The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  Cahan applied himself anew to his writing, and in 1895 placed “A Providential Match,” in Short Stories magazine. One day Howells’s wife, while waiting on the elevated platform for a train, glanced at the titles on the newsstand and spied Cahan’s name on the magazine cover. She purchased a copy and brought it home to Howells, who, after reading it, invited Cahan for another visit.

  It was at this meeting that Howells really got down to business. “I have read your story in Short Stories,” he told Cahan. “Of course, it’s not a serious thing. But it shows me that you must write. It is your duty to write.”

  “Imagine then what an effect the compliment of the ‘Dean of American Literature’ had on me,” Cahan later wrote. It made him realize that his writings about the Jewish immigrant experience would have an American readership far beyond the world in which they were set. That insight set in motion the creative frenzy that in 1896 produced Cahan’s first novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. But the reverberations of this meeting went well beyond Cahan himself. William Dean Howells, a consummately American writer and a supporter of Mark Twain, was now encouraging a writer who was chiefly a portraitist of the Lower East Side. The immigrant Jewish enterprise was entering American life and becoming a much more central element.

  Despite their amateurish tone, Cahan’s early stories have moments of poignant beauty. In “A Providential Match,” an unattractive, pockmarked immigrant Russian Jew pays a matchmaker to convince a young woman from back home to come to New York to marry him. He rushes to meet the boat on which she has arrived, only to discover her on the arm of a young “collegian” with whom she has fallen in love during the crossing. When he shouts that he wants his hundred and fifty dollars back and will call for a “politzman,” a burly runner for an immigrant hotel, who has been observing the proceedings, shoves him aside, then escorts the couple away.

  In “A Sweat-Shop Romance,” Beile, a finisher, is berated by the boss’s wife. Her coworker and beau, the machine-operator Heyman, silently sits by. But David, a baster in the shop, sticks up for Beile, and they are both fired. He thereafter pursues her with persistence and humor. Here is an excerpt:

  He found work for her and for himself in the same shop; saw her home every evening; regularly came after supper to take her out for a walk, in the course of which he would treat her to candy and invite her to a coffee saloon—a thing which Heyman had never done; kept her chuckling over his jokes; and while sitting by her side in Central Park one night, he said, in reply to her remark that it was so dark that she knew not where she was, “I’ll tell you where you are—guess.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, in my heart, and keeping me awake nights, too. Say, Beile, what have I ever done to you to have my rest disturbed by you in that manner?”

  Her heart was beating like a sledge hammer. She tried to laugh as she returned: “I don’t know—You can never stop making fun, can you?”

  “Fun? Do you want me to cry? I will, gladly, if I only know that you will agree to have an engagement party,” he rejoined, deeply blushing under cover of the darkness.

  “When?” she questioned, the word crossing her lips before she knew it.

  In Cahan’s life, immigrant melodrama was not confined to his fiction. One day in October 1892, at the Jewish Labor Lyceum—a two-story building on Delancey Street—he met two friends who had with them a young man with red hair. He looked to be about nineteen years old. Cahan had no idea who the boy was until one of the men introduced him as Isaac Cahan. He was Abraham Cahan’s only sibling, whom he hadn’t seen for eleven years. Cahan wept and resolved to do right by his brother. Isaac, who had been working since he was a young boy, was not as educated as his brother, and Cahan decided that Isaac would now learn English well, quickly. He became his personal tutor.

  Despite Cahan’s voluminous writings about his own life, he says little else about his brother, or about his parents for that matter. But in August 1893, when he traveled to Europe to attend the third congress of the Socialist International in Zurich he made arrangements to meet his parents at Vienna; it was still too dangerous for him to return to Russia. He described the meeting in his memoir:

  I rang the bell and heard sounds inside. The door opened all the way and I saw an old lady. At first glance she did not look familiar to me, but I realized right away that this was my mother. I threw myself towards her and she towards me.

