Wallace Markfield would not claim that these portraits of bosses and workers in New York’s garment center by any means exhaust the pattern—these are only a few of many types in one of the most diversified industries—“racially” and culturally—in the United States.
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He started west from the Lower East Side and then reached a point beyond which he could not pass; this was Seventh Avenue and he settled there. Twenty or so years ago the firm name on his business stationery was simply Sam Katz, but today it is Ess and Kay. He likes the models and the office girls to address him as “Mr. Kay”—especially in the presence of out-of-town buyers.
He maintains an ornate office near the showroom, but there is nothing he hates more than the fact that he is compelled to spend so much of his time behind the desk. For no matter how long his cutter and markers have been with him, he cannot trust them. He carries a load of anxiety, wondering whether remnants are being sold under his eyes, suspicious of any employee who leaves at the end of a day with a bundle under his arm. No matter how busy he is with customers, there always comes a time during the day when he must walk nervously about the cutting-room floor, looking almost into the hands of his cutters, fearful lest he say too much, since their union is strong. Sometimes he will stand with the marker, watching him chalk the patterns on a long rectangular section of cloth. A sudden spasm of economy, and he will pick up an odd piece of chalk from the floor with a hurt look in his eyes.
Between him and the marker there is war, though never a word is exchanged. Standing over the table, the boss lifts a pattern, searches about on the cloth till he places it at a point that will gain him another few inches of material. Almost scornfully the marker will shift it to the original spot, slapping the heavy cardboard down as though it were a pinochle hand. This is a symbolic challenge, wherein the marker dares his boss to assert superior knowledge of the trade. If once again the boss picks up the cardboard pattern to slap it down with redoubled force, he is reaffirming his own judgment, taking full responsibility for the change. Tentatively he reaches toward another pattern, but this time the marker ignores him, places his hands in his apron pockets, taking the pose that means he will walk off the floor at any moment if the ritual is continued.
In his shop there is no role the boss aspires to more than that of paterfamilias. When the children of his employees are married or Bar Mitzvah he will send down for shnaps and cookies. He himself may come to the ceremony, but even if he is not there, his check usually is. During lunch hour, for example, he will often walk over to the shipping table where the men are seated playing rummy, and deal himself a hand. It is like a meeting of a burial society or a family circle, till the hour ends and work begins again. Then newspapers are thrust aside, the machines turned on again, and the transition from landsman to wage-slave takes effect. For in the garment center the boss translates the Calvinist doctrine into his own terms—the worker by his very nature bears a load of sin and must never be praised. No matter how honest is a man’s work he will seldom hear a word of commendation, nor does he expect it. Cutters who never lift their eyes from the table, doing their job with the neatness and precision of the experienced artisan, are sneered at, compared with some real “mechanic” who always works for a rival firm. Even if it has been a good day for the boss and he is cheerful, he must walk unsmiling into the cutting room.
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Remembering his own origins at the sewing machine, he likes to believe he could still sit down and run off seams and pockets at a faster clip than any of his operators. But that is as far back as he cares to go. Recollections of the ghetto, the tradition of learning and Hasidism, the patriarchal family unit—all of these sentiments fall away when the boat docks and the immigrant is cast out from the steerage to assume full status as a “greenhorn.” Before his first dinner in the New World is even finished, his older cousin is demonstrating the art of the piece-worker in the small room behind the shop. In the months that follow, if all goes well, he sends passage-money to his family, and soon, if his children are old enough, their hours after school are spent sitting with him, helping with the piece-work.
Phylacteries remain untouched in the morning, laid temporarily aside for a more material security, for a goal that can be achieved only by amassing a load of frugality and self-imposed suffering at a faster pace than the workers who sit at the machines next to him. The pattern is simple—first to learn the trade, lay away every penny that can be spared and even more joyfully those that cannot be spared, and then the slow wait for the “break” that will make a small business possible. Almost ruthlessly does he set himself apart from every remnant of the old culture. Especially does he scorn the luftmenshen whose nostalgia for the old heated arguments and longwinded Talmudic dissertations serves only to set off the sadness of their lives as they sit in coffee-shop and synagogue.
