Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A M

by Elisa New

  In this volume Jacob had placed for Eddie’s discovery the clipping dated 1915, in which Edward Levy announced to the world that he “utterly renounced, relinquished and abandoned the use of my said surname of Levy . . . so that I and my heirs lawfully begotten might therefore be called known or distinguished by the surname of Baron.”

  At the clipping’s bottom, Jacob had written: “My first born son, named after my father, Abraham Samson on June 22nd, 1892 at 3 PM.”

  Edward never collected the Bible. And it was not until 2002 that anyone else saw the clipping Jacob had left in it. Sixty years after Jacob’s death, more than twenty after Edward’s, I am the one who turns the pages. The clipping slips noiseless from between the Bible’s pages, brittle, flat, its fold sharply creased from being pressed inside the book of Exodus for more than half a century. At first I think it is something cut in half, a bookmark perhaps.

  But it isn’t. It is the shocking clipping preserved whole, and the answer to why Jacob had added an extra bequest for Edward. I see that the note in the Bible was meant to leave his son with the sense that his father had died still grieving over the son’s defection, so fundamentally terrible as to alter the family tree itself.

  When I spread the clipping out on the desk I can see how significant, how full of import and reproach, Jacob meant his gesture to be. Reading the sad, carefully penciled postscript, I feel—for the first time—the grandeur of my great-grandfather’s anger, and how the literate, civilized means he used to express that anger perhaps exceeded the capacity of the persons he was angry at to understand. I thought then of Jacob’s cane, its inscriptions long unread, with certain sardonic hints in its correct but telegraphic inscription intimating the inevitable incommunicability of one generation’s core beliefs to those that followed.

  I see something else. Perhaps I wanted to see it so badly that I have claimed an inheritance never meant for me. Holding that clipping, I see my great-grandfather as the scholar, the bibliophile, the thoughtful polymath he was. He eased his moods, his anger, his discontent and disappointment by sitting at the desk and typing, typing, typing. Just as I do.

  He was a man who wrote.

  I was, I hope, not so foolish as to think myself in any occult sense his addressee, or even to imagine that he’d not have traded a great-granddaughter in love with his precise, sardonic ire for a son who would simply keep his name.

  Yet in studying the documents, the clipping, and the will, I feel closer to him and fancy him closer to me, due to the fact that this man seems to have typed his last will and testament himself. The font of this document is the same as I find in others—all those indignant, rueful missives on the letterhead of Levy’s International Shrinking that he dispatched over the years. He would not have been too sensitive to send a grandson to fetch a book on probate, a template for wills, from the public library, and then, on the same typewriter used for so many animadversions to The Editor, the typewriter on which he’d schooled himself in perfect written English, to compose a parting rebuke to sons.

  Learned, solitary, scholarly; impatient, rude, in love with ideas, Jacob is naturally the ancestor I hoped to find—and so I am not to be trusted in claiming him as such. And yet, holding the clipping and then holding the photocopy of it up to the pages of the will and testament, I still feel the quality of ardent will he made his will convey, and I admire and approve the writerly means he used to make this will known.

  The sin of my great-grandfather’s sons, the crime they had committed, is a simple, primal one: betrayal, for which he must have held himself at least partly responsible. His will is not only an angry and hurtful document but a self-wounding one. Rather than simply disinheriting his sons, it guarantees their refusal of inheritance in bequests too poor to be worth accepting. A man does not board an ocean liner to collect his father’s spite. Sparing the sons the trouble of collecting his blame, yet blaming them because he spared them, Jacob’s anger at his sons becomes anger at himself. His anger at Bernhard Baron had a more poignant source.

  It was not for luring his sons to give up their birthright, to leave their father, their sick mother, and their widowed sisters. The sons had decided to do these things themselves.

  It was not just for Bernhard’s enticing them from the New World back to the Old, back to the lands of kings and emperors. No respecter of nations, Jacob knew the United States was as liable to favor the powerful and rich as any princely state or kingdom.

