Needling Capitalism: Unionizing American Jewish Workers

As leaders and workers, American Jews played a prominent role in the early American labor movement.

By Howard M. Sachar

 

Between 1880 and 1924, more than  two million Jewish immigrants came to America. They were “grist for the mills of America’s manufacturers,” according to historian Howard Sachar. Jewish immigrants worked in a variety of sectors, but Jewish labor fueled one economic sector in particular: the garment industry. However, with the end of mass immigration in 1924 and the economic progress of the next generation of Jews, evident by 1950, American Jews lost their connection with organized labor. The following article describes the active participation of Jewish workers in the American labor movement in the early part of the 20th century. The article is reprinted from A History of the Jews in America written by Howard Sachar and published by Knopf.

 

East European Jews arrived in the United States at the very apogee of unrestrained Ameri­can capitalism. Early working‑class efforts to unionize, to strike, al­most invariably failed. Among East European Jews, these initial unionizing ventures proved even more difficult than for other laborers. Most Jews worked in sweatshops, in tenement quarters that were too small to foster a collective, unionist outlook.

 

As early as 1885, garment workers participated in a brief, spontaneous walkout of some ten thou­sand cloak and skirt makers. Once they achieved a few minor conces­sions, however, they drifted away, allowing their union to die, and the improvements gradually were rescinded. Other occasional local strikes flickered out in ensuing years.

 

Jewish workers appeared "unorganizable," lamented Morris Hillquit [union organizer and intellectual leader of the American Socialist Party] some years later. They were "dull, apathetic, unintelligent." In 1888, at the initiative of Bernard Weinstein, a nineteen‑year‑old shirtmaker and a recent Bundist activ­ist in Russia, Hillquit and several other Lower East Side Jews founded the United Hebrew Trades.

 

In current terminology, the organization's purpose was one of "consciousness‑raising," simply of fostering union organization within the garment industry and other "Jewish" trades. And indeed, by 1890, the little group managed to establish some twenty‑two unions, including a typographers union, a shirtmakers union, a knee‑pants‑makers union, a cloak‑makers union, a cap‑mak­ers union, a bakers union, even a Yiddish actors union.

 

Their early idealism doubtless was intense, even messianic, but it was still essentially unfocused. In 1880, the United Hebrew Trades enthusiastically accepted founder and leader of the New York-based Labor Socialist Labor Party Daniel De Leon's request for union partici­pation in a May Day parade. Ostensibly a demonstration for the eight-hour workday, the event signified much more to the nine thousand marching Jews.

 

Bands played the Marseillaise and workers' songs. Red flags fluttered from hundreds of tenement windows. Marchers among the sixteen Jewish unions and Socialist organizations making their way to Union Square carried placards reading "Bread and Free­dom" and "Down with Wage Slavery." A continuous rain could not dampen the crowd's spirits. Abraham Cahan, one of the speakers, proclaimed "this imposing demonstration ... [is] the beginning of the great revolution which will overthrow the capitalist system and erect a new society on the foundation of genuine liberty, equality, and fra­ternity." De Leon and others orated in the same vein. None of the speakers paid much attention to the issue of the eight‑hour workday.

 

Eventually they would have to. It was the warning of the newly established American Federation of Labor, and specifically of its pres­ident, Samuel Gompers. Born of Dutch‑Sephardic parents in the ghetto of London, Gompers had come to the United States as a teen­ager in the midst of the Civil War. Employed as a cigar roller on New York's Lower East Side, he participated in the founding of the cigar­makers union, then worked his way up through the German‑language Central Labor Council. In 1886 he negotiated the formation of the American Federation of Labor and became its first president. As philo­sophically pedestrian as De Leon was intellectually charismatic, Gom­pers was entirely pragmatic in his approach to working‑class issues. Ideologies held no interest for him. As he saw it, free enterprise was a fact of life, and he was determined to fight for labor's rights within that system.

 

Without Jewish loyalties or concerns, Gompers at first made no secret of his distaste for the United Hebrew Trades and their windy messianism. In turn, their membership heartily reciprocated his suspicions. But with the demise of De Leon's Socialist Labor party, the United Hebrew Trades was left with little choice except to allow its unions a certain tentative identification with the AFL. The latter appeared clearly to be the single labor organization capable of achieving bread‑and‑butter improvements for the working man.