  “My son, I don’t recognize you!” she wailed without tears. I forgot about my resolve to be calm. I was confused and nervous.

  Cahan had changed irrevocably, they all realized. He described for his parents his journalistic and speaking career in America. His father confessed that he didn’t like the sound of it; his mother offered no such judgment but constantly touched him and begged him to take good care of Isaac. Cahan spent eleven days with his parents then and never saw them again.

  It is something on which to reflect. His memory of his childhood was so acute that he could recall in detail the condition of a couch upon which he stood as a toddler; and he was obsessed with creating a career using the language of his parents. Yet after he left home, he failed to maintain contact with them or even, if direct contact was deemed too dangerous, to send word back to them through a third party. When he finally did see them again, for what would most assuredly be the last time, he could barely speak to them, much less offer to bring them to America. Such behavior suggests that Cahan’s character included a degree of self-control and self-regard that enabled him to keep an emotional distance from radicals, Communists, office schemers, and even his wife, leaving himself free to pursue his enormous ambitions. It also captures something of the immigrant ethos, which would become essential to Cahan in the creation of his own persona and in achieving his other goals in America.

  The Arbeiter Zeitung to which Cahan returned had a circulation of about 10,000, and its principal backer, the United Hebrew Trades, had about a quarter-million members. It must have been a kind of paradise for a writer-editor like Cahan. He could, and did, publish news, editorials, feuilletons, fiction, and even poetry, at a time when significant feuds roiled the socialist movement, the labor movement, and the literary world, and when the trend toward realism in American fiction was on the rise and was influencing Cahan’s writing. At the same time, the work environment at the paper was deteriorating. Power was shifting to a management board that wanted more say in running the paper; Cahan chafed at having to answer to an outside bureaucratic entity. For a world-class journalist like him, it must have been a kind of hell.

  For a while Cahan thought he could live with the situation at the Arbeiter Zeitung, but eventually he and a colleague, a fellow Lithuanian Jew named Louis Miller, began laying plans for a new newspaper. Adding fuel to the fire was a showdown he had with Daniel De Leon over the direction of the Socialist Labor Party.

  The economic crisis of 1893 would have a far-reaching effect on Cahan and his socialist colleagues. After a period of feverish growth and expansion, the American economy took a nosedive, culminating in the economic depression known as the Panic of 1893. The rush to build railroads across America had created a bubble that eventually burst, fueling bank runs, credit crunches, and bank failures. Unemployment soared. The presidential election of 1896 was fought over economic issues, as William McKinley headed the pro-gold, high-tariff Republican ticket and William Jennings Bryan led the pro-silver, populist Democrats. McKinley’s victory meant the Gilded Age was nearing its end, and the Progressive Era was about to begin. Thereupon the Socialist Labor Party came into its own in America. Dominated since its birth in 1876 by German-speaking immigrants, the SLP regarded it as a coup when Daniel De Leon, an urbane intellectual fluent in seven languages, joined the party in 1890 and became editor of its newspaper, The People.

  De Leon’s zeal and dogmatism were polarizing, and when he abandoned his academic career and turned his full attention to the SLP, he became intent on defeating rivals by any means possible. He once called Samuel Gompers, the l
egendary leader of American Federation of Labor, “an entrapped swindler.” Cahan, for his part, once referred to De Leon as “a Bolshevik before there were Bolsheviks, a Leninist before Lenin.” De Leon anathematized small, incremental efforts to improve the workers’ conditions, especially if those efforts came about through cooperation with nonsocialist labor leaders. Such “labor fakers” were deluding the workers into believing that the capitalist system could somehow be reformed from within. De Leon, determined to work only with unions that specifically supported socialism, embraced the tactic of “dual unionism”: breaking an existing union and developing another in its stead. Many within the SLP, including Cahan, considered this tactic destructive and strenuously opposed it. In World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe describes the battle:

  Though led by men who regarded themselves as socialists, the unions had to fight for immediate reforms which the De Leonists scorned, had to work out peaceable relations with nonsocialist union leaders whom the De Leonists abused, and had to respond with sympathy to the Jewish sentiments of their members, which the De Leonists dismissed. De Leon was an ideologue most comfortable in the seclusion of the sect, and as long as he practiced a kind of “dual unionism,” that recurrent curse of the American left, his leadership could only be a disaster.