  It was not even that Bernhard took away his own workforce, his own future, leaving him alone in Philadelphia and Robert alone in Baltimore to manage the larger plant. It was not just that Baron took the sons in and made them his heirs but that he made them heirs at all.

  Worldly persons would not doubt that his sons were fortunate. Their handsome offices; their outrageous Egyptian boardroom; the drivers waiting by their cars; the honor they enjoyed owing to the founder’s own spotless reputation—all these showed them to be world cynosures of commerce, notables of Europe’s Hebrew elite. Their wives (handpicked for them by Bernhard) meanwhile kept themselves busy with decorative and philanthropic offices.

  But this was not what either Jacob or Bernhard had meant when they spoke of civilization.

  May you be, Jacob had said in a letter to his grandson Earle, a “leading agent of civilization.” Earle was now Bernhard’s agent, the “civilization” he guarded was Bernhard’s Canadian, Australian, and South African interests. Was this what Jacob and Bernhard wanted, this what they struggled in Baltimore together to advance—to produce fine examples of the ruling class?

  Well might Bernhard look disconsolate in the photos Jacob saw of him. The world might deem him a success but the man who knew best, Jacob, could see his failure. For had he not failed in doing what he wanted to get done?

  Lionized the world over for creating the first truly global luxury by putting Black Cat and Craven A cigarettes in the hands of rich and poor, men, women, and children, Bernhard had also surpassed whatever the unionists had done in helping those who worked for him lead better lives.

  But having sworn, having promised on his heart to make Jacob’s sons Great Men, he made of them something far more meager: rich men.

  Having set out to perfect the very machinery of civilization—using the cigarette as his tool—what had Bernhard produced in the end but an excellent machine?

  Today it strikes us as strange that Bernhard Baron would ever have imagined the cigarette to be a vehicle of progress or enlightenment.

  But it is a fact of American, and indeed world, history that between the American Civil War and World War I no product, no industry better exemplified the struggle and gains made for social progress than tobacco did. Toxic and intoxicating, lethal and luxurious, tobacco’s complex history parallels the history of American social progress.

  Tobacco’s effect has always been to concentrate power in the hands of the few and enslave the many. The “bewitching vegetable,” the tobacco that brought the first colonists to America, also established the colony’s first leisure class and forced its first labor shortages. Tobacco precipitated the importation and breeding of American slaves. Tobacco’s power to line pockets, and thus the influence it exerted in favor of colonial dependence, strengthened the loyalist cause and deferred the struggle for American independence, while the model of land use tobacco farmers pioneered before independence—break new ground, use it up, push westward—provided a template for the antebellum Cotton Kingdom’s spread to larger and larger tracts of frontier.

  None of the above could be called progressive. And yet the same tobacco debt that bound Americans to British colonial power eventually, in the late eighteenth century, fostered a growing commitment to revolution. The spread of slavery from coast to tidewater, to Appalachian rim, to the Mississippi and beyond, spurred the development of free labor, and free soil, ideology. With the Civil War over, tobacco culture once again became a staging ground for shifts in attitude and policy, fresh evaluations of industrial, social, and specif
ically labor policy.

  Between the 1860s and World War I, developments in tobacco culture mirrored the development of modern standards of access, of protection and justice. Tobacco’s rising popularity counterpointed struggles for:• Equality between the sexes—and exploitation of women

  • Unregulated industry—and workplace safety

  • Accessible luxuries for the masses—and the concept of public health

  • The growth of advertising—and investigative journalism

  Tobacco became the symbol of monopoly—and trust busting. Mostly, though, tobacco had become the talisman of the parlous situation of American labor and, in particular, the twin labor crises brought on by emancipation and mechanization. The fundamentals of extracting profit from tobacco without using slaves exposed the relative primitiveness of homegrown labor theory, making America face the futility of its old commercial and labor practices and requiring new ideas, symbols, and even new heroes of American labor.

