S. L. Blumenson here tells from personal memory the story of a strike that played an important part in the revolt against the sweatshop and brought trade unionism for the first time to the American garment industry.
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One sunny spring day in the year 1905, a cloak operator named Friedland (prophetically nicknamed “Columbus” by his fellow workers) pulled a switch that set in motion a train of events which was to wipe out the sweat shop and begin a new era in the garment industry. Though I was only a youngster just out of my teens (and a hireling of the “bosses” to boot), I can claim a part in that day’s eventful doings.
Friedland worked in a large sweat shop on Walker Street (near Broadway) in New York City which manufactured those children’s coats called “reefers.” Suddenly he stood up from his work, strolled over to the switch handle which controlled the electric motors driving the fifty sewing machines, and jerked it down. As soon as the sewing machines purred to a standstill, the hundredodd workers—men, women, and some children—held a shop meeting under Friedland’s direction, and voted unanimously to strike. Following this, they all trooped down to Adelson’s Saloon and Meeting Hall on Monroe Street near Pike Street, on the lower East Side, appointed a strike committee, selected pickets, and by the following morning the strike was in full swing.
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In those days, there were about twentyfive shops clustered around Walker, Lispenard, Church, and Canal Streets, between Broadway and West Broadway. In addition, there were a number on Greene and Wooster Streets, and two on Spring Street, all west of Broadway.
As it happened, about eighty per cent of the bosses and workers in this section of the industry were landsleit and relatives. They all came from a small district in Lithuania, the uyezd or county of Hooman, in the province of Minsk—from such villages as Schmilovits, Dukor, Puchovitch, Hooman, Bobroisk, Berezin, and Minsk.
Most of the manufacturers were graduates of a pioneer shop established in a loft on alley-like Pelham Street, which is one block long and runs between Monroe and Cherry Streets, near Pike, right around the corner from Adelson’s Saloon and Meeting Hall. This shop was opened in the year 1889 by an immigrant from Dukor, his two sons, and his son-in-law. The father was a tailor by trade, as was the son-in-law. The two sons, however, were ex-yeshiva bochurim, and excellent Hebrew scholars. When they opened their own shop, after working in various sweatshops, the father did the cutting and finishing and pressing, and the other three operated the sewing machines. The business grew and prospered, and it soon became a beehive of new immigrants from the county of Hooman. Older men, small town baal habaatim (householders), became pressers; younger men became araushelfers, helpers to operators; and the young women, mostly teenage, became finishers. (The “reefer” industry was then one hundred per cent Jewish. Italian workers had not as yet infiltrated. Some “finishing” homework was taken by a few Italian women, who carried big bundles of cloth on their heads, well balanced and erect, with the grace of field workers carrying sheaves of grain.)
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In time, some of the graduates of this shop opened places of their own, two or three pooling their skills and their few dollars. It did not require much capital to start a small factory. A dark hole of a loft, more often than not over a smelly stable, at a monthly rental of ten or twelve dollars, a few wooden horses and boards for a cutting table, a few chairs, a long cutting knife, and a gas or wood stove for the solid press irons—these made up a shop. Every operator had to supply his own sewing machine.
The “capitalists” bought a few bolts of very cheap cloth, cheap even for those days, and manufactured children’s wearing apparel ranging in price from ninety cents to two dollars apiece wholesale, and women’s and misses’ finery from a dollar and a half to three seventy-five. Despite these low prices, and to compensate for the cheapness of the cloth, these garments had to have “style.” Yards and yards of soutache, braid, and gimp were sewed onto them in all manner of geometric design, and some were trimmed with innumerable ornamental buttons. It does not require a cost accountant to determine that little was left over for the payroll.