Then, when the “break” finally materialized, the garment man often found himself in the strange position of employing some of his old friends, even close relatives. Here the ties were definitively severed, and gradually another factor crept in. He, the manufacturer who had sensed what counted in this new world, could look only with a smugness that approached scorn upon fellow-Jews who seemed to accept their lot as workers. It was not only that they were Jews without money, but, more pathetically, they were Jews without chutzpah. In business he adopted a pruste attitude—a dollar was a dollar, let somebody tell him different There was no point in disguising the fact that he was out for “number one,” and he neither expected nor showed mercy.
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He found that the success of one season would not necessarily avert a disaster in the next. There was no certainty in the trade, and just holding his head above water required absolute mastery of the art of “hustling.” If he managed to get a large order, the delivery of the goods he needed was never on time; if he had a dozen samples made on a buyer’s promise, another house had produced the same model at a cheaper price; if he was stocked up with woolens at the end of one season, gabardine was the big hit for the following year. Always on the verge of putting over a deal that would place him on Easy Street, he found himself defeated again and again by the sheer anarchy of an industry where your own shipping clerk can be quietly getting set to steal your best designs and open his own shop. A strange fatalism pervades the garment man’s thinking, as in the story of the manufacturer who cannot procure woolens. Suffering from insomnia over this, he is told by a psychiatrist to try counting sheep. One night he dreams happily that he has gathered all the sheep he has counted and sheared them by the thousands, thus solving his problem. But a few hours later he wakes from a horrifying nightmare and moans—“The dirty dogs! I got all the woolens in the world, but do you think they’d let me have some linings?”
Basically his survival had little to do with business ability. He was a poor bookkeeper, a spineless bill collector, knew next to nothing about modern production methods or cost accounting, but, like a Hollywood producer, he depended less upon organization and efficiency than upon sales and ideas. What he sought was a certain tone, a style, a quality—in short, shmaltz. Shmaltz was the ability to look at a dress model that flopped three years ago and turn it into this season’s big number simply by adding a few sequins to the bodice. Without shmaltz, he might have the most spotless of reputations, employ the best designer in the industry, use only the finest materials and handwork, but he might just as well declare himself bankrupt and place his assets under his mother-in-law’s name.
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The last step toward his full emergence as garment man came with the advent of the unions, when he found himself hiring Irish and Italian strikebreakers. The mechanism had begun to function at full capacity, clogging his ears and shutting out Peretz’s plea—
How can a man strike his brother,
How can a man mock his brothers tears?
But he soon found that bringing racketeers into the industry served only to create new problems. Sometimes the move was countered by the unions with other gangsters or, more often, militant squads of workers known as “educational committees.” And as time passed, ironically enough the gangsters themselves became unionized, and attached themselves to the bosses like blood-suckers. In the end, the only way to shake them off was to accept the less threatening claims of the union.
The union leaders were wise to all the dirty tricks in the game and had their own brand of “prustkeit.” Volatile and dynamic, and fully as shrewd as the manufacturer, they brow-beat him into at least a tacit acceptance of the fact that the welfare of the worker was more than a platitude that took money out of his pocket—it was a problem of industry as a whole. They set out to prove to him that with good management and rational planning, the American consumer might be educated into becoming the best dressed citizen in the world. Across the conference table this idea was drummed into the boss by organizers, walking delegates, top rank officials, till it almost seemed that to fight the unions would be equivalent to fighting the progress of American capitalism.
