by Elisa New
His children and his in-laws might not comprehend why he and his brother did such things, might call him, and his brother Paul too, Luftmenschen, purveyors of dreams and notions, crazy filers of writs and plats, in love with sashes, buttons, and any kind of regalia. Crazy!
Jacob and Paul did not care. They loved to declare intentions, take positions, forward motions, outline objections, weigh in. They loved putting themselves on the record and seeing their names in the paper. They loved the accoutrements and ceremonies attached to office of any kind. If they ever lost their tolerance of democracy’s rudeness, its motley population, its smelly public halls, they might think about their older brother Max, still in Raseinai—Max, whose prominence helped him not a jot.
A worthy, notable man of education and means who sent his children to university and had the most elegantly appointed offices in town—what was Max doing now?
Max, who sent stately New Year’s cards and appeared each year in the annals of Kaunas Guberniya as esteemed member of the Board of Jewish Electors, the Fire Prevention League, and even the Russian Sejm. Max, with his sinecures and emoluments, his leadership in the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment, his standing as member of the diploma intelligentsia, his desirable credentials. Where was he now?
Standing in a tightening noose, that’s where he was.
Every day in Raseinai, the Jewish Current reported more outrages committed against the Jews of the western Pale, rich and poor. Economic security meant nothing without political security.
Max and his liberal friends, the Jews trained at Kovno, Riga, and Tartu, had pierced the law all over with loopholes, and for a few decades Jews had slipped through. The laws that forbade Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement, from doing business, from traveling as they liked were punctured in manifold invisible places by exceptions through which ambitious Jews rushed.
But in this year, 1914, Jewish privileges were being revoked, as reported in the Jewish press. Readers of the Jewish Year Book of 1914 could see that the loopholes Jewish sechel had opened were now being cinched shut. A whole world of exceptions and privileges was being eliminated.
At Vladivostok, only those Jews might remain who possessed certificates that they had rabies and required attention at the local Pasteur Institute. At Vilnius, authorities forbade the performance of a song in Esperanto, because the inventor of the language was a Jew. Esperanto was condemned as a Jewish language. Jews adopting Islam were forbidden to live outside the Pale, as were Jews working as printers, millers, builders, photographers, gardeners, cabmen, or menders of musical instruments. At Tsaritsyn, Jews were forbidden to appear on the streets during church services. In Raseinai and in Shavli, a Jew’s accomplishments mattered only if they could be put to use. Jews filled the market stalls and university quotas, but nothing they did left its mark, nothing stuck on the record.
This is why Paul and Jacob never tired of spelling out the advantages of democracy to each other. In America, what mattered was not privileges but rights, free and public access to the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights: freedom from search and seizure; freedom of movement; the right to a fair trial; freedom to associate; freedom to rid oneself of national, ethnic, and tribal affinities. Here, one might say unpopular things in one’s own name, in one’s Jewish name, and still go home to supper.
One of the things I puzzled about before I began to study my great-grandfather’s socialism (the socialism of the period from 1900 to 1915, before the Russian Revolution) was how he could have been an international socialist, a progressive of some conviction, while strongly opposing unions.
Aunt Jean made no bones about showing her contempt for unions, the brutes who had, in 1923, forced her father to sign their contract or close his doors.
Unions! The very word made her sniff and, if pressed, snort her contempt. She never tired of repeating how her father had “handed out bread on the streets of Baltimore,” nor did she ever let anyone forget that in the years before she became a CEO she ’d run the factory herself, not above taking her turn, along with Myrtle and Fanny, inspecting yard goods and even lighting the boiler.
What she reviled was the way the union contract her father had been made to sign in 1923 forced the end of what she saw as his liberal, genteel, and Jewish conduct of his business, and the beginning of capitulation to the thugs and brutes who would plunge them all into misery. Did they really think these union riffraff, these “organizers,” knew better than her father how to run a business? These gentiles, coming to work wearing anything they liked—even dungarees!—and telling Mr. Levy that the union manager, and not one of the boss’s own children, must be employed to supervise the shop floor; that (and this the most galling and painful to her father) only union machinists be employed to maintain and repair her father’s inventions.
