The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  What Cahan wanted was to speak in and write English. All that work with Appleton’s English Grammar was paying off. After but a few months in New York, he began giving English lessons to other immigrants, and soon he was earning enough as a tutor to quit the factory. But remaining one linguistic step ahead of his fellow immigrants was not good enough for him; he wanted to master the new language.

  In the fall of 1882 Cahan approached the principal of an elementary school on the corner of Chrystie and Hester Streets, not far from where he lived, with an unusual request. In “careful but tortured English” he explained that although he had been a teacher in his old country, he wanted to be a student in his new one. The principal granted him permission, and for the next three months the twenty-two-year-old Cahan sat in on classes, joining thirteen-year-old boys in their lessons in reading, writing, and geography. He studied his fellow students as well, so as to learn their mannerisms as well as their pronunciation. It was not simply English he wanted to conquer, but American English, in all its idiomatic complexity. By winter, he had picked up enough to sail through the American daily newspapers. And soon he was speaking English with only a hint of an accent. In the fall of 1883, he landed a job teaching English at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association night school, which left his days free for writing and political activities.

  Cahan was spending time with William Frey, né Vladimir Heins, a charismatic Russian nobleman who had come to America intending to join a Communist agricultural society. Frey set up a commune in Oregon, but then became taken with what he called the “religion of humanity” and eventually returned to Russia. With Frey, Cahan attended lectures at Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society. Frey considered Adler a preacher of progressive morality, but as Cahan wrote in his memoir, “for me the sermons were merely English lessons.”

  It was during this period that Cahan began to develop an interest in the Yiddish theater, which was just then getting underway in New York; it would be one of his great passions throughout his life. He also spent time in socialist salons—or more often, saloons. He attended a memorial for the German-Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lassalle and another for the Paris Commune. But he also stood a bit aloof from, or above, the fray.

  Despite all his activities, Cahan was lonely. As much as he had wished to flee his homeland, he missed it. He dreamed of Vilna and his family, his heart “filled with a crushing longing.” Everything in America seemed “strange and contrary. Everything was different from what it had been at home.” Still, he wanted to fit in, and this ambivalence about his new home would, in years to come, mark not only Cahan but also his immigrant readers.

  This is not to understate the headiness of the time for a young Yiddish-speaking exile from Russia. At one point, Cahan related in his memoir, he and his roommate were awakened in the middle of the night by a “determined” knock on the door. In marched the young revolutionary Lev Hartmann. “Only a few years earlier,” Cahan related, “the entire world resounded with that name.” In 1879 Hartmann had been involved in a plot to blow up the czar’s train as it traveled south from Moscow. His wife had famously used her shawl to signal the attack.

  The plot had failed. But even with someone as famous as Hartmann, Cahan affected a slightly detached tone, focusing not on Hartmann’s subversive activities but on his entrepreneurial, distinctly American ones. Hartmann, who had applied for American citizenship, was apprenticing as an electrician, drawing upon the skills he had picked up as a revolutionary with a taste for explosives. He had invented a tiepin that contained an electric light, and Cahan decided to help him try to interest storekeepers in selling it. But when the storekeepers learned that the user was required to carry a battery in his pocket, the two men were laughed out of the store.

  By the end of his first year in America, Cahan was attending socialist meetings held in English. “I call them socialist meetings,” he wrote in his memoir, “but in truth every kind of reformer came to them to advance his or her personal cause.” At the same time, he was drawn to American democracy and its symbols. When he heard that President Chester Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland were scheduled to unveil a statue of George Washington in front of Federal Hall, Cahan was among the first on hand. But when the crowd went into a room where Arthur was signing autographs, he held back. “How,” he wrote in his memoir, “would it look for a socialist to ask for a souvenir from a capitalist President?”

  Still, Cahan couldn’t contain his fascination with his new country. Beneath his outbursts of socialist rhetoric, he was developing a journalistic detachment from the events that swirled around him. For the St. Petersburg journal Viestnik Yevropy,† he wrote a long piece in Russian about the U.S. presidential election of 1884. He described the candidates and their campaign platforms with true journalistic dispassion, as he tried to understand them and the issues that divided them: the reform-minded Democratic governor of New York, Grover Cleveland; Republican James G. Blaine, a former Speaker of the House, senator, and secretary of state, known as the Plumed Knight, with a history of financial scandal; and the candidate of the populist Greenback Party, Benjamin F. Butler, a former Massachusetts governor, whom the socialists and radicals, Cahan observed, thought too weak in his progressivism.

  Much to his horror, political operatives from both major parties were bribing voters. “For Russian socialists, the ballot was a sacred ideal. [Yet here in America] the naive immigrant was being taught to sell it for a few dollars.” Cahan spent “almost my entire first presidential election day” walking the streets “watching the politicians operating and the people voting.” He was pained by the “ease with which corrupt politicians were able to persuade our uneducated Jews to sell their votes.” Russia denied Jews “even the small rights granted to their Gentile neighbors.” But in America, “all enjoyed the same rights, Jew or Gentile. And for us the right to vote should have been even more precious than for our Christian fellow Americans.”

