CHAPTER XV
SOCIAL FORCES, CONTINUED
The drama is taken seriously in our neighborhood, particularly among the people whose taste has not been affected by familiarity with plays or theaters classed as typically “American.” In the years of our residence on the East Side there have been several transitions in the Yiddish drama[17] from classic to modern and realistic. Feeling has at times run high between the advocates of the different schools, and discussions in the press and disputes in the cafés have reflected a very lively popular interest.
Jacob Gordin, the Yiddish playwright, contributed an important chapter to the history of the stage, and his art was, I think, a factor in drawing intelligent attention to the East Side. The Yiddish drama, before his time, had not been looked upon with great favor, and there was in this, as in other instances, an implication of the contempt that Americans not infrequently feel for the alien, and also a fear, on the part of members of the older Jewish communities, that the Yiddish theater might retard the Americanization of the immigrant.
Mr. Gordin was one of our early friends, and we found pleasure in our theater parties. The audiences seemed scarcely less dramatic than the performers, and we took sides, perhaps not illogically, with the new school. Upon our appearance interpreters from various parts of the house were sure to offer their kind services. The acting was of high grade, and the fame of some of the performers has now gone far beyond the neighborhood and the city. The stage during this period performed its time-honored function of teaching and moralizing. One of Gordin’s plays that had many seasons of popularity was “The Jewish King Lear.” It depicted the endless clashing between the generations. The Shakespearean Cordelia, on the Bowery stage, is the daughter of character who longs for self-expression and becomes a physician. Another impressive play was “God, Man, and the Devil.” Here was preached the story of man’s fall, not because of poverty, but through the possession of riches. The pious Jewish scribe resists the worldly man and his enticements, but having come into the possession of money he becomes grasping, eager for power, susceptible to flattery. The portrayal of his spiritual downfall gave the playwright opportunity for remarkable delineation of Jewish character. I also found it interesting to take William Archer, the English critic, on his first visit to America, to see Ibsen metamorphosed in “The Jewish Nora,” which was then playing at a nearby theater.
The Italians have now almost abandoned the marionette theater, and we can no longer find on Mott, Elizabeth, and Spring Streets the stuffy little theaters filled with workingmen (and an occasional woman), sitting enthralled night after night while from the wings the fine voice of the reader continued the story of Rinaldo and other popular knights.
The puppet theater was usually a family affair. Its members slept and cooked behind the scenes, alternating in reading the story or operating the puppet figures of knights and ladies. One hot night we strolled from the settlement to a marionette theater nearby to show our guests (among them a theatrical producer) the simplicity of the primitive stage still to be found in the great city.
THE DRAMATIC CLUB PRESENTED “THE SHEPHERD”
During the story that was then being enacted a doll, representing the infant heir, was dropped in a miniature forest to be rescued by the valorous knight. At that moment the naked baby of the proprietor walked out from the wings, crossed the stage, and snatching up the doll, clasped it tight in her little arms and disappeared. The audience gave no sign that the current of their enchantment had been broken, nor did the reader or the manipulator of the rescuing knight pause for a second in their rôles.
The theaters on the Bowery and in its vicinity advertise Italian opera and occasional revivals of serious drama, but more obvious at present are the lurid advertisements of sensational melodrama. We are plainly under the influence of Broadway and the “movies,” but at the Metropolitan Opera House our neighbors can always be seen in great numbers among the “appreciators” at the top of the house.
A short time ago an unselfish and well-beloved member of the older circle of Russian revolutionists asked me to help him establish a comrade on some self-supporting basis, and began by saying, “Being a literary man, he wants to open a restaurant.” The fact of his being “literary” would immediately bring him custom, and I foresaw another meeting-place for philosophers, poets, and revolutionists, graduates of universities or gymnasia, writers and publicists, students familiar with Kant and Comte and Spinoza.
In these little East Side cafés, over a steaming glass of tea or a temperate meal, endless discussions take place. In the groups that gather there are many men of education who, during their first years in this country, worked as cloakmakers, tailors, or factory operatives until they were able to obtain employment more suited to their aptitudes or talents.
The cafés and the bookshop where the interesting proprietor specializes in radical literature are the meeting-places for the “intellectuals,” centers from which radiate influences that are not insignificant. As they prosper, many of these men move their families to other parts of the city, but they continue to be East Siders at heart, and find congenial atmosphere in their old haunts. So they come back for the fellowship they miss in their new habitations.