It was an insult, that’s what it was! And not at all what her father had stood for. Not at all.
Of course she was right, though what he had stood for, I later came to understand, was the dissemination of his own European, internationalist, highly learned socialism in America.
It would, I think, have been in 1912, that bellwether year in American politics, when Jacob first decided to run for office in the next election on the Socialist ticket. So far, only New York and Wisconsin had sent Jewish socialists to Washington as congressmen, but 1904 found a Jew, if not a Socialist, from Maryland in the U.S. Senate.
No one could beat the Americans in the pageant of democracy. Men of all parties and stripes had pronounced 1912 a spectacular year for politics. Though the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, failed to win a state, he had stirred the passions of men from the eastern immigrant enclaves to the railroading West. He had captured nearly a million votes out of 15 million cast—and this with progressive reform high on the agenda of the major party candidates as well. Moreover, for sheer democratic spectacle, the election was unmatched.
Who could forget how, at what seemed the last minute, Theodore Roosevelt had returned from shooting big game in Africa to “throw his hat in the ring.” Amply justifying his self-description as Bull Moose, TR lowered his own horns and charged the floundering, dumbfounded incumbent, William Howard Taft, by becoming the candidate of the new Progressive Party. This alone was gripping. But thinking men could also look on as the stately Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, coolly snatched Roosevelt’s own bully pulpit. While Roosevelt showed as much animal intelligence as ever, Wilson’s speeches introduced a new subtlety of mind into the political mix. With such men as Roosevelt and Wilson—orators both, public men both—talking themselves hoarse at every whistle-stop, vying with Debs for a mandate to bust the money interests, who could resist throwing his own hat in the ring?
Jacob Levy had not yet got his own men to understand what workers all over the world understood—that the enemy was not the industrial entrepreneur, a producer, but the landowner, the holder of leases, the collector of rents, and a government in sympathy with those who held property rather than those who worked with their hands.
It was for them, these workers, that Jacob hit the streets of the Third Ward to spread the socialist word by going to outdoor meetings, visiting immigrant hovels, and collecting signatures. Progress was not parochial or local. Socialism was an idea, not a matter of buttons and work hours.
Nothing made Jacob’s blood boil more than a pious pronunciation of the word “local.” Local was to labor as, in his view, Ostjude was to Jew: narrow, parochial, and without regard. What could be of less political moment than a geographically limited organization of people engaged in the same puny trade?
Could any politics be smaller potatoes than the Amalgamated’s cyclical defense of the buttonholer asking for more money per hole, or any symbol more frail than the shrewd Baltimore girl flattering the matrons of Bolton Hill into the campaign for cleaner toilets?
The politics of Samuel Gompers and his Federation of Labor was, as far as Jacob was concerned, socialism for those without enlightenment, with
out ideas, unlettered, lumpen. Did not the word itself, the word the unionists used to shut out the larger world of ideas, sum it up? Did not the smallness of the word “local” say it all?
Such is the tone and temper of the literature issued and recommended by the Socialist Party of America, of which my great-grandfather Jacob was not only a proud member but—as a candidate—their man on the barricades.
The prodigious literature of international socialism’s golden era reminds me that in 1914 Jacob would have made his run still hopeful, still innocent. His candidacy would have given purpose to his life: the satisfaction of living for progressive ideas, struggling for an international cause.
The city directories of Baltimore and Philadelphia show that Jacob added the word “International” to his company name in about 1911 and kept it until his death in 1939—despite the excesses of Lenin and Stalin and despite the victory, bitter to Jacob, of the unions in his own shop. The election coverage of fall 1914 shows that Jacob’s run for Congress was not successful but not unrewarding either, since the candidate for the Third Ward received one-quarter of the votes tallied. Jacob M. Levy demonstrated to himself and all Baltimore that a man named Levy—whom unenlightened cultures might exclude from holding office or owning land or tuning instruments or practicing law or medicine—could, in America, put his name on the ballot. Win or lose, succeed or fail, he could speak out.