 

With the encouragement of Hillquit, of [Meyer] London [Socialist politician from New York], and eventually even of Eugene Debs, the Jewish unions agreed then to concentrate for the time being simply on achieving stability. They anticipated that the AFL's moral support and guidance in the long run would add to their strength, and they were not wrong.       

      

In the short run, however, it was the resourcefulness of the Jewish labor force itself that played the decisive role in the unionizing effort. The initial battleground was the women's‑garment industry. Here, for immigrant Jews, tactical direction emerged as early as 1890, when the twenty‑five‑year‑old Joseph Barondess, only two years in the

United States, organized the cloak makers, the single largest subcommunity within the needle trades.

 

Burning‑eyed and mustachioed, affecting the flamboyant demeanor of a bohemian aristocrat, Barondess won the hearts of his fellow workers with his soaring voice and gift for lacing radical agitation with talmudic epigrams. It was Barondess in 1890 who organized a strike of three thousand cloak makers, almost miraculously sustaining the discipline and morale of his fellow picketers through eight weeks of police brutality, strong‑arm goons, and economic deprivation and hunger. In the end, management conceded a modest reduction of hours and workload.

 

Barondess and other labor leaders then spent the next few years struggling to consolidate their union. It was painful, drudging work throughout the 1890s. Upon resolving a specific grievance, these early Jewish garment workers often allowed their union dues to lapse. Painstakingly accumulating their savings, many either sent for families in Europe or ventured into business on their own as subcontractors or petty retailers. As late as 1905, Abraham Bisno, deputy inspector of factories for the State of Illinois, suggested in a report on Chicago's men's‑clothing industry that "most of the [Jewish factory workers] do not believe themselves to be working men for life, nor do they think thatthey will leave as a heritage to their children the lot of a wage‑worker. . . ."

 

It was a series of new developments that gave the Jewish union movement an unexpected lease on life. One was the early‑twentieth ­century wave of immigrating Bundists. In their ideological zeal and commitment, these hard‑edged Socialists provided a vital infusion of staying power. Ironically, so did the growth of the clothing industry itself, particularly its New York‑based women's‑garment branch.

 

Over the first decade of the new century, women's clothing became the third largest consumer‑goods industry in the United States. In 1900, the number of its factories totaled 1,224. In 1910, the figure reached 21,701. In the same period, the number of its workers rose from 31,000 to 84,000. With this growth, and the introduction of newer, more efficient machinery, the older sweatshop-‑haphazardly organized, economi­cally redundant--soon disappeared.

 

The shift from sweatshop to fac­tory in turn provided a more effective basis for unionization. Workers no longer were isolated from each other, as they had been earlier, dispersed among tenement flats. Crowded together now in factories, they were positioned to share their grievances and complaints, to col­laborate for group action.

 

Still another factor accounting for the upsurge of labor activity was a consolidation of individual unions within the women's‑garment industry. Separate locals continued to function-‑of cloak makers, pressers, cutters, shirtwaist makers, and others. For years they would organize individually and strike individually. In 1900, however, under persistent exhortation by Gompers and the AFL leadership, the vari­ous unions agreed to collaborate at least in an umbrella organization, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

 

The ILGWU was not about to turn conservative. Endlessly infused with Bundist ideal­ism, it would for years constitute the single most radical component within the AFL. Yet the "respectable" new imprimatur of AFL mem­bership, as well as the garment workers' sheer consolidation in num­bers, offered a dimension to be taken seriously. With the economy booming in post‑Spanish‑American War years, organized labor was making giant strides. In 1900 alone, some four hundred fifty thousand new workers flocked to the AFL. Responding to the confluence of these factors, the ILGWU by 1909 had grown to sixty‑three locals encompass­ing sixteen thousand members. Here at last was a Jewish proletariat structured to challenge the inferno of the clothing factory head‑on.

 

Howard M. Sachar is a Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington DC.

c. 1992 by Howard Sachar