own. Naturally the capitalists cannot stand it when the unions get involved in their affairs. They simply cannot abide it when workers tell them how to manage a private business.
But in reality the man who contributes his labor and his health to a factory or to a railroad has invested just as much in the running of that factory or railroad as the one who contributed his money. Therefore he
should have as much a say in how many hours he should work and in the conditions of his employment as the boss. It is true that the boss is the legal owner and he can keep it open or shut it down, as he wishes. But the workers have exactly the same right to withhold their labor under conditions that are not to their liking. Workers enjoy that right, whether they exercise it individually or all together. Bosses and workers both understand that through a trade union the workers can get better pay for their work than if the union were destroyed. They both see that, but each from the perspective of their own personal interest. The boss wishes to destroy the unions, while the workers want to strengthen them. And as long as personal interest remains the fundamental principle of business, we have to maintain that struggle faithfully. For as long as capitalism is the law of the land, trade unions will need to keep up the fight.
Obviously not every speaker used the exact same language, but that was the general tenor of the talks that the workers heard. For most of my life in the labor movement, I devoted the majority of my time to building unions. And I did have a lot of free time, because the bosses and the foremen knew who I was, and I was often fired. There was no rule back then saying that a boss could only fire a worker for a valid reason.
That was a rule that the unions had to fight for in a variety of arenas and gradually established.
We did our principal work of organizing unions by calling meetings, which we called “mass assemblies”, but first we had to lay the groundwork by sending volunteers to the factories and sweatshops to distribute handbills to the workers. We also gave handbills out in restaurants, dancing schools, cigar stores, and on the bridges where the workers in some trades used to congregate. For example, the dress makers often gathered at the corner of Essex Street and Hester Street, a place that we called “the Pig Market”. Contractors would come there to recruit half-basters103 and operator “assistants”. The knee-pants workers used to frequent the corner of Ludlow and Broome, which was a smaller version of the “Pig Market”. The cloak makers stood at the corner of Orchard and Hester. Dancing schools were the place to find Romanian workers.
103 The work in the sweatshops was often conducted by teams consisting of a baster, a half-baster, an operator, a helper, a finisher, a trimmer, a bushelman, and a presser.
At first there was no Yiddish labor newspaper, and even later, when there was one, not all the workers read it. Though there were bourgeois papers, they did not publish announcements for labor meetings. And when, for example, the tailors or the bakers went on strike, those newspapers took the side of the bosses, never the workers. They opposed the unions and condemned the organizers. Despite that, we still managed to hold mass meetings, form unions, and launch strikes.
It sometimes happened that, by the time we decided to call a general strike in a certain trade, spontaneous strikes had already broken out at individual shops, because the workers couldn’t take it any longer and wouldn’t wait for a general strike. Strikers would often walk out and go to a beer hall, rent a meeting room, and then look for Jewish labor leaders, who did not have their own offices at the time. The Socialist union activists would come into the beer hall, ask the strikers for the details that had led to the strike, and organize the strike in an orderly fashion. They would then go to the owners to ask for their side of the story. On occasion, the conflict could be resolved on the spot. If not, the activists would return to the strikers and appoint pickets, who would go see if any workers were still working as “scabs”. Then they would line up outside the shop.
Although it was easy to have Jewish workers go on strike, it was very difficult to actually win a strike. And it was very painful to see striking workers not be allowed to return to their shops. It was most difficult to win a strike when the boss was a rich manufacturer and not a contractor.
Such rich owners were very stubborn, and they were prepared to lose a lot of money so long as they could refuse the demands of their workers and break their union.
Among the workers, there were a number of ignorant people of low character who would have sold their own fathers for a dollar. So it was easy for the owners to get “scabs” to break any strike. In addition, there were tramps from all over who would come to the shops and tell the pickets that they knew the craft, they didn’t want to replace the striking workers, but they had unfortunately been jobless for a long time and were dying of hunger, so what else could they do? But if we could help them out, then they wouldn’t work there. That kind of tramp would take the last pennies of the union fund.
