It was 1890, when the United Hebrew Trades of New York counted thirty-six unions, and we had Di Arbeter tsaytung. The Jewish Socialists of New York decided to help our comrades in Philadelphia. At the time, anarchism was very attractive to the Jewish masses in Philadelphia. The anarchists had many Yiddish speakers there, while the number of Jewish Social-Democrats was very small. They had no Socialist speakers, so they would bring them in from New York. That was why they decided to send Mikhail Zametkin, who was one of our finest Yiddish Socialist lecturers, to live in Philadelphia for a while. He would help build a Socialist movement there.
As Secretary of the UHT, I traveled with Zametkin to help found a United Hebrew Trades organization there. We arranged a series of mass meetings and union meetings.
We both went to all those meetings, which were crammed into three days, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. As far as I recall, there were only a few small Jewish unions in Philadelphia then, those of the tailors, the jacket makers, and the knee-pants workers. Zametkin and I took the train down to Philadelphia on a Friday morning in December 1890.
We were both Social-Democrats, and we discussed how to spread our ideals. We agreed that we should help to organize Jewish unions as we had done in New York, and then our Socialist propaganda would catch on. We arrived at about five in the afternoon.
A couple of comrades came to meet us at the station, and then we took a car to the Jewish neighborhood on the South Side, to 4th or 5th Street. We entered a café where the comrades used to hang out, and we had supper there and spent an hour talking with them. Then I went over to a hall on Gherig Street (there’s a Jewish school there now). We left Zametkin in the café. A committee and I decorated the hall with red banners and banners that I had brought from New York. People began to fill the hall — young, old, women, even children whom some workers had brought along. That pleased me a lot, because in New York we only had children at the celebrations, whereas there, in Philadelphia, whole families came to Socialist meetings. We started at eight o’clock. Zametkin made a speech. In his younger years, Comrade Zametkin spoke with fire. His audiences were always enthusiastic and enthralled, and that talk in Philadelphia was a success. The crowd was thrilled. People asked questions, and Zametkin’s responses were greeted warmly.
There were lots of anarchist sympathizers there, too, and they also asked questions. The meeting lasted past midnight, and the audience gradually dissipated. But I stayed till the end, guarding the banners that I had brought from New York. I was waiting for the hall to empty so that I could take down my signs. When I was done I realized that there was no one left. The Philadelphia comrades had forgotten to tell me where I could spend the night, and I didn’t have money for a hotel room. I wasn’t worried, because I knew a lot of people there. Years earlier I had walked to Philadelphia and had worked there in my trade as a cigar maker.
I took my bundle and went to find a place to sleep. It was quite late, about one o’clock, and it was raining. I went into a coffee shop, but there was no one there I knew. “They’ve all gone home”, I was told. I went into
another, but I had no luck. That was bad, I knew, because they all closed at two o’clock. And it was raining harder. I remembered that there was another meeting place somewhere on Lombard Street, so I ran over in the pouring rain. And there I met a comrade from New York, Morris Smilansky, who is now deceased, who was working in Philadelphia. He took me to sleep over at his brother’s house. He was a Socialist and a member of the Bookbinders’ Union. I was delighted.
I spent the next day running from one union meeting to another.
I made speeches encouraging the workers to build stronger unions, just as I did in New York. We worked until about five in the afternoon.
Then we went to the German Labor Lyceum on North 5th Street, where delegates were meeting from the three Jewish unions who were starting the United Hebrew Trades of Philadelphia. They elected J. Greenberg, a representative of the Jewish section of the Socialist Labor Party, to be the first Secretary of the Philadelphia UHT. That Saturday night we held a huge mass meeting in Gherig Hall, which was called by the new Philadelphia UHT. Zametkin fired up the audience that night. On Sunday we went from one meeting to another. We spent the evening with our German comrades at a concert at the German Labor Lyceum.