  Cahan characterized as his “first lesson in American politics” the blunder committed by an ally of Blaine, Reverend Samuel Burchard. The pastor, who had “a greater talent for sophistry than for common sense,” jibed that Cleveland stood for “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” One of the most notorious examples of bigotry in American politics, the phrase may have cost Blaine the White House.

  Cahan expanded on his theory that there was basically no difference between the two major parties, which were more like competing corporations. He prophesied the death of the two-party system, a notion he later called “juvenile.” Following Cleveland’s victory,‡ Cahan gave a speech in which he “criticized the two capitalist parties and explained that they were interested in political power for the purpose of exploiting the workers.… ‘The days of the Republicans and the Democrats are numbered!’ I thundered. The audience consisted entirely of greenhorns. In that entire hall there wasn’t a single citizen.”

  It was in his account of this campaign that Cahan’s journalistic instincts emerged. He was paid for the piece, which he “read and reread” when a friend told him the Astor Library had a copy of the journal on file. He was invited to continue submitting articles, but Cahan had a better opportunity. Only two years after arriving in America, he became a writer for one of the greatest newspapers in America.

  The first time Cahan submitted an article about the Lower East Side to The New York Sun, Erasmus Darwin Beach, the paper’s editor, read it with interest. The piece was great, Beach told Cahan; it would run in the paper the following Sunday, and Beach was eager to publish more pieces by the young journalist. Beach had just one question: “You use a word about which I must ask. What is a ghetto?”

  As Cahan worked to advance his journalistic career, he began to exhibit a skepticism of certain left-wing nostrums. At one socialist meeting he attended—he was often one of the only Russian Jews in attendance—“a woman with a mournfully pious face again took the floor,” he wrote, and spoke about monetary reform. If only more money were printed, she said, all would have more money
, and poverty would come to an end. “I remember the sorrow in her voice as she cried: ‘How long must we tolerate this insanity? So much tears and blood are flowing! Such crushing poverty, such grinding need, and we do nothing! Nothing! Let’s march on Washington! Let’s demand that they print more money.”

  When Cahan got up to speak, he pointed out that “minting more money would solve nothing and … money cannot be printed without limit.” The mournful lady screamed at him that “humanity must continue to endure its suffering because of people like me.” An argument ensued, until “a speaker with a German accent began to explain that no matter how much money would be printed the pockets of the poor would remain empty and the money would end up in the hands of the rich.” The mournful lady jumped to her feet again, “and when the meeting was adjourned she was still shouting hysterically at this so-called socialist meeting that we were all out to help the Vanderbilts and the Goulds.” In other words, more than a decade before he founded the Forward and began his career of socialist newspaper work, Cahan was already being described as a shill for the capitalist system.

  * * *

  * New York’s port of immigration at the Battery from 1830 to 1892, when Ellis Island replaced it.

  † European Courier

  ‡ The only person to serve two nonconsecutive terms in the highest office, Cleveland was the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president.

  5

  By the mid-1880s, socialist activists were forming educational societies called “unions” for Jewish laborers, sponsoring lectures and debates about political and labor issues facing the working classes. Cahan attended many of their organizing meetings and was a popular and sought-after speaker at their events. In February 1885 he married Anyuta (Anna) Bronstein, the young woman who back in 1882 had perched atop a table to catch, through her pince-nez, a better glimpse of Cahan at his second Yiddish speech. In his memoir Cahan devoted remarkably few words to her, aside from the fact that she came from Kiev, was an educated intellectual, perhaps more so than he, with an interest in both French and Russian literature, and was “much admired for her discriminating intelligence and attractive personality.” They set up housekeeping in an apartment in a relatively new tenement building on Division Street, between Clinton and Suffolk Streets. “My intellectual friends considered my three new rooms with brand-new furniture just fine,” Cahan recounted.

  The year after Cahan was married, he began to advance his plan for publishing his own Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, a project about which he had long dreamed. But he would be involved with several Yiddish newspapers and then spend some time writing for English-language publications before he finally came into his own at the Forward.

  The first Yiddish socialist paper where Cahan worked was Di Neie Tzeit,* which he and his cronies launched in June 1886 (“on Shavuos,” Cahan recalled in his memoir). It was written in simple, conversational Yiddish, prompting an immediate outcry from those who were partial to the more florid, German-infused Yiddish vernacular known as Daytshmerish, which was then used in journalism and the theater. Cahan was the chief editor as well as “proofreader, manager, bookkeeper, and advertising agent.” The paper, issued weekly, lasted six months, done in by competition from a better-funded Yiddish socialist weekly.

  Around this time an event occurred at Chicago that would have strong reverberations throughout the American labor movement and, indeed, the world. On the evening of May 4, 1886, some twelve hundred people gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police tactics against workers who had gone on strike for an eight-hour workday, and to show solidarity with the striking workers. The demonstration, organized in part by the editors of an anarchist German-language paper called the Arbeiter-Zeitung, was fairly peaceful. Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, who had come by to observe the rally, left early. As the last speaker was finishing, the police appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse. A bomb was thrown at the column of policemen, killing one. Mayhem broke out. In the ensuing violence, six more policemen died and at least four workers were killed. Sixty policemen and at least fifty other people were wounded.