Most of these shops had originally clustered around their “alma mater” on Pelham, Monroe, Cherry, and Pike Streets, but circumstances compelled them to move elsewhere. The “circumstances” were a gang of fire-bugs operating on the East Side, who set fire to whole blocks of loft buildings which burned to the ground with great loss of life. (The gang was finally caught, and the members, one a woman, received sentences of thirty-five to forty-five years in Sing Sing.) In their new quarters, the more progressive factories prospered, changing to power machines, and charging the workers fifty cents a week for the use of them. Some even installed gas irons. The operators of these shops were not contractors, but small manufacturers. They made the cheapest sort of women’s, misses’, and children’s capes (worn extensively in those days), coats in all sizes, and “reefers.”
For the most part these garments were un-lined or half-lined, because the cost of felling in linings by hand was more than the traffic could bear. Just about this time, however, a way was found to sew linings by machine, and these downtown shops began to make all-lined clothing, giving the “classier” up-town shops tough competition. Moreover, plush coats were beginning to displace cloth coats in the feminine scale of values, and downtown shops, having eliminated the expensive, skilled hand tailoring, began slowly to monopolize this highly profitable business.
Then came the ravages of the boll weevil and the consequent failure of the Southern cotton crop, which created a great demand for cheap clothes. The new mail-order houses in Chicago and New York grew by leaps and bounds, and the East Side makers of cheap clothes became their chief source of supply.
At the time, as I have said, I was just out of my teens. I had left a “career” in Wall Street, where I had been for many years employed as a “stock runner” for the old Consolidated Stock Exchange, on Broadway and Exchange Place, and for a number of large brokerage houses, for a job with the very cloak and suit and “reefer” house whose switch Friedland pulled.
My duties were many. I was salesman, bookkeeper, shipping clerk, piece goods buyer, and “labor relations” man. In my spare time I also swept out the shop. Having been also in charge of the payroll, I can testify that an operator working day and night, seven days a week, rarely earned more than twelve dollars, a finisher no more than nine, and a presser no more than ten. This was, of course, at the height of the fall season. From December to May, work was mainly parttime sample-making, and that was given only to those whom the foreman or the boss favored.
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The picket line showed up early on the morning after the strike call. Since all the pickets were landsleit and relatives (two of the pickets were the bosses’ own brothers), and as it happened to be a rainy morning, we invited them to do their picketing inside the shop. Meanwhile, I hurried down to Adelson’s Saloon and Meeting Hall to talk things over with the strike committee.
Adelson’s, despite the title “saloon,” was a highly respectable place, where large schooners of beer were dispensed at a nickel a schooner. Mr. Adelson was an Orthodox Jew who served nothing but sliced herring and pumpernickel as free lunch. He did have a small cask of schnaps, but this was dispensed mainly for ritualistic purposes like kiddush and havdullah. The large hall in the rear of the saloon was rented out for Jewish and Irish (both green and orange) lodge meetings. The Irish saloon keepers, and there were many in the neighborhood, did not bother with such things as meetings. Adelson’s was closed tight on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, when the hall was used by Congregation Chevra Anshei Rudgensk as a synagogue. On every second Tuesday the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians met at Adelson’s, and on Thursdays a lodge of Ulstermen. They did their drinking, however, at Angus Cambell’s on the corner. Cambell was a Scotsman and a neutral; furthermore, the members of both organizations had no great partiality to beer.
I found Friedland and the members of the strike committee awaiting us. After downing a couple of Mr. Adelson’s deep and tall and foamy schooners, out of respect to Mr. Adelson who had donated the meeting hall gratis to the strikers, we got down to business.
The demands were two cents more per garment for the operators, a cent and a half for the finishers, and a penny for the pressers. The cutters, however, the aristocrats of the trade, demanded a fifty-four hour week, fifteen to eighteen dollars per week, and time and a half for overtime. (Cutting machines were not in use in the downtown shops, and cutting was done with a long knife resembling an executioner’s sword, on five or six inch layers of cloth. It was somewhat like cutting sheet metal.)
I assured the committee that the “bosses” were ready to agree; but as our shop was the only one struck, higher prices would put us at a disadvantage against competition. And secondly, how could the “bosses” be certain that the same thing wouldn’t happen again in a month or two? “The bosses,” said I, “want to settle, but with a responsible union. But there is no responsible union. Not even a responsible local.”