  Cahan’s quarrels with De Leon are illuminating because they disclose his ability to judge character, an ability that he had by now keenly developed. One time, according to one biographer of Cahan, Theodore Pollock, Cahan was in the audience when De Leon was lecturing. A man named Goldenstick contested one of De Leon’s points, and the audience “was startled to hear the lecturer reply by addressing him as ‘Mr. Golden-stink.’ ” One of the listeners, an elderly man, thought De Leon had “simply made a mistake,” Cahan recalled, “and corrected him. De Leon laughed, and then proceeded to mispronounce the name again, this time in a different way.” Cahan was shocked at this rude behavior, and his dislike of De Leon intensified, over and above his disagreement with the strategy of dual unionism.

  The battle between the two factions of the Socialist Labor Party was bitter and broadly waged, involving not only the SLP but the staff of the Arbeiter Zeitung and members of the United Hebrew Trades. Eventually the newspaper’s management board decided to reduce the Arbeiter Zeitung to a weekly supplement to the evening paper, the Abend Blatt. The board was prepared to leave Cahan as editor of the supplement, but it complained that he was “nervous and extremely temperamental.” So Cahan quit and published his account of the controversy in the SLP-sponsored magazine Die Zukunft, characterizing the management board as a “House of Lords” and calling instead for a “House of Commons.”

  Louis Miller, on his return from a trip to Europe, brokered an attempt at a compromise. It brought a period of detente during which Cahan wouldn’t go to the office but sent in his weekly column by messenger. But De Leon continued to gain ground with members of the management board. Miller, Cahan, and another member of the SLP named Morris Winchevsky attempted to stage a coup at a meeting of the Arbeiter Zeitung publishing association in early 1897, but once again De Leon out-maneuvered them. So their faction retreated to the basement in a nearby hall and laid plans to launch a new Yiddish newspaper.

  The response from those in the hall was immediate and favorable. Cahan and another editor “went about with hats in our hands, and people threw ten-dollar, five-dollar, two-dollar bills and silver coins into them. Off came rings and watches and all were thrown into the hats.… I remember how my hat became so heavy that I had to support it with my other hand lest it rip.” One enthusiastic supporter felt so buoyed that he pawned his own suit to give money to the cause.

  Emboldened, Cahan and his colleagues called a meeting of their allies among the socialist and union leaders. On January 30, 1897, representatives of nearly two dozen organizations from cities as far away as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Haven descended on Walhalla Hall on Orchard Street, where they created a new organization called the Press Association. The association declared that it would “hold high the flag of international class conflict” and “work with all its might for the Socialist Labor Party.” It was delinked from the United Hebrew Trades, though its sympathies were with the labor movement generally. It was Louis Miller who proposed naming the association’s newspaper the Forvertz, or Forward, after the Vorwärts, the official newspaper of the Social Democratic Party in Germany.

  * * *

  * “The New Era”

  6

  The founding of the Forward was but one of three events that took place in 1897 and that changed the course of Jewish history. In August of that year, Theodor Herzl attended the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland, later writing in his diary, “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basel, I founded the Jewish State.” In Vilna, a band of socialists met in secret to unite Jewish workers across the far-flung Russian Empire and, in October, founded the General Association of Jewish Workers, which came to be known simply as the Bund. Its goal was to create an educated Jewish proletariat that could partner with other social democratic organizations in Russia and throughout the world. One Russian Marxist referred to them as “Zionists with seasickness.” Over the succeeding decades, Cahan would cover both movements for the Forward’s readers. The efforts of the Zionist pioneers gave rise to the State of Israel. The Bund would emerge as a powerful force in Poland, only to split into Communist and social democratic factions whose masses would be murdered by the Nazis and its remnant leaders by the Communists. With Cahan’s creation of the Forward in April, three movements that would have a profound effect on world Jewry—Zionism, international socialism, and an activist, democratic American Judaism as exemplified by the Forward—can trace their origins to this momentous year.