And as the unions came to dominate the industry, the old days when a man could set himself up with a little capital, three or four machines, his father-in-law as the designer, and call himself a manufacturer were over forever. The average wage, which before the first war was under twenty-five cents an hour, is now almost a dollar an hour. Today the boss finds himself cordially welcoming the business agent into his office, eating lunch with him, even recommending him to his own tailor for suits. And as it has turned out in many instances, not only is he forced to accept the union, but he might find himself going to it for favors, using its production men, time-study experts, and merchandizing analysts.
But even though the union has pardoned the manufacturer his former sins, he still enjoys a vicarious piratical image of himself (mostly imaginary) as an unscrupulous “operator,” someone who can fake his books and outsmart a competitor with the best of them. He likes to recall the old turbulent days of the industry, when private detectives used to “ride shotgun” on his trucks, when he was “palsy-walsy” with gangsters. (Two of Lepke’s boys used to get their suits by him wholesale.) Walking up Seventh Avenue he is able to spot a gangster from three blocks away, and if you seem impressed he will walk over boldly and ask him for a cigar. “God knows,” he reflects later over the cigar, “he’s a thief and a murderer and a bum—but you should see the apartment he keeps up for his mother in the Bronx!”
But despite what warmth and color his world retains, he cannot rid himself of a sense of insecurity. With another Jewish manufacturer he has no qualms about following the codes set down by a vindictive God of Business, and he will press him to the wall over a penny-a-yard difference on a hundred-yard order. But in his occasional dealing with the goyim it is a different story, and often, under the heading of “good will,” he takes a loss that would normally make him wince. With the Gentiles he can never be quite at ease, for he is always fearful that the mask of graciousness may slip off and disclose their private image of him—a Fagin with a tape-measure. He is always, at bottom, in the position of that Jewish millionaire who invited his parents for a cruise on his new yacht. Proudly displaying himself in his “captain’s” uniform he looks to them for approval. “Look, Sonny,” says his mother, “by me you’re a captain, by Papa you’re a captain, but what are you by the captains?”
He can create no business dynasties that may be passed on to his children, for he too is infected with the disease of the Jewish middle class, and only those of his sons who are so poor in school that they cannot become professionals enter the business. If he has a daughter, he resigns himself to the fact that he must “buy” her a professional. His attitude towards this transaction is likely to be ambiguous—as one manufacturer said upon the day his intended son-in-law was to graduate from medical school: “Nu, so today he is a Buick!”
He takes pride in contributing to such organizations as the UJA and subscribing to full-page ads in charity journals. Sometimes he pretends annoyance over the fact that his name appears on virtually every “sucker” list, but no matter how pressed for time, he always manages to spend fifteen minutes conversing with telephone solicitors, secretly proud that someone recommended him as a “contact.” When it comes to a theater benefit, he is always the first one approached, and he takes tickets for the Second Avenue musicals which he swears he will never use. But, as his wife points out, for a good cause it doesn’t hurt to show his face, and besides, Menashe Skulnick is still good for a few laughs.
Lately he has taken to attending shul frequently, doing his best to pass it off as a mere social form. But somehow, if there is a new wing to be added, or some refugee yeshiva students who need a home, he is the first to contribute. On the High Holidays he bids heavily for the privilege of placing the Torah inside the Ark, and when he davens, without even straining himself, he can drown out the combined voices of the cantor and his choir.
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II
A Cutter for thirty years; since he’s been in the garment trade, he’s promised himself a little chicken farm some place near Lakewood, and for the last twenty-five years he has been taking orders for fresh butter and eggs to be filled in the future. But time passes, and the closest he’s come to the fresh green earth is the little cemetery plot he pays for with his chevra-brider. “A koptzen bleiht a koptzen.”
He is grateful to the union for the fact that his craft status has been strengthened year by year. But such projects as the workers’ educational program, which go beyond strict trade union activity, leave him with more than a few doubts. He feels little desire to return to school or see his union compete with the colleges, and the idea of a cutter learning economics, taking lessons in painting, or attending poetry classes seems frivolous. On the other hand, if he is a member of the ACWA, he is proud of their recent “womb-to-tomb” plan of workers’ benefits. He deposits his savings in the Amalgamated Bank and fills out an application for an apartment in an Amalgamated housing project.