Friedland had a ready answer to this. “Let us go down and talk it over with Congressman Meyer London; he will tell us what to do.”
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Congressman Meyer London was a well-known labor attorney, who gave every-one legal and other advice, and often forgot to send a bill for his fee; he was the first and only congressman ever elected in New York State on the Socialist ticket. A placid, kindly, humorous man, even the strong Tammany leadership on the lower East Side made no strong efforts to defeat him, preferring him to someone from Charlie Adler’s Republican Club. Re-elected a number of times, he was well thought of in Congress, and, indeed, his defeat in his last campaign was due not to his opponents, but to hoodlumism on the part of some of his adherents. (Vice-President Fairbanks, addressing a Republican rally in a hall on the corner of Grand and Orchard Streets, was heckled by some of the London rooters inside and outside the hall. Outraged at this insult to the Vice-President of the United States, the East Side citizens defeated the whole Socialist slate, and Meyer London with it.)
The next morning at his downtown Broadway office, I explained to London that we were strikers and bosses in search of a union.
In the last years of the 19th century Joseph Barondess had led an abortive strike against the large uptown manufacturers and their contractors, and had been jailed for his efforts. Since then there had been no active organized labor movement in the cloak industry in New York. There did exist a cutters local, but at the time not many Jews were cutters. The cutters kept aloof; many of them came to work wearing frock coats, high silk hats, and with walking sticks. London thought that a remnant of Barondess’s defunct union might be hovering, ghost-like, somewhere on the East Side. He suggested that we contact the bartender at Wolf’s Workingman’s Friend Saloon and Meeting Hall on Forsyth Street, and inquire for Abe Rosenberg and a Mr. Grossman.
Wolf’s Workingman’s Friend Saloon and Meeting Hall was well known to everyone on the East Side. Over the door there hung a big sign with a three-foot picture of a schooner brimming with amber colored beer; a man was drowning in the schooner; and firemen were running up ladders to rescue him. On the side of the schooner was a big “Five Cents,” and underneath, in large Hebrew script, was printed the words Arbeiter Freint. It became common usage on the East Side to call for an arbeiter freint when ordering a beer.
In the saloon part of the establishment was a long bar with the free lunch, rich with kosher tidbits. Wolf was a godsend to many a hungry immigrant, who for five cents worth of arbeiter freint could eat a full meal. He was a huge man, gentle as a child, and as everyone who knew him said, “with a heart of gold.” He was a henchman of Big Tim Sullivan, the picturesque Tammany leader on the East Side, and his saloon was a gathering place for the many East Side pushcart peddlers, who always needed political favors and voted solid Tammany. Wolf also conducted a sort of general delivery branch of the post office. Many immigrants, with uncertain places of residence, received their mail from their families in the old country through Wolf.
The bartender at Wolf’s, after a number of arbeiter freint, put us in touch with Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Grossman. They were in a small room upstairs, playing pinochle with some cronies. They halted the game while we explained our mission. When we finished, they both threw in their cards and grabbed their hats, and all of us hurried down to Adelson’s. Here were more than a hundred young and enthusiastic workers, waiting to be organized into a local. That same afternoon Friedland’s little band became the Reefer Makers Union, Local 17.
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The following morning we all met in London’s office. An agreement was drawn up and signed, with the understanding that the other “reefer” shops would be called out within two weeks.
The “victorious” strikers marched back in formation, from Monroe Street to Walker Street, by way of Canal and Church Streets, past the other shops in the district. At our shop, the “defeated” bosses ordered up two barrels of beer, a couple of dozen salt herring, pumpernickel, and pickles. To a select few, the shop foreman provided a schnaps and a portion of sponge cake at the bosses’ expense.
The following Sunday all the other “reefer” shops in the district were called out; every shop but ours was shut down. This time the strike was organized by experts. Rosenberg and Grossman knew how such things worked. Adelson’s was no longer large enough to house all the strikers; the overflow met at Wolf’s. Before the week was out, the bosses capitulated, agreeing to all demands.