Until Jacob entered the campaign, he had not realized the power of the public record. To run as a Socialist in Baltimore was to have no expectation of actually going to Congress. Although Socialists were on the ballot in every eastern city and in scattered Debs strongholds, only one Socialist, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, was predicted to keep the seat he had won in 1912. Moreover, with Woodrow Wilson’s presidency still in its exhilarating first stage, it was not credible that Democratic Baltimore would send anyone but a Democrat to the House.
But the point, as Morris Hillquit urged and Jacob told any who listened, was not the win but the run, the demonstration, as against the syndicalists on the one hand and the unionists on the other, of participatory democracy, which was not just an office but a rostrum, a lecture hall.
Jacob ran as an actual candidate for the Congress of the United States. Public office in a representative democracy was a large, slow, and abstract thing. But candidacy was something else; candidacy was as fast as the races at Pimlico.
Jacob was careful, more careful than most Socialists, to learn every filing procedure with impeccable reliability, and he was not disappointed to find that the Socialist candidate from the Third District was plagued by manifold obligations to functionaries at city hall. The campaign itself, of course, had been no idle act but a long slog of fourteen-hour days, every day’s genuine or strained optimism ending in sour breath and sore feet. The Third District was, though certainly not winnable, watchable.
Through the Indian summer after the primaries, Jacob spent long days away from his shrinking company, mounting the stoops of countless brick walkup buildings, climbing splintered stairs to workshops and sweatshops littered with vest cuttings; then descending toward the bay to pitch whatever he had left.
In the years that followed, Jacob would be glad to have his memories of this time. He had of course lost, but only to Republicans and Democrats. He had beaten the Progressive, Labor, and Prohibition candidates. When the results came in, he could feel satisfaction that the Third District led the Socialist vote in the city. For years after, he could look back at having lost the immediate battle but written his small chapter in Baltimore Socialist history.
Jacob’s 1914 report of campaign expenses, featured in the Baltimore Sun, showed more than a little moxie. The Sun’s account, “Socialist Candidate Declares Campaign Expenses,” reports that Jacob Levy, “candidate for the Third District,” declares campaign expenses of “53 cents and Thanks.” Condescending, yes, but he could count it a sign of the city’s elevated blood pressure, its jittery recognition of Debs’s party, that he, like Debs himself, had made them stoop to condescend.
My own hunch in regard to the unions was that the worst effect they had on my family, aside from wounding its pride, was to trivialize a set of ideas about labor my great-grandfather lived for and believed in. To be beaten by the Baltimore local in the name of labor equity was, for Jacob, not only to see his own German-accented strain of highbrow internationalism squashed. It was also to lose the high ideals of enlightened industry and modern civilization in a set of small concessions on a document.
Consequently I am sad for Jacob. Even before he came to America, met Bernhard Baron, and lost his sons, it was inevitable that he would lose his vision—the family’s vision—of not only betterment but happiness.
My aunt Jean kept the Sun clipping in a white vinyl album, gold tooled, the kind with ribbed sticky pages under plastic sheets. Using one curved, burgundy-lacquered fingernail to pry the corner plastic up, and then a thumbnail to lift the clipping’s edge off its sticky matting, she had once passed it to me over the cookies and the cold coffee and had grinned at her father’s insouciance and chutzpah, the obvious delight he took in declaring his probity on the public record. Socialist candidate Jacob Levy: hands out of the public till. After Jean died, I lost track of this album. But after I began to dream about Jacob’s cane and started writing this account of his civilization, I asked around and found that the album was safe in the hands of Jean’s nephews, Fred and Dan, who had kept the clipping along with other artifacts from the early days of Levy’s Shrinking. Indeed they held these treasures closely, protectively, as my cousins who now possessed the cane guarded it.