For the past few years he has been a little in awe of the manager of his local, who has perhaps eaten luncheon (at twenty dollars a plate) with Henry Wallace, or shaken the hand of Bernard Baruch. Walking into the local office, he gazes respectfully at the autographed photos, stares at the leather upholstery, the commodious oak desk, the large murals covering the walls, and remembers the old lofts that once served for offices, the days when the only visible equipment was one or two broken-down typewriters and an old mimeograph machine. Twenty years ago there was always a possible excuse to offer the shop chairman who came at the end of the week pleading for dues; today, the union’s almost impersonal systematization permits no such dilatory practices, and he knows that his union book, perhaps the most important single document he carries in his jacket pocket, must have the small stamps pasted in twice a month.
When union elections come, he votes straight down the line to retain the old leadership. To the cries of “bureaucracy!” from the “Left” opposition he responds with a tolerant smile, as though humoring a fractious child. When he does attend a meeting and listens to the perpetual challenges and issue-raising of the “Left wing,” he feels even more secure—after all, every union must have its own little communistlach who can be threatened with excommunication or serve as the butt of good-natured jokes. For his part, he is always willing to match wise cracks with them, for Karl Marx or no Karl Marx, they can never prove to him that a summer at Grossinger’s is not better than a summer at Coney Island.
The recent influx of younger men into the garment houses raised certain problems for the older worker like himself. After the war ended, the union, as any large-scale enterprise, faced the problem of taking care of its own. It set up a regular system by which veterans could be taught the trade, apprenticed, and, after a probationary period in a shop, fully enrolled in the union books. For the older worker, what was particularly astounding was the idea that anyone, especially a young man, could conceivably enter the clothing trade of his own volition. Union membership, which twenty years ago was predominantly Jewish, is now giving way to new groups—Italians, Puerto Ricans, Spaniards, and occasionally Negroes. Observing this, the garment worker is made more than a little insecure. (After all, would they be so generous to Jews?)
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He is shocked to see the Italian workers taking their children into the shops and teaching them the trade: how can a father deliberately take his son from school and make him into a worker? Like the manufacturers, his ambition is to achieve a middleclass position which will insure his children against ever having to know the inside of a shop. So closed off and separate does he make his working life that it is not unusual that fellow-workers who have labored across the table from one another all their lives should have seen each other’s children only three times—at circumcision, Bar Mitzvah, and marriage. The occasional visits a child may pay to the shop are marked by uneasiness and mutual embarrassment.
Though on the whole the garment worker wants no contact with his family when he is at work, this does not mean that the events of the working day are held back from them. At home, over the dinner table, he creates his own myth. His tales of early hardships go beyond the usual description of sweat shop conditions and the horrors of peacework. They reveal a peculiar quality of Jewish melancholy, as though the garment worker conceived of himself as paying through the nose for some unremembered sin, for which the price of atonement is an irrevocable doom to the status of a worker.
In his stories the cutter appears upon the scene as a youth, energetic and hopeful, and then finds suddenly that he has grown gray and old, that his best years have been irretrievably lost to the boss, that at least one of the occupational diseases has caught up with him—hernia, heart trouble, or ulcers—while the boss grows younger every day. And is it any wonder, he will ask, as he lays his working life across the dinner table, after starting out in the old days with the messer, the long knife that tore out your kishkes against the material? Coloring his memory of that period is always the story of some act of aggression that ends with his waving his knife or shears before the frightened eyes of the boss, tossing his apron at him, and stalking off the floor. And there is the description of the racketeer who once managed his local, the secret dangers undergone before the “Hitler” was driven out. (Will I forget how, he should rest in peace, Kornfeld had his eyes stabbed out by the gangsters?)