Once again London’s office was busy drawing individual agreements; once again they were signed, sealed, and delivered. This time the victorious workers, about thirty-five hundred strong, paraded back to work with flags and banners flying, preceded by a union band blaring the “Marseillaise” and “Chossen-Kalla-Mazel-Tov.” The parade circled and snaked through the narrow, cobblestoned streets of the “reefer” shop district, and finally ended up at the corner of Spring and Greene Streets. There victory tasted sweetest: Weinstein Brothers, the strongest and fastest growing of them all, had also capitulated. There Abe Rosenberg, the marshal of the parade, and Grossman, the vice-marshal, with wide red satiny sashes across their chests, addressed the victors, amidst a swirl of newspaper confetti, and cheers from the crowd.
But the hero of the day was the leader of the first revolt, “Columbus” Friedland. He had taken the day off from work and had been honored with an assignment as color bearer. He carried an improvised union banner, flanked on the left by a red flag, and on the right by a large red, white, and blue flag. A popular Yiddish song of that time, “Lebenzul-Columbus”—“Long Live Columbus”—was played by the band in his honor and all the assembled workers joined in with loud voice.
Then the workers dispersed to their respective shops, where barrels of beer, dozens of salt herrings, pickles, and pumpernickel awaited them. Once more the machines started their roar, the presses their sizzle and thumping, and the young women finishers sang the sad folk songs they had learned in the old country.
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There followed three years of troubled peace. Petty grafters infiltrated into the union ranks and caused trouble. Chiselers among the employers caused more trouble. Wild-cat stoppages became a common occurrence. These years were profitable years for the manufacturers, and they began to feel their oats. They claimed that the union leadership alone was at fault, that they could not control the union members. They organized into a manufacturers association, and in the spring of 1907 declared a lock-out, refusing to renegotiate a contract with Local 17.
But they had reckoned without the new leadership of the union, and the new fighting spirit which hundreds of new members, mostly young newly arrived immigrants, had brought into the Local. Shortly after the first “revolt” in 1904, Benjamin Schlesinger, an astute and experienced labor organizer, had been called in to take over the leadership of Local 17 and to help organize the uptown shops.
He was one of the ablest, most honest, sincere, and intelligent of union leaders of his day. Confident of the future of the garment workers and of the industry as a whole, he hated the sweat shop with a fanatical hatred. He fought the grafters and trouble-makers, and struggled to instill a sense of responsibility into the rank and file. But this last was no easy task.
Then there was a new factor. The failure of the Russian revolution of 1905, and the persecutions which followed, had brought thousands of fighting young men and women to this country. They flocked to the “reefer” shops, becoming members of Local 17. Once again, the young men became apprentices, araushelfers, to operators; the young women became finishers. Some of the more sturdy, usually the most illiterate, became unterpressers, apprentice pressers. A few of the more ambitious became assistant cutters. Most of these young new arrivals had been members of the first Jewish labor union in Russia, the Bund, which had been outlawed and forced underground. To these new arrivals, the lock-out and subsequent strike declaration resolved into a klassenkampf, a class struggle, a battle against the exploitation of the workers by the capitalist bosses (the first labor unions in Russia were all Marxist and political).
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The employers received an inkling of what was in store for them from a young landsman, a Puchovitcher, who had arrived in New York from Russia only seven weeks before the 1907 strike (or lock-out, as you please), and who had for six of these weeks been struggling, as Friedland’s araushelfer, to master the art of threading a sewing machine and sewing a straight seam. This ex-Bundist and firebrand, this victim of six weeks of American capitalist exploitation, cried in classical Lithuanian Yiddish, when the committee of manufacturers came to our place to hang up the sign which declared the shop to be an open shop: “We will reckon with you, you bloodsuckers who live off the toil of the workers, you who live in luxury while we die of hunger and starvation! You may battle us, you may starve us, but we will never surrender! We will die on the barricades first!”