The bosses would usually hire toughs, hoodlums — “guards” as they called them. The police and the detectives would also beat up the strikers, drag them off to jail or to court, and frame them. The judges at that time were in cahoots with the pack of politicians from the East Side, so they obliged them by sentencing the strikers to months in the workhouse. In addition, the workers were very poor, so when they went on strike they had nothing to live on. When the first day of the month came around and they didn’t have the money for the rent, the landlords would threaten to throw their furniture out on the street — and some actually did. You can well imagine what an awful responsibility it was for those organizers of the first Jewish unions and the strike leaders. It is almost impossible to convey the heartbreak of those early Jewish labor activists.
The unions usually had no money in their accounts. One striker is carrying his eviction notice around. Another is complaining that there is no bread in his house. A third one has a sick wife. The child of a fourth has just died. And the strike committee has to help them all. Now a picket comes running to tell us that one of the strikers just sold out to the boss. Then a striker is carried in, his face pale and all covered with blood. He has been beaten up, and his clothes are torn. He passes out.
We pour cold water on him and run for a doctor. The phone rings. More bad news: five more strikers have been arrested near one of the shops.
We have to find a “bailer” to get him out of jail until the trial. We run to the lawyer and the doctor, but there’s no money to pay them. It was an agonizing struggle, but we didn’t give up hope. We had to be brave to give other people courage.
We hold a meeting, and the strikers start coming in. We, the “leaders”, make speeches.
We tell them that “we’re standing fast” and “we will overcome” and
“we’re going to win our strike, and our opponents — the bosses — are in deep trouble and will soon have to accede to the just demands of the workers”. The crowd applauds. We cheer ourselves up and carry on. We would ask for advice from the leaders of other unions, the progressive German workers who were sympathetic. They had strong unions in New York and elsewhere, and we, the founders of the Jewish unions, had much to learn from them. The German unions helped us a lot in those days.
The majority of the German workers in the unions were Socialists, and the critical lesson we learned from them was that we needed to
have our own newspaper if we were going to build a movement. Ever since the founding of the Jewish Workers’ Association, we had tried to publish a Yiddish labor newspaper but had not succeeded. When the United Hebrew Trades association was formed, we in Branch 8 (the Yiddish section) of the Socialist Labor Party discussed at our meetings how to establish our own newspaper in Yiddish.
Varhayt, the newspaper the anarchist group Pioneers of Liberty put out in 1889, went out of business after seven months. A few months later a new progressive Yiddish newspaper came out. It was called Der morgenshtern,104 and was published by Ephraim London, Meyer London’s father.105 Its first editor was Dr Braslavsky (from Breslau in Germany),106 who had been editor of Di Niu-yorker yidishe folkstsaytung, which had gone out of business. Toward the end of 1889 the Pioneers called a general convention, to which they invited all the Jewish organizations, anarchists, Social-Democrats, education associations, and Jewish unions, to discuss the possibility of publishing a nonpartisan Jewish newspaper that would include both anarchists and Social-Democrats.
Jewish sections of the Socialist Labor Party already existed in many cities: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Haven, Hartford, New Britain, Chicago, and others. There were also anarchist groups, education associations, and Jewish unions, mostly in the garment trade.
They all sent delegates, thirty-two organizations in all. The convention was held at the Pioneer headquarters, in a big building on Essex Market that had been a military barracks.
The convention lasted six days and nights. The hall was huge, and it could accommodate two hundred people. It was packed. The seats of the delegates were cordoned off with heavy cords so that it was easy to tell the delegates apart from the guests. The clouds of cigarette smoke and the tumult did nothing to impede the impassioned speeches that were given. The anarchists realized that they were not in a position to publish and support a newspaper all on their own. They thought that if they shared a newspaper with the Social-Democrats they could take control and convert the public to anarchism.