  As the American economy began to recover from the Panic of 1893, Cahan’s adopted hometown boomed. New York had become, if not the official capital of America, its cultural and economic heart and a city to be reckoned with internationally as well. In 1898 the five boroughs united into one municipality, to become the city we know today. A record-breaking number of press rooms were set up to cover local, national, and international news. Some fifty-eight dailies in New York alone jostled for attention; two of the best known, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s World, engaged in a bruising war for readers, lowering their newsstand prices to one cent and raiding each other’s staff. From Pulitzer’s newsroom, Hearst grabbed Stephen Crane, the journalist and author of the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and the novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Crane was a writer whom Cahan greatly admired and to whom he had already been compared.

  In the race for readers, these newspapers refashioned themselves into crusading advocates of social reform; commissioned crowd-pleasing, gossipy feature articles; and often sensationalized the stories they covered, sometimes making them up out of whole cloth. They tried to lure readers with huge, screaming headlines and offered games and contests in their pages. They instituted cartoons and eye-popping graphics using the latest technologies. Typewriters were installed in the city rooms, though some old-timers hated the clattering noise. The first halftone photograph in a mass-circulation newspaper was published in 1897, in the New-York Tribune.

  In short, there was little subtle or quaint about “yellow journalism,” as more staid publications called it, and its influence in the public sphere was enormous. Hearst in particular took great pride in his paper’s activism, going so far as to help stage the jailbreak of a young female political prisoner in Havana. The venerable New York Sun, for which Cahan had freelanced, played a prominent role in the struggle for free Cuba. The leader of the movement, José Martí, kept his office in the Sun’s newsroom. Martí was mocked by The New York Times, which Adolph Ochs had acquired in 1896. It began printing its famous motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print” at the top of its front page in 1897, as a not-so-subtle response to the lurid repor
ting of its competitors. The New-York Commercial Advertiser, a musty paper that had been founded in 1793 by Noah Webster as the American Minerva, sought to breathe new life into its pages by appointing as its city editor in 1897 a crusading young western journalist by the name of Lincoln Steffens.

  On April 22, 1897, the Forward jumped into this mix in full Marxist regalia, with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” at the top of its front page. The headlines of that first issue included “Blood Runs in Civilized Europe” (on the Turkish-Greek war), “Bravo, Cubans!” (supporting the island’s resistance to Spain), and “From the Class Struggle: Locked-out Steamfitters are Holding Fast.” The paper’s headquarters were on one floor of a warehouse on Duane Street in downtown Manhattan. The loft had been newly divided with unfinished planks of lumber into three distinct areas housing the paper’s writers, editor, and typesetters, and the smell of fresh wood filled the air. Cahan shared his narrow office with a staff writer and a rising playwright named Jacob Gordin, who had already written several plays and would go on to become one of the most successful writers for the Yiddish theater. Cahan had written a critical review of Gordin’s work in another publication, and relations between the two men were cool; they would grow infamously strained in the years to come.

  The Forward’s first Sunday edition, produced in a tabloid format, featured an illustration of a sword-carrying woman labeled “Social Democracy” under the headline “Eight-Hour Working Day.” The woman was depicted as attacking the fort of Capitalism, out of which burst forth angry rich men shaking their fists. Inside the paper, following the model of the Arbeiter Zeitung, were popular science pieces, political columns, literary essays (Cahan wrote an early one praising Thomas Hardy as “the only good novelist in England”), short stories (Anna Cahan translated some Russian tales), and poems.