He then climbed up on one of the press tables, raised his right hand into a stiff hammer salute and cried: “Arrunter mit die bosses; arrunter mit dem capitalistishen system; es lebe die oonia, es lebe Schlesinger, es lebe der Forwarts, svoboda oder tait!” (“Down with the bosses, down with the capitalist system, long live the union, long live Schlesinger, long live the Forward, liberty or death!”) Everyone in the place—the assembled workers, the bosses, visiting customers, and sales-men—all applauded enthusiastically. (A few years later, this ardent Marxist and devoted unionist opened a non-union contracting shop on Long Island, and fought the union to a standstill.)
Whoever was at fault in forcing this strike, the fact is that the strike had to take place. The working conditions, the long hours, the sub-standard wages, were slave standards in Schlesinger’s eyes. He stood for a forty-four hour week, a living wage, and, above all, for sanitary and well-lighted shops. But he did not want the strike to happen when it did. The revitalized union was busily engaged in organizing the uptown shops, the “bears” as they were called. The large and financially strong uptown manufacturers were mainly German and Hungarian Jews, to whom the mere mention of union was heresy. Unionizing these shops required a strong organization and a full treasury. It also needed the good will of public opinion, for the English press would surely favor the employers, who numbered among them quite a few solid, public-spirited citizens, politically well connected. Schlesinger wanted to bide his time, but events forced his hand.
The struggle was mainly between landsleit and relatives, but it developed into a grudge fight, one of the nastiest labor struggles in the short history of the Jewish labor movement.
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This “Reefer-Makers Strike,” as the 1907 strike came to be known, followed the set pattern for all strikes in those days before conciliation and mediation. As first step, the employers sought to replace the striking employees with non-union workers. The union, on its side, countered by appointing pickets to keep the strike breakers from entering the shops. The next step was for the employers to hire a professional strong-arm organization, officially known as a “detective agency,” which provided guards to keep pickets from molesting the non-union workers. The union in turn countered by selecting able-bodied members from its ranks to protect the pickets from the hired guards. (Sometimes the same outfit rented strong-arm men to the union and the employers.) There followed street battles between pickets and guards. At this point the police entered the picture.
Now, to the police of this district, strikes were something new. Their district had consisted mainly of textile distributing concerns and their warehouses, until the “reefer” shops invaded its outskirts, and with them their labor disturbances. The police considered the strikers foreign agitators, anarchists, socialists—in a word, trouble-makers bent on tearing down the established order, at least of the Leonard Street precinct. Maybe that stuff went on the East Side, maybe such subversive activities were all right for the Eldridge and Madison Street precincts. But not for Leonard Street, which was sworn to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. No such things in their district as picketing or mass meetings. And the managers of the large and impressive textile houses, who sold their goods to the struck employers, praised the police officials of the district for their patriotic and loyal attitude. In any case, the rights of strikers were rather nebulous and ill-defined in those days.
Fully appreciating the value of publicity and public good will, Schlesinger denounced the employers for arbitrarily locking out the workers, and for refusing to bargain collectively. The East Side press, even including the usually conservative and anti-union Taggeblat, and public opinion generally, came over to the side of the strikers.
The editor of the Forward, who from the start had fulminated against the “cockroach capitalists,” as he termed the employers, now began to attack the police in his daily editorials, calling them gendarmes and Cossacks, ants doing the dirty work of cockroaches. If he had stuck to mere name-calling, it would have done no harm, for the police of the Leonard Street precinct were about ninety-nine per cent Irish and did not read the Forward. But Cahan went further. In an editorial, he advised the pickets of their legal rights and urged them to refuse to move when ordered. “Look the policeman in the eye and insist on your rights,” he advised. The first result was that many of the pickets received bad beatings, the police began a series of mass arrests, and the resulting fines began to deplete the union’s skimpy treasury.