  It is a largely forgotten bit of history, but the American labor movement found its first modern leaders in the cigar industry, its cynosures and vanguard in the bookish agitators of the International Cigar Makers 144th. The first truly national labor leaders were German speakers who hailed from the cigar towns of central Europe. Accented, argumentative, intellectual, the cigar maker was the aristocrat and cynosure of progress. And if, among his fellows, the cigar maker was known as the most cerebral of workingmen—the vocation of cigar maker an alias for social theorist—he had a reputation too for intelligence of craft, for hands that not only rolled tobacco but knew it. An internationalist in politics, the European cigar maker in postbellum America was nevertheless a hot commodity. He had a skill backed by centuries of craft tradition, and this was worth something to an industry suddenly without captive labor.

  In the hands of men with names like Gompers, Strasser, and yes, Baron, rested American tobacco’s world market.

  That begins to explain why, from the first day he arrived in America, Bernhard Baron would have found himself in some demand. He did not have much money, but what he did have—a thorough knowledge of tobacco—was worth a lot to an industry trying to lift itself out of a Civil War past and get onto a more solid footing.

  One thing to remember is that in 1870, tobacco in America was ubiquitous but also déclassé. In England tobacco had traveled straight from Sir Walter Raleigh’s pocket to Elizabeth Regina’s court. And in Europe, centuries of ingenuity, art, and science had been lavished on finding a market niche for every smoker’s taste and pocketbook—from the paper-wrapped, rapidly consumed smokes popular with soldiers and workingmen, to the silk-wrapped “parparos” rolled for ladies’ fingers; from the carefully compounded mixtures whose elegance derived from “purity” of leaf (the exclusive use of choice “Turkish” or other “Oriental” strains), to blends that made up in smoothness, steady burn, or complex flavor what they might lack in pedigree. Moreover, Europeans had created ever more elaborate devices for the enjoyment of tobacco (cloisonné snuff boxes, gold cigarette holders, carved cigar boxes, silk embroidered pouches, meerschaum, amber, ivory) and had developed a genuine tobacco culture, including a polite literature extolling the charms of tobacco in many languages.

  In America, tobacco’s uses were crude, its signs visible in stains on walls, inside and out, and the sight of men—cheeks bulging—expectorating long ribbons of tobacco juice. The “chaw” was the preferred form of tobacco in the New World. Marketing tobacco to the better classes was an uphill battle. For a long time Europeans had been remarking the American fondness for the spittoon, marveling both at its ubiquity and its inutility. Why provide the revolting cuspidor, they asked each other, since, as Charles Dickens was hardly first to notice, few used it.

  Where then, after the Civil War, could hungry American tobacco entrepreneurs go to find examples of refined tobacco use? To whom did rising tobacco magnates Duke and Liggett, Kinney, Lorillard, and the Ginters go to recruit their talent?

  Where but to the workshops up and down the coast, from New Haven to the Carolinas, where German (Jewish) émigrés were employed. Hailing from the river towns and industrial ports of German-speaking Europe, where every hamlet with a slimy dock had its tobacco “factory,” the German immigrants of midcentury brought to the west the talents of the tobacco-using east.

  Brest, the town from which Uncle Baron hailed, was not quite as large a tobacco center as nearby Grodno, but circa 1850 it had five factories within the city limits, four of them devoted to the processing and manufacture of tobacco products. Moreover, the very first factory to open in the raw frontier town of Rostov-on-Don (where the Baron family moved in the 1850s) was—what else—a tobacco factory, opened to meet the demand of soldiers fighting in Crimea.

  From such a place my Uncle Baron, and many other immigrant Jews like him who had worked in the tobacco factories, brought ripened talents and a sense of dignified vocation. They brought their long-nurtured pride in craft and their esteem for the product, as well as the adaptability of persons accustomed to living with and through disruption.