  In the aftermath, eight individuals associated with various anarchist movements were arrested, including most of the staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. There was no proof that any of the accused anarchists had thrown the bomb, but public opinion was certainly not on their side. The New York Times, which covered the incident along with much of the American press, described the Haymarket affair as the “bloody fruit” of “the villainous teachings of the Anarchists.” All eight defendants were found guilty, and four were sent to the gallows on November 11, 1887. Protest rallies were held around the country, including in New York, where Cahan, perhaps remembering the bodies he had seen swinging from Russian gallows as a young boy, said, “For us, the thirteenth of March was the sacred anniversary of the martyrs of the Russian Revolution, and the eleventh of November was that of the martyrs of the American labor movement.”

  But as sympathetic as he may have been toward the Chicago radicals, Cahan was growing skeptical of anarchism as a viable movement. The American political system, in contrast to the Russian, offered possibilities for reform, and the New York mayoral campaign of 1886 was a tantalizing case in point. Henry George, the political economist and author of Progress and Poverty, a popular book on economic inequality, ran as the candidate of the United Labor Party, an alliance of the Socialist Labor Party and the Single Taxers Union. George lost to the Tammany Hall–backed Democrat, Abram Stevens Hewitt, but did manage to receive an impressive 68,110 votes to Hewitt’s 90,552. A twenty-eight-year-old Republican state assemblyman by the name of Theodore Roosevelt came in third, with 60,435 votes. Cahan was heartened by the fact that socialism could actually make inroads within the American political system. In December 1887, he formally gave up on anarchism and joined the Socialist Labor Party. He became a frequent contributor to the party’s English-language weekly, the Workmen’s Advocate. “When I got my membership card, I felt as if a stone had been lifted from my heart,” he later wrote.

  By now, Jewish immigrants were pouring into New York City, overcrowding the already cramped tenements and streets of the Lower East Side. If the numbers offered comfort, they provided misery, too; conditions in the sweatshops worsened, and few other jobs were to be had. Sanders writes that the task of organizing the Jewish workers was “both more necessary and more possible than ever.” A battle between the generally older anarchists and the younger radical intellectuals, who considered themselves social democrats, was brewing on the Lower East Side, and the issue of unionism brought it to a boil.

  In the fall of 1888, several Jewish Social Democrats, inspired by the United German Trades and by the anarchists’ competing organization, proposed the formation of a like-minded group of Yiddish-speaking workers. Bernard Weinstein, Cahan’s friend from his factory days, and a nineteen-year-old immigrant from Riga who spoke little Yiddish, Morris Hillkowitz, were assigned the task of reporting on the current state of Jewish organized labor. They hit the streets of the Lower East Side, peering into cramped basements and crowded lofts. “There had been, we knew, unions of shirt makers, cloak operators, and bakery workers at one time or another,” wrote Hillkowitz, who later took on the moniker Hillquit. “We thought them dormant. We found them dead.”

  Despite the lack of actual unions to organize, Weinstein, Hillquit, and their colleagues decided to press on. On October 9, 1888, they wrote the charter for the United Hebrew Trades, which grew quickly. In early 1890, the UHT pulled almost 3,000 striking cloak makers (the industry employed more Jewish immigrants than any other) into its fold and won significant increases in wages for its members.

  Around this time, the anarchists and the Social Democrats on the East Side were discussing pooling resources and publishing a nonpartisan labor newspaper. Their differences were too great, though, and in January 1890 the Social Democrats struck out on their own. The new Yiddish-language weekly was to be called the Arbeiter Zeitung, a tip of
the hat to the Haymarket victims. Cahan, who had been writing more and more in English, was invigorated by the thought of a true social democratic newspaper, a venture that would enable him to marry his political interests with his journalistic ones. He was not the paper’s inaugural editor, though; Philip Krantz, the former editor of a Jewish weekly in London, served in that capacity.

  But from the get-go Cahan, enthusiastic and convinced that he knew better than anyone else (much to Krantz’s consternation), attempted to shape editorial policy. He had several pieces in the first issue: a front-page feature juxtaposing New York scenes of wealth and poverty and written in a deliberately lowbrow tone; an account of African cannibalism that he had pulled from the pages of Scribner’s Magazine (Krantz disliked it and decided to run it only at the last moment, for fear of not having enough material); and a column called “The Proletarian Preacher,” which taught socialist lessons cloaked in Jewish tradition. Here is how Cahan introduced the preacher in his first column:

  Me, I’m from the town of Proletarishok.… Do you know, folks, where Proletarishok is? Not far from Capitalishok. The two shtelakh are as near to each other as in New York, for example, Fifth Avenue is to the Pig Market [a derisive nickname for Hester Street].

  Subtle he was not. And from a later column:

  Today our biblical portion is about strikes: the cloak-makers still have a little strike to finish up, the shirt-makers are on strike, the pants-makers are striking, even our teacher Moses called a mass meeting to talk about a strike.… Sheyshes yommim te’asseh m’lokhoh, more than six days a week you shouldn’t work for the bosses, the seventh day you shall rest.