As the strike progressed from weeks to months, it developed into a slugging match. Pickets were assaulted, strong-arm men battered. A number of the employers were waylaid and beaten, and in retaliation a number of the union officials received the same medicine. Not a day passed without its street fights.
All this time no effort had been made to negotiate a settlement. To the “pure and simple” American Federation of Labor, and to the Central Federated Unions of New York, this socialist-led union was outside the fold. When Herman Robinson, the AFL representative in New York, finally offered his good services, Schlesinger turned him down. He wanted no help from the “reactionary” AFL. Standing fast for unconditional surrender, he saw the strike enter its fifteenth week.
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Two sensational highlights of this strike were the headlined attempted assassination of Abe Rosenberg, who was in direct charge of the strike—and my own arrest and incarceration in the Tombs prison for illegally possessing and carrying firearms.
The report of the attempted assassination read like a cloak-and-dagger adventure, and indeed, as I can now report, it had no basis in fact. It was pure propaganda.
In ordinary and peaceful times, Abraham Rosenberg was a most reasonable man, and one of the “safest and sanest” of union leaders. In union matters he was non-political, leaning toward American “pure-and-simple” unionism, as enunciated by Samuel Gompers. But in troubled times he was a high-powered and calculating propagandist. While Schlesinger and Grossman and lesser lights went from hall to hall addressing the strikers and urging them to hold fast, Rosenberg was feeding the press.
His main outlet was the editorial page and the news columns of the Forward. In those days the Forward itself was a great expounder of the klassenkampf. Day by day, Rosenberg issued his tales of outrage, beatings, intimidations, arrests, and oppressions by the police at the instigation of the “cockroach capitalists.” Some charges were true, but many were pure fabrications. The Forward itself fulminated against these “cockroach capitalists” until their own families began to disown them. The hardships of the strikers, as reported by Rosenberg, shocked the whole East Side community. As a master of pathos, Rosenberg had no equal—except, possibly, Jacob Gordon the dramatist.
And then came the climax, splashed in large-lettered headlines in all the East Side papers. Attempted Assassination of Abe Rosenberg, Beloved Leader of the Working Class. At midnight, on his way home, in a dark street, he had been set upon by a gang of hired hoodlums. Came the flash of a knife—and then, just as the assassin’s knife was about to be plunged into his heart, eight strikers, who had followed their beloved leader unbeknownst to him, foreseeing just such a dastardly attack, rushed up and fell upon the cowardly assassins, who let the knife drop on the cobblestones and took to their heels.
The usual editorials followed, castigating the capitalists for allowing the strike to reach such murderous extremes. While not charging the employers directly with instigating the cowardly attempt, they asked the rhetorical question: “Who would be interested in the elimination of the beloved leader of the strike?” The readers of the Forward were well able to answer this for themselves. Popular opinion solidified behind the strikers. It was a master stroke by Rosenberg.
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The second headlined sensation was the arrest and incarceration of the secretary of the Manufacturers Association, in the person of this writer.
My lot in this strike had been a stormy one. I had the reputation of being liberal and progressive, and only the year before I had gathered together about one hundred young men and women, all newly arrived immigrants, and formed an Americanization club which met at the University Settlement. We held some very nice and informative meetings, and some very important men and women addressed the membership. And just as we were getting into full stride and gaining membership and fame, along came the strike and I was compelled to resign as leader. All the members, 106 young men and women, were members of Local 17, and all were out on strike.
Dr. Charles S. Bernheimer, assistant headworker of the University Settlement at the time, attempted to hold the club together, but to no avail, so shocked were they by the fact that the organizer and leader of the club was a reactionary and an enemy of the working class. In fact, some of the ex-Bundists, born conspirators, charged that I was a paid tool cf the capitalists, a provocateur, who had been ordered to organize them into a group and lead them into the capitalist orbit. A relative of mine told my father that the union had documentary evidence to this effect.