  Ten, twenty, forty Jews might be brought to Carolina to teach the locals refinements of rolling and curing, the proper way to strip a leaf, and then sent back on a third class car, one way to Baltimore, where every second immigrant had relatives. Some manufacturers recruited whole villages of rollers from muddy Bohemian or Belorussian sloughs. Agents would land at Bremen or Hamburg and send scouts down the riverways, and then the manufacturers would raid each other, stealing the cream of the cigar makers and spiriting them from city to city.

  The late-nineteenth-century émigré cigar maker was perceived to have qualities that made him valuable indeed in newly corporate America.

  The only problem with these émigrés: their ideas.

  Along with their talents, the European cigar makers brought habits of thought. They brought ideas about feudalism, serfdom, radical socialism and syndicalism, anarchism, trade unionism, craft unionism, Marxian and Lasallean communism, and every other ism filling the journals of the day. They brought conceptions of the workingman more nuanced than those of “slave” or “free” that had engrossed American labor thinkers hitherto. With their knowledge of blends and growing conditions, stripping, and the crucial matter of the wrapper, they also brought outrage at risks a tobacco laborer was heir to, all the toxic syndromes and economic inequities of the trade.

  They had expertise in the muscular limits of the human hand, the vertebral column, the nerve tunnels running from wrist to shoulder.

  They knew the vulnerability of the human lung to fine particulates.

  They knew the long-term effects of an unlit workspace on the eye; the contribution of unventilated workshops to the spread of the scourge, tuberculosis. They knew too that TB (along with grippe, bronchial ailments, influenza) spread from producer to consumer through the saliva on a cheaply sealed cigar.

  They realized the impacts of child labor on juvenile growth, education, and opportunity.

  They recognized the effects of child labor on an adult breadwinner’s livelihood.

  They saw the effect of falling prices due to overproduction or increased demand on a cigar maker’s income.

  They saw the insult to craft, craftsmanship, and product quality in the breaking up of tasks once performed by one craftsman into mechanical operations.

  They witnessed the insult to manliness, family, and domestic peace in employing women and children to replace the skilled craftsman.

  They endured the insult to manliness in replacing the craftsman’s delicate intuition and dexterous hands with the cigar mold.

  They suffered the atrophy of mind and spirit in a workday reduced to repetitive motion, and the atrophy of hope in a workweek without Sabbath or any surcease.

  To all of these risks the German cigar maker who had seen everything now saw something new—the effect of slavery’s abolition on the price of labor throughout the United States. Wages in the postbellum South depressed wages everywhere
, for the tobacconist now hired free men but still needed to make a profit. The shift from slavery to sharecropping meant that the man who had picked tobacco at someone else’s pleasure, poorly fed, badly housed, now picked tobacco as a free man. What was the difference? In 1869, the “Tobacco Factory Mechanicks of Richmond and Manchester” wrote to a newspaper, “Our masters hired us to the Tobacconist . . . the tobacconist furnished us lodging food and clothing.” Now these same employers offered a wage, but from this wage workers had somehow to pay for bed and board. The workers wrote, “They say we will starve through laziness this is not so. But it is true we will starve at our present wages.”

  To compete, northern tobacco manufacturers cut labor costs to the bone, developing various schemes to keep the workforce stable and cheap, especially the system of urban sharecropping that became the cause célèbre of the Cigar Makers Union. “Cigar makers,” Samuel Gompers explained, “paid rent to their employer for living room which was also their work space, bought from him their supplies, furnished their own tools and received in turn a small wage for completed work, sometimes in scrip or in supplies from the company store.” Gompers warned that such a system would eventuate in the circumstantial destruction of both peaceful homes and dignified labor. Jacob Riis devoted a whole chapter to this situation in How the Other Half Lives. Riis found hovels where “a man and wife [are] working the bench from six in the morning until nine at night. She strips, he makes the filler; she rolls the wrapper on and finishes the cigar.” For a thousand cigars they earn 3.75. They manufacture 3000 cigars a week. This is one a minute on a two person assembly line.

  In postbellum America the gap left by the abolition of slavery opened new vistas of degradation for the tobacco worker. But he also had ideas.