The saloons of the neighborhood touch the life of an entirely different set. They are informal club-houses for many men, some of whom have for years been members of the same political organization. Not that the organization trusts to the saloon alone. All through our neighborhood are the club-houses maintained for members of the party who are kept together through social intercourse.
However, among workingmen, the saloon may be patronized for other reasons than refreshment and sociability. When I expressed to a sober man, long out of work, my surprise that he should have been seen going into a saloon, he explained that if a man did not sometimes go there he was likely to be out of work a longer time. “The fellows just kind of talk about jobs when they’re sittin’ round in the saloons, and sometimes you pick up something.” His reasoning reminded me of a friend who professed indifference to the numerous expensive clubs to which he belonged, but found them useful in his business. “Often a chance conversation or a meeting with men develops into something big.”
When the Empress of Austria was assassinated in 1898 newspaper reporters, seeking “color,” asked the settlement’s direction to anarchists who, in the excitement of the time, were believed to form a considerable portion of the East Side population.
I recalled two men who, in a cellar in Grand Street, had a few rows of books for sale which advertised them as “Dealers in Radical Literature.” One partner proclaimed himself a State Socialist, the other a Philosophic Anarchist. The latter, mild and gentle, devoted disciple of Prudhon, with whose writings he was familiar, was almost pathetically grateful, and showed not altogether complimentary surprise when we purchased Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” Tolstoi’s “My Life,” and Walt Whitman’s poems. In his naïve simplicity he assumed that only those unsure of food and shelter found interest in such literature, and later he and his partner, in all seriousness, proposed, with our co-operation, to reform society.
They had decided, after much thought, that the reason the people they met at the settlement seemed to sympathize and understand was because of the books they read. They felt sorry for the people on Fifth Avenue who, living so far away from the poor, could not know how things might be remedied. Their plan was that I should rent a store opening on the avenue, place comfortable chairs and tables upon which books could be spread. These books the merchants would loan,—their whole stock, if necessary,—and then people passing on foot or driving by could stop and read.
Such naïveté could hardly be met with to-day, for education and discussion of themes of social interest have widened the minds of the community and contact with people of different positions in life is much more general.
Police interference with free speech and free assemblage in our country has stirred vigorous protest from sober people and has had the effect of kindling enthusiasm for propaganda of ultraradical philosophies among those who might otherwise never have given thought to them. In some quarters mere radicalism has become perilously popular. The spirit of adventure, a kind of generous devotion not always balanced with knowledge of definite issues or the constructive processes that are under way, deflect forces that might be employed for immediate advances in social welfare.
I recall the indignation of a young man, just graduated from one of our universities, when chance took him into an East Side hall where a well-known anarchist was addressing a large and attentive audience and reading selections from Thoreau. Without any obvious provocation the police jumped upon the platform, arrested the woman and those who sat with her, refused them permission to call a cab, and drove them in the patrol wagon to the police station. At the time there was no limit to which this man would not have gone to show his resentment against the injustice of the proceeding, and it was some relief to his chivalrous spirit to testify against the police and to use the settlement’s experience in giving publicity to the occurrence.
Something of this menace to cherished American institutions lay in the occurrences at Lawrence, Massachusetts, during the winter of 1912.
Unsatisfactory labor conditions gave the Industrial Workers of the World an opportunity to capture the loyalty and devotion of the discontented operatives. Reports of the unwarranted action of police and militia during a strike that ensued, the imprisonment of the strike leaders, and the difficulty of securing for them an impartial hearing were incidents too serious to be lightly dismissed from the mind. I went to Lawrence at that time, and came away reflecting with sadness on the manifestations there of how slight is our hold upon civilization, how insecure our reliance upon the courts for justice when feelings run high.
The operatives’ story had not reached the general public, and I offered the House on Henry Street as one medium for informing people in New York who had no link with the working people.
A participant in the strike came to us to tell the story, and her presentation, on the whole, seemed fair and reasonable. It was no less an indictment of the leaders of the established labor organizations for failure to unionize the workers, and thereby secure better wages and shorter hours, than of the capitalist, who, the speaker thought, should be held responsible for creating the conditions.
The reaction of the audience was definite—that the workers should have tangible assurance of the existence of an American sentiment for justice, and money came spontaneously to the settlement to be sent to the strikers and toward the cost of the defense of the prisoners. The New York press, on the whole, gave fair interpretation of the causes of discontent and the disturbing consequences to society of what appeared to some observers to be anarchistic methods on the part of those in authority.
The Social Reform Club, organized in 1894, was a factor in helping to stimulate a more general public interest in matters of social concern.