The facts in my cause célèbre, which followed soon after, were simple. The building in which our shop was located had four lofts. The first three we occupied and the fourth was occupied by a skirt shop. The workers in this shop were naturally in sympathy with the strikers, and in the early morning joined the striking pickets in their efforts to keep the strikebreakers from entering the premises. This building had an old-fashioned iron door, with a heavy padlock, the key to which was ten inches long and weighed over a pound.
One Friday morning when I unlocked the door, the strikebreakers, the pickets, and their sympathizers all piled into the gloomy hallway and up the dark steep stairs. In the tussle that followed I received a couple of blows, and in defense I wielded the key. In the gloom of the stairway the flashing metal was mistaken for a gun, and the fighting crowd instantly dispersed.
That same afternoon I was told that a warrant had been sworn out against me for carrying and brandishing a gun. The union’s strategy was that I was to be arrested late Friday afternoon so that I would have to stay in jail until Monday morning before I could be arraigned before a magistrate and have bail set. I knew I was in for trouble, for that same week two police officers had been shot to death by a gangster, and it went hard with any one charged with carrying a gun. So I went over to Newark for the weekend.
Early Monday morning I appeared at the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street to surrender. Unhappily for me, the police wouldn’t have me. There was some irregularity in the warrant. I tried to tell the officer in charge that the warrant was intended for me, and that I would waive the irregularity, but he laughed: “It’s harder to get into jail than to get out. Until you get a valid warrant we can do nothing for you. In the meantime, please move over and make room for a steady customer.”
However, being a New Yorker and an East Sider I had friends everywhere. A rescuer soon spotted me, a boyhood schoolmate who was now a plainclothesman attached to the Criminal Courts Building. When he heard of how I was being denied arrest by the police, he went to work at once. He advised me to go back to Walker Street and wait. In the meantime he would arrange for a legal warrant and would himself come over to take me into custody. “Don’t worry, Sam,” said he, “I have pull; they will greet you with open gates.”
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When I got back to Walker Street, the street in front of our shop was jammed with strikers waiting to escort me to jail. I was greeted with catcalls, and cries of “murderer, gorilla, gangster.”
About eleven A.M., my schoolmate came to take me into custody; escorted by the hooting crowd, we walked to Centre Street. I was immediately booked, and taken before a magistrate. The crowd also squeezed into the court room, hoping, no doubt, to see me immediately sentenced to the gallows.
The magistrate read the warrant and the accompanying short affidavit, looked me over severely, took my plea of not guilty, and held me in five thousand dollars bail.
Max Weinstein, president of the Manufacturers Association, and a lawyer named Red Jacobs who practiced in the downtown magistrates’ courts, mainly in Essex Market court, were supposed to be waiting in court with bail, but Red Jacobs couldn’t make it. He was tied up in another court. My schoolmate waited a while but routine compelled him to turn me over to an officer of the court who would escort me to the Tombs. He got a receipt for me and asked the court officer, as a matter of professional courtesy, not to apply handcuffs. My escort led me through a maze of corridors, stairways, and across the “Bridge of Sighs,” down into a walled courtyard, through a stone tunnel, up two stairways, and finally to a big iron-barred gate, behind which ran a long line of doubledecked cells. My escort got a receipt for me and left.
Two o’clock that afternoon, after I had feasted on the jail fare, black bread and tasty stew, a keeper came and notified me that I had been bailed. After signing a receipt for me, he led me back to the court room where Max Weinstein and Red Jacobs were waiting. I was free until the date set for the hearing, two weeks later.
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My lawyer, Red Jacobs, was a well-known character of the time. He had a small office in a store right opposite the Essex Market court, next door to Silver Dollar Smith’s Saloon. He came into the picture through Max Steuer, who was under retainer to the association. Mr. Steuer, of course, didn’t practice in magistrates’ courts, and Red Jacobs, who knew law but had tainted his career with the reputation of being a “fixer,” handled the case instead. In the weeks before the hearing, I used to meet Jacobs in Silver Dollar Smith’s Saloon nightly, and with one foot on Silver Dollar’s highly polished brass rail, and the other on the silver-dollar-encrusted floor, we downed short beers, consumed his highly spiced free lunches, munched on pretzels, and planned the defense.