Long since has the cutter discarded the messer, but the shears remain his personal property, though he has less and less use for them except to cut occasional “singles.” But he keeps them oiled and sharpened, for in the cutting-room it is only his apron and his shears that belong to him. Continued sharpening of the shears make the cutting edges narrower and narrower, and eventually useless. It is against these edges that the cutter measures out his life.
For despite the changes that have come to the clothing industry, he knows that he is still the traditional shneider, who, if he knows his craft well, may come to be honored with the title of “mechanic.” Garment-making remains a hand industry that has been only partially mechanized, and he still does the same things in very much the same way. He still walks back and forth the length of the thirty-yard tables with his cutting machine—miles every day—while behind him comes the entourage of bundle-tier and button puncher, and even as he finishes up one section, a team of pullers has already set up the next table for him.
At work, conversation is limited, save for an occasional kibbitz. Most of the talking is done during lunch hour in the streets outside the buildings, where the men pair off and exchange their views on every conceivable topic. Between twelve and one the streets of the garment center become a kind of proletarian Bourse known as “The Market,” where you can take stock of conditions in other houses and present rumors concerning the trade for verification or denial. Often there are heated political discussions, with the participants ringed by a wall of onlookers as in Union Square.
And since every garment house must have its philosphe, its one intellectual alienated amongst the philistines, where else would he be found declaiming but in the streets? This man’s working day is spent mourning the passing of a golden age of writers. He will make clear to you the fact that the hacks who are in charge of the Forward can never force him to change his style. If you are unfortunate enough to be collared by him, he will draw out of his hip pocket a sheath of Yiddish poetry and read it aloud—sometimes revising as he goes along—with appropriate gestures: a sigh, a slow mournful nod, clenched fists. On week-ends he frequents the Café Royale and is on the best of terms with the leading Yiddish writers. He lives under the shadow of Peretz and Mendele, and he curses Sholem Asch for selling out. Union meetings he never attends, and more often than not, as far as his work goes, he is a “butcher.” But, if ever he makes a serious mistake, the other men will cover up for him. He carries his lunch to the shop and generally, as he is declaiming, holds up a sandwich in one hand. For him there is only one certainty—that his kind is fast disappearing, with no replacements coming up.
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Finishing his lunch off with an assorted bag of fruit, the balagula or presser leans against anything that may partially remove the weight of his body from his feet. It does not matter whether it is a hydrant, a handtruck, or a carton—he spreads himself out on any part of the sidewalk and remains fixed. When he has thrown away the bag he does not stop to speak with anyone, for he goes off to search for sunlight. No matter the weather, the balagula never wears a jacket. He is the genuine proletarian of the garment world, traditionally generous and “gezunt vie a pferd.”
The “Market” is characterized by an extreme restlessness, a frenzied attempt to cram everything into the lunch hour. Bookmakers mingle casually with the crowd, taking bets; good designers are besieged by salesmen attempting to seduce them with fantastic offers into fly-by-night firms. Around the corner, the side entrance near the freight elevator is the shipping clerks’ territory. They remain in the lobby during lunch and wash down the morning with Pepsi-Cola, shooting crap with the elevator operators and the truckmen. The shipping clerk is the transient of the garment trade, emerging at the end of June with the last images of highschool graduation still in his eyes, trying—if he is ambitious—to put away a few dollars before the college term begins in September. He may belong to a small union that remains virtually powerless against the mass of shipping clerks who cannot be organized. For who can define his duties? If he is not tying packages he is carrying piece-goods into the cutting room, if he is not loading the salesmen’s samples into a cab he is rearranging stock, and if nothing is left there is always the floor to be swept or the cloth-ends to be folded. His working day is a perpetual search for the moment when a cigarette can be lit, for no one knows when the fire inspector may pop in, or when the boss may wander with an assumed casualness into the men’s room to assert the democracy of the bladder.