104 Yiddish: The Morning Star.
105 Ephraim London was a printer with radical views, whose shop on the Lower East Side was a hub of Socialist activity.
106 Now Wrocław, Poland.
As I’ve noted, the anarchists did not believe in trade unions. They operated under the principle that the worse conditions became, the better. They hoped that if the workers earned nothing, they would soon launch a social revolution. The Social-Democrats, by contrast, held that
“better was better”. If workers earned more and worked shorter hours their morale would improve, which would encourage them to struggle even harder both for more improvements right now and for an eventual liberation from capitalist slavery. Heated debates between “socialism”
and “anarchism” would often take place at union meetings, and the great orators would line up on one side or the other.
Ironically, in their effort to forge a newspaper together with the Social-Democrats, the anarchists first heaped attacks on them, saying that they were holding back the social revolution. But then they ended by calling for a common newspaper. The Social-Democrats responded by saying how ridiculous it would be to publish a newspaper with the anarchists under those circumstances — such a paper would in no way serve the labor movement.
Abraham Cahan attended the convention as a guest only, but he was so passionate on this issue that he never left the sessions. As a result, he threw himself body and soul into turning this communal newspaper for the labor movement into a reality. But on the fourth day of the convention the two sides finally split apart. The Social-Democrats withdrew from the convention, and all the Jewish unions walked out with them. The convention became two conventions, and each one decided to publish its own newspaper. The Social-Democrats, the unions, and the United Hebrew Trades — who were called “partisan people” — agreed to put out a Socialist and trade union weekly newspaper called the Arbeter tsaytung. The anarchists and the education associations — who were called pareve lokshn107—decided to publish a “nonpartisan” weekly called the Fraye arbeter shtime, which came out in July 1890, four months after the Arbeter tsaytung.
The Social-Democrats started the Arbeter tsaytung Publishing Association, which collected a few thousand dollars in just two months.
But even before we had enough money, and even before we had picked a date for the first day of publication, we wrote to Philip Krantz in London
107 Yiddish: noodles that can be eaten with either milk or meat, according to the kosher laws.
asking him to be the editor. He had already promised Louis Miller that he would come, when they were both delegates at the Congress of the Socialist International in Paris in 1889.108 We collected the money for his ship’s ticket from the comrades by dollars and half-dollars. I was the collector of these donations. It also fell to me to go to Castle Garden to meet his ship. A week later we held a meeting of the Arbeter tsaytung Publishing Association, where we officially installed Philip Krantz as the editor of the newspaper and Morris Hillquit as the manager. We voted to give them each a salary of seven dollars a week. The Arbeter tsaytung first came out on Friday, March 2, 1890 at three in the morning.
Krantz, Cahan, Hillquit, and others stayed up nights getting all the articles ready. Our editors and our printers were located at 29 Henry Street, not far from Catherine Street. They were in the basement of a small private house with two large rooms divided by doors that had been removed. The room nearest the street had the editors and the business office. The editor had a desk with a drawer to keep the manuscripts in. But Krantz didn’t trust that drawer, so he carried the manuscripts around in his vest pocket. God knows how many articles he was carrying around!
The manager had an old-fashioned high desk with a tall stool.
Business was slow and not much money came in, so the manager, Comrade Hillquit, used to sit there and write poems in heavily Germanized Yiddish, which he signed with the pseudonym Hamnagen.109 There were also a few wooden benches in the office where unemployed comrades would come and sit. Those without seats would stand. It gave them special satisfaction to be in the same room where their Arbeter tsaytung was being written and published. In the other room, four or five typesetters were working by hand — there were no machines at the time. Our landlord was a Jewish pawnbroker. At first he wouldn’t rent it to us because we were Socialists, but we agreed to pay him twenty-nine dollars a month, which was considered a lot of money in those days.
May 1, 1890 was approaching. At the Congress of the Socialist International in Paris the year before, it had been agreed that on
May 1, 1890 was approaching. At the Congress of the Socialist International in Paris the year before, it had been agreed that on