Then the case took a new turn: the complaining witness wasn’t sure any more whether what he saw on the dark stairway was a key or a gun. Others who were also there swore it was a key. Some kibbitzers told him that I would be exonerated and he would be held for perjury.
So night after night his wife, who was my mother’s landsfrau, brought her two children to my mother’s house and begged my mother to prevail upon me to drop the case! I tried to explain to my mother that I was the defendant, and couldn’t drop the case, that it was now in the hands of a magistrate and only he could decide. But my mother couldn’t see that at all. Here was a Jewish husband, the father of two children, in danger of going to jail for perjury, and I refused to drop the case. Didn’t I have a Jewish heart? Did I want to make orphans out of two Jewish children? It never dawned upon my mother that I, too, stood a fine chance of going to jail. From then on my own mother openly sympathized with the strikers against me.
In time, the case came up for a hearing. I brought Professor James H. Hamilton, headworker of the University Settlement, the late Dr. Henry Moskowitz, his brother Morris, my friend Judge Emil Fuchs, and a host of other prominent men to testify as to my good character. The complaining witness wasn’t sure whether he saw a key or a gun, and the charges were dismissed.
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By now the strike was in its fifteenth week. Most of the strikers were in bad straits, for the union had no money with which to pay strike benefits. The manufacturers also were in bad shape. None of them had financial means with which to risk the loss of the fall season which was by then almost in full swing. Both sides were ripe for a settlement, if only someone would lead the way. There now entered a mediator in the person of Herman Robinson. Despite the objections of Schlesinger, he brought Samuel Gompers to New York to intervene in the strike and to try to resolve it. Gompers, diplomatically but firmly, soon convinced the embittered opponents that a settlement was imperative for the good of all.
A meeting of representatives of both contending sides was arranged. They met at the old Union Square Hotel, at the southwest corner of Fifteenth Street and Union Square, which is now part of a ready-to-wear store.
The first two days were spent in recriminations, but both Gompers and Robinson were hopeful; they were used to such meetings. Finally, taking matters into their own hands, they advised both sides to make concessions, warning that if they hurried they might still save the fall season. Finally, on the seventh day of negotiations a settlement was reached. The union won major concessions, and the employers received a verbal promise that the AFL would see that the agreements would be kept. This last was a hard blow to Schlesinger’s pride. To Schlesinger, Gompers and the whole of the AFL leadership were reactionary misleaders of the working class. But he had to swallow his pride and accept the decision.
To the relief of the community, the strikers, the employers, and the police, the strike was over. The workers returned quietly to work, without parades or other fanfare. The employers provided no beer or herring or pumpernickel or pickles. Like two pugilists who had fought a draw, they had new respect for each other, but the good fellowship—landsmanshaft and gemütlichkeit—which had prevailed before this disastrous conflict was gone forever.
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Although the number of strikers involved was small as compared to the subsequent general strikes of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the early strikes marked an epoch in the history of the garment industry. Local 17 served as the foundation upon which the strong ILGWU of today, with its high labor standards, was built. The Johnny-Come-Lately’s (Brother David Dubinsky did not arrive in this country until 1911; Brother Israel Feinberg not until 1912) who took over and in after years absorbed Local 17 into the general body of the union, owe a great debt to these early and unsung fighters, who fought and won these first revolts against the sweatshops, and even to some of their “class enemies,” of the employer group, who, on more than one occasion, seem to have played a “collaborationist” role with labor in the garment industry.
I have not referred to “Brother” David Dubinsky, or “Brother” Israel Feinberg in a derisive sense, as a “boss” to a “worker.” It is my right and privilege to address them as “brother.” For the last ten years I have been, and am, a member in good standing of Local 9, Shipfitters and Helpers Lodge, of the International Brotherhood of Boiler Makers, Iron Ship Builders and Helpers of America, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.
As my grandmother used to say: a topsyturvy world.
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