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But “The Market” cannot be confined within the limits of the streets. It flows over into the cafeterias, where kosher and treif exist side by side, where the busboys hover about ready to remove a coffee cup while it is still half full. For the garment worker there is nothing easier than to move through the packed aisles balancing a roll, a piece of Danish pastry, a cup of coffee, and one of the Yiddish dailies. As soon as he sits down he leans the rest of the chairs against the sides of the table, glaring with hostility at any unknown who may foolishly expect to take a seat. And by the time he has started breaking off small chunks of the Danish to dip into his coffee he is joined by two or three associates, and the table passes automatically into their hands. They are conscious of their status as steady customers, and unashamedly protest if they are given two slices of rye bread instead of the customary three, and manifest true dignity as they demand an extra pat of butter. Nor do they temper their scorn of the new counter-man who dares add this to the check.
Delicatessen is a sin to eat in a cafeteria, but they cannot resist such other Jewish delicacies as kashe pirogen, which however invariably fail to please them, since, after all, even if it did taste like something, for what they paid for one portion their wives could make enough to feed the family. Leaving the cafeteria, it is part of the ritual for the garment man to grab a handful of toothpicks at the cashier’s desk, faithfully dropping them into his jacket pocket where they decompose till the suit is sent to the cleaner.
He hurries back to the showroom, for it is during lunch hour that most of his friends and relatives drop in for the “wholesale” transactions, which of course seldom appear on the books. Wholesale in a garment house is divided into two categories—“goniff” wholesale and “absolute” wholesale. “Goniff” wholesale is for distant relatives, those that can be left to the tender mercies of the salesman, who usually splits the difference with the garment worker. “Absolute” wholesale is for the very immediate family, and part of the ritual involves the garment worker’s swearing by his life that he isn’t making a penny for himself. Not only does he bring the designer over, but the head salesman and even the boss, who must all swear that the fit is superb and the price is right. (Just stand like a mensh so the shoulders won’t droop!) By means of some mysterious mechanism, no matter how the customer wavers, a purchase is made just before lunch hour ends, and the garment worker goes back to his machine promising himself that positively this is the last time.
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Resting in his modern apartment in the Bronx or the two-family house in Flatbush, the garment worker today feels himself a proletarian aristocrat; he has forgotten, or perhaps chosen to forget, the radical tradition of trade unionism. To him the very idea of being a good American is bound up with the idea of being a good trade unionist. Once a seasonal man, uncertain of the number of months he would find himself working during the year, he is today protected from the perils of the labor market by the union, whose statisticians watch all trends, keeping themselves a season ahead of him. The union is the bridge between his own handicaps as a worker and his sense of participation in American society. And whether he likes it or not he is in politics, even if it is only to the extent of showing up at a rally or a conference by order of the manager of his local.
He no longer sees his boss as the “capitalist cockroach” of the sweat-shop days: the typical cartoon in a union paper would show a foreman carrying a prostrate employe into the boss’s office: flicking his ashes over the rug, the boss says coldly, “Well, if she’s a piece-worker, give her the afternoon off;” another cartoon shows the boss standing over an operator who has just run a sewing machine through his finger and benevolently saying, “Don’t worry, Harry, I’ll get somebody else to finish off the dress.”
Today the garment worker no longer need fear the boss of the Art Young or Redfield cartoon. Instead, the boss, as the garment worker conceives him, is simply another human being who must be taught by stalwart trade unionists that his best chances for success lie in a closed shop and a union label. If the manufacturer deviates from this idealized image, it must be demonstrated to him not only that he is helpless against the union, but that his attempts to evade union rulings are wholly irrational. For the manufacturer, no matter what his vices, is still a Jew. The farther he has strayed, the greater joy is there over his return, and, like Irving Davidowsky in Asch’s East River, at the eleventh hour he will always sign with the union and become reconciled with his people. It is the basic acceptance of this myth which lends a peculiar warmth and color to the garment world, distinguishing it from the rest of American industry.
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