Zametkin moved to Philadelphia, and his efforts won many adherents to Socialism. Jewish workers formed new unions and new branches of the Socialist Labor Party. Every week one of our speakers would travel from New York to Philadelphia: Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, Louis Miller, or Benjamin Feigenbaum. But that first Philadelphia organization did not last long. It fell apart for lack of activists. A few years later a second UHT was founded, which has lasted to this day.
Jewish Socialists loved Philadelphia, and we chose it as the site of the second convention — which we called our “Party Day” — of the Yiddish section of the SLP. At the time we had ten Party organizations in various cities. The Philadelphia section already had its own hall for lectures.
One fine day the police expelled the anarchists from their “Yom Kippur Ball”, which they had arranged to hold in a large hall. So the anarchists came to the hall of the Social-Democrats to have their get-together. The police, incited by wealthy religious Jews, then tried to attack the second assembly at the Social-Democrats. But the meeting had ended, so they found no one in the hall, only Comrade Meyer Gillis, who was locking
up the place since he was on the house committee of the Party section.
They arrested him and charged him. He was sentenced to a year in prison despite all appeals and suffered for ten months in Moyamensing Prison.
There was a Jewish policeman named Casper in Philadelphia in those days who used to come to all the meetings of the Socialist Labor Party to hear the speakers. He was the one who arrested Gillis. Soon after, Casper arrested Abraham Cahan when he was speaking in Philadelphia. Casper brought charges against him, too, but the magistrate freed Comrade Cahan as soon as he heard the charges. Some time later Casper arrested Benjamin Feigenbaum, and a trial was held in a higher court. The charge against him was “inciting to riot”, but the judge let him go.
And that was how the Socialists worked energetically forty years ago in Philadelphia and other cities to organize Jewish workers into unions and to spread their ideals. In 1890 the cloak makers launched a strike in Philadelphia, which lasted eighteen months and which they lost. That happened because of the strife between the Jewish anarchists and the Social-Democrats in Philadelphia and across the country. That same year the shirt makers also struck several times. Workers in Jewish bakeries also held strikes, and they won some improvements in working conditions. In 1891 the cloak makers of Philadelphia went through a lockout. The owners got together and locked out all the workers, demanding that they reject their union. Seven hundred men’s tailors also struck that year. It was the Knights of Labor who called that strike, and it was a victory for the workers, who had demanded that the owners hire only union members and that wages be paid every Saturday.
Philadelphia was the birthplace of the Knights, and they were stronger there than anywhere else. In 1889 there was an influx of Jewish unions into the Order. But in 1891, when the United Garment Workers was started, the American Federation of Labor attracted the Jewish tailors’ union. Following the example of the United Tailors’ Union Local 1 of Philadelphia, all the other branches of the union went over to the United Garment Workers. The United Hebrew Trades organized the pants workers and the cap makers. The cap makers joined with the International Cap Makers’ Union of America. The cloak makers, who were at first under the sway of the anarchists, later joined the Philadelphia UHT, who were overwhelmingly Social-Democrats.
The great crisis of 1893 triggered massive unemployment. Almost all the Jewish unions and the UHT were reeling. But by 1894 the Social-Democrats of Philadelphia were able to resuscitate the UHT, primarily due to the efforts of Meyer Gillis of the Socialist Labor Party, B. Bichovsky and J. Landau of the Children Jacket Makers’ Union, and the brothers Shembeliants of the Shirt Makers’ Union. The cloak makers, the tailors, the pants makers, and the knee-pants makers joined the renewed United Hebrew Trades.
That year the Cloak Makers’ Union held a strike against Strawbridge
& Co., in sympathy with the cloak makers in New York. When the shirt makers in New York went on strike, the owners sent the work down to be done in Philadelphia, but the Philadelphia workers refused to do it. In 1895 there were two children’s jackets makers’ unions in the city, one of them associated with the Knights of Labor, the other with the United Garment Workers. There was bitter strife between them, and they sometimes came to blows. In the end it was the United Garment Workers’ Union that prevailed. That year, too, the pants makers won a strike for higher wages. The Philadelphia Tailors’ Union waged a campaign against the sweatshop system — there was an outbreak of smallpox, and the union refused to get inoculations until the system was abolished.