The club aimed at the immediate future, and labored solely for measures that had a fair promise of early success. Its members, wage-earners and non-wage-earners in almost equal numbers, were required to have “a deep active interest in the elevation of society, especially by the improvement of the condition of wage-earners.”
Ernest Crosby, Tolstoian and reformer, was the first president, and the original membership comprised distinguished men and women, courageous thinkers who fully met the requirements of the society, and others, like myself, who were to gain enlightenment regarding methods and theories for the direct improvement of industrial and social conditions.
Father Ducey, whose support of Father McGlynn[18] during his time of trial was then still referred to; Charles B. Spahr, and others no longer living were among the organizers. On the club’s weekly programmes can be read the names of men and women who were then and still are bearers of light for the community. Devoted members of the club testified to their indebtedness to the Knights of Labor as “a great educational force for social reform,” and a younger generation gained immeasurably from association with men and women who had given themselves unselfishly to the early labor movements in this country.
It was at the time of excessive sweatshop abuses, and from the windows of our tenement home we could look upon figures bent over the whirring foot-power machines. One room in particular almost unnerved us. Never did we go to bed so late or rise so early that we saw the machines at rest, and the unpleasant conditions where manufacturing was carried on in the overcrowded rooms of the families we nursed disquieted us more than the diseases we were trying to combat.
Our sympathies were ready for enlistment when working people whom we knew, and whose sobriety of habits and mind won confidence and esteem, discussed the possibility of improving conditions through organization. In another place I have told how the young girls first led us into the trades union movement, but now where the standard of the entire family was involved through the wage and working conditions of its chief wage-earner, it became to us a movement of greater significance.
We were accorded a doubtful distinction by acquaintances who had no point of contact with working people when we acknowledged friendship with “demagogues” and “walking delegates” (terms which they used interchangeably), and, inexperienced though we were, it was possible for us, in a small way, to help build a bridge of understanding.
Research was not then a popular expression of social interest. Discussions developed the need of a formal investigation into conditions, and a distinguished economist of Yale was asked to send someone academic and “without feeling for either side,” while we chose a labor leader, well informed from the workers’ point of view, to make the inquiry. The paraphernalia of cards, filing cabinets, et cetera, was provided, and a room set apart in the settlement, but the investigation ended before it was fairly begun with mutual scorn on the part of the two men.
Through the years that have followed the settlement has from time to time been the neutral ground where both sides might meet, or has furnished the “impartial third party” in industrial disputes.
One such conference lingers in my memory because of the open-mindedness shown by a man whose traditions and training were far removed from wage-earners’ problems. A friend and generously interested in all our undertakings, he questioned my judgment in espousing the workingmen’s side in a threatened strike, believing that a compromise on disputed hours and pay during that unprosperous time was better than interrupted employment. We believed that the “half loaf” might prove too costly. The wage was already below a living minimum, and the workers’ contention that at the beginning of the season the market could be made to meet a fair charge for labor seemed to us an entirely reasonable one. My friend agreed to bring representatives of the manufacturers and contractors if I would bring an equal number of workers to a conference in the Henry Street house, over which he would preside. No agreement was reached, but when the strike was finally declared this friend, whose wisdom and experience have placed him high in the councils of the nation, had come to see that the workers could not do otherwise, and throughout the strike he aided with money and sympathy.
Since those days cloaks are no longer made in New York tenement homes, and the once unhappy, sweated workers, united with other garment-makers, have been lifted into eminence because of the unusual character of their organization.
In 1910, after a prolonged strike, peace was declared under a “protocol,”[19] wherein were combined unique methods devised for the control of shops and adjustment of difficulties between the association of progressive manufacturers and the trades unions. New terms—“a preferential union shop” and the “Joint Board of Sanitary Control”—were introduced. Under the latter, for the first time in the history, of industry, sanitary standards were enforced by the trade itself. On this board, the expense of which was shared equally by the association of manufacturers and the trades unions, were representatives of both organizations, their attorneys, and three representatives of the public unanimously elected by both parties to the agreement.
When I was asked to be one of the three representatives of the public, already laden with responsibilities I was loath to accept another, but the temptation to have even a small share in the socializing of industries involving in New York City alone nearly 100,000 people and several hundred millions of dollars was irresistible.
High sanitary standards and a living wage, with reasonable hours of employment, were assured so long as both parties submitted to the terms of the protocol. Whatever changes in the administration of the trade agreement may be made, the protocol has established certain principles invaluable for the present and for future negotiations. The world seemed to have moved since we shuddered over the long hours and the germ-exposed garments in the tenements.[20]