Never having seen Jacob’s library, attended a rally with him, or stood in the cold waving to Debs’s train, I am a latecomer, maybe a usurper. My writing about the cane and these clippings, putting my own stamp on them, is a way of trying to possess the family history I cannot own, to snatch for my own children a history not really mine to give.
I have brought Yael into it.
I have made the child I took to the Baltics on the eve of her bat mitzvah, now in her twenties, my ally in this theft of Jacob and his cane for our purposes. As I regret the loss of Jacob’s books, and as I observe my mature self created out of that regret, I encourage Yael’s self-fashioning along the same lines. Inheritance going the way it does, my own disdain for bourgeois niceties and artifacts, my preference for materials recondite and uninviting, is something I have passed on. I love it when Yael shakes her head, looks amazed, and asks, How could they? How is it possible they simply threw away all those books?
A lover of old covers, cracked bindings, Yael is now a collector herself.
Yael has her own growing library, shelf on shelf to the ceiling. Reference first, then modern languages, the avant-garde, film, history, poetry, and the literatures of Europe, from east to west, with books in Russian, her subject, given pride of place. How proud I am of her collection, how much I pardon her for her habits (wrinkling my nose as I look in at the tumbled bedclothes, piles of pants, shirts, underwear, carpet strewn with books, the window open to release the telltale tobacco odor mixed with her perfume), rationalizing as I pass that she is, after all, as much like him as I am like him.
Even as I invent us out of him, as I cast a fond and indulgent eye on Yael’s room with its smell of smoke and its books books books, I realize that I made him out of us.
Yael’s tumbled books I cherish as if they were his. His episodes of manic composition, his flight into ideas, are all mine.
Uppity and unbowed, living for and in ideas, I claim him, the patriarch I need, my forebear on the barricades.
TEN
Mother Earth
During the summer of 1917, while war raged in Europe, weekend mornings found my great-grandfather Jacob on the porch of his brother Paul’s farm in Glyndon, an hour’s train ride from Baltimore.
Down the long slope of lawn near the chicken coops, Jacob’s thirteen-year-old son Theodore idled with seven-year-old Emil in view of Paul and Jacob, wh
o kept an eye on them. Theo’s punishment for shoving his older but shorter brother, young Paul, off a pier was to spend the whole summer at Glyndon with his Uncle Paul and Aunt Sarah. To the weekly roster of Theo’s tasks—which included picking corn, feeding chickens, and mucking out the barn—Jacob added tender weekend attention to Emil. The dusty, stony hollow where the chickens clucked inside their low-windowed houses got the only shade on the lawn, and so there, on two stools, sat Theo and Emil, with a chessboard on their laps, while their father discoursed with his brother in German and, inside the house, their sisters Fanny and Myrtle helped Aunt Sarah with her work.
As in other summers, Fanny and Myrtle helped their aunt by sweeping floors, wiping dead bugs off the window sills, changing linens, and running Theodore’s shirts and trousers through the wringer, while in the sweltering kitchen fat Aunt Sarah stood over steaming pots of beans and beets, her cheeks flushed with the heat. Canning was Sarah’s delight, a job she saved for summer weekends when girls could come help at the farm. These vegetables and jams that she “put up,” using the phrase the Negro girl who helped her used, would be on sale, along with churned butter, come Monday at the booth of the Reisterstown Grange, her Paul’s own cooperative enterprise.
This summer of 1917 was about the last time Jacob and Paul were able to discuss the possible comeback of the Socialist Party. In fact, 1914 was the beginning of the end for socialism in the United States. The three years since had undermined the relevance of their speculations as to what might have happened if the United States had not joined the war, if Russia were not now plunged in revolution, and if their party’s presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, had not been arrested. The international, outward-looking socialism that had riveted Jacob’s intellect and distracted him from his wife Amelia’s troubles was considered more and more dubious. Still, discussing the future chances of the SPA versus the SDP, the WWW, and the AFL helped Paul keep Jacob from brooding on the hard facts he lived with.
