by Seth Lipsky
Steffens was pleased to give space to articles that highlighted the vibrancy of the Lower East Side, regardless of what others thought of it. While he was at the Evening Post, he received a letter from “a socially prominent Jewish lady [who] had written to the editor asking why so much space was given to the ridiculous performances of the ignorant, foreign East Side Jews, and none to the uptown Hebrews.… I had the satisfaction of telling her about the comparative beauty, significance, and character of the uptown and downtown Jews. I must have talked well, for she threatened and tried to have me fired, as she put it.”
Rischin quotes a description by Hapgood of one Eliakim Zunser, a “jester and folk-poet” to whom he had been introduced by Cahan.
As he chanted his poems he seemed to gather up into himself the dignity and pathos of his serious and suffering race, but as one who had gone beyond the suffering and lived only with the eternities. His wife and children bent over him as he recited, and their bodies kept time with his rhythm. One of the two visitors was a Jew, whose childhood had been spent in Russia, and when Zunser read a dirge which he had composed in Russia twenty-five years ago at the death by cholera of his first wife and children—a dirge that is now chanted daily in thousands of homes in Russia—the visitor joined in, altho he had not heard it in many years. Tears came to his eyes as memories of his childhood were brought up by Zunser’s famous lines; his body swayed to and fro in sympathy with that of Zunser and those of the poet’s second wife and her children; and to the Anglo-Saxon present, this little group of Jewish exiles moved by rhythm, pathos, and the memory of a far-away land conveyed a strange emotion.
The weeping visitor was, of course, Abraham Cahan, and the description became part of Hapgood’s famous compilation The Spirit of the Ghetto.
Another friend of Cahan at the newspaper was Carl Hovey, who went on to become editor of Metropolitan Magazine, (which would send John Reed south of the border in 1910 to cover the Mexican Revolution). Cahan introduced Hovey to Russian novelists, and the literary group at the Commercial Advertiser became something of a newsroom aristocracy. Some of the reporters asked Cahan to read their stories before they submitted them to the paper. Cahan became friends with the financial reporter, Edwin Lefèvre, and with the paper’s war correspondent, Pitts Duffield, who came from one of the wealthiest families in Ohio. Hapgood and Hovey, both Harvard alumni, would on occasion bring Cahan along for an evening at their alma mater’s club on West 44th Street.
During his years at the Commercial Advertiser, Cahan interviewed President William McKinley on a ferryboat, had lunch with William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and strolled down Fifth Avenue with the financier Russell Sage, no doubt getting a different perspective on capitalism from a master. Cahan was at the Advertiser when Theodore Roosevelt came to visit Steffens. They’d known one another from Roosevelt’s days as New York’s commissioner of police. Cahan became friends with Samuel Gompers after covering a debate between the legendary president of the American Federation of Labor and Harvard professor Edward Atkinson, whom, Rischin notes, Cahan characterized as the court economist to “King Capitalism.”
If Cahan was getting an education in American culture, the Advertiser and its readers were learning about the immigrant world flourishing in their midst. The Advertiser gave considerable space to features about the Lower East Side Jews. Almost every week its Saturday supplement contained an article on the East Side “Jewish quarter,” with such titles as “Yiddish Comedy,” “Literature of the Slums,” “Ghetto War Spirit,” “Zangwill in the Ghetto,” “Researches of a Rabbi,” and “Hamlet in the Bowery.” Some of the coverage was written by Cahan, and some by others.
The Commercial Advertiser was by no means the only newspaper that covered the Jewish neighborhood, but it was the one that had Abraham Cahan, who could describe the area and teach others how to do so better than anyone else. According to Steffens, Cahan would take his coworkers to the Yiddish theater, where they observed with fascination the ongoing battle between advocates of realism and romanticism.
Cahan took us, as he could get us, one by one or in groups, to the cafés where the debate was on at every table and to the theaters where the audience divided: the realist party hissing a romantic play, the romanticists fighting for it with clapping hands and sometimes with fists or nails. A remarkable phenomenon it was, a community of thousands of people fighting over an art question as savagely as other people had fought over political or religious questions, dividing families, setting brother against brother, breaking up business firms, and finally, actually forcing the organization of a rival theater with a company pledged to realism against the old theater, which would play any good piece.
In the five years he spent at the Commercial Advertiser, Cahan produced a thick file of astonishingly eloquent and wide-ranging feature writing. It would serve as the basis for a lush anthology, compiled by Moses Rischin and published in 1985 as Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan.‡ The book opens with Cahan’s description of a visit to a café in 1898, where conversation centered on the recent explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor under mysterious circumstances. Some argued in favor of declaring war on Spain over the incident; a Hungarian insisted that the time for imperialistic colonies was gone. The only person who offered a counterargument “was a dark-eyed young woman of thirty, the wife of one of the gathering. ‘You men cannot do without bloodshed. If you were mothers, you would not be in such a hurry about sending your children, the flower of the population, to the battlefield.’ Whereupon the champion of liberty bowed deeply, and with a broad smile of gallantry supplanting the look of martial enthusiasm on his bewhiskered face, he said: ‘Madam, love is the vocation of your sex. I may feel like remarking that it is for the sake of love that I advocate war, but who dares oppose you?’ ” The anthology closes with Cahan’s paean to the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists whom he loved and in whose ranks, under a different set of political circumstances, he might have found himself.
The camaraderie of the Commercial Advertiser staff would not last indefinitely; bigger publications came calling. Norman Hapgood was the first to go, in 1901, taking a job at the popular magazine Collier’s Weekly. Steffens left shortly thereafter, joining McClure’s Magazine. Cahan quit at the end of 1901, but not before, in the late summer, he and Anna took a vacation, his first holiday ever. They went to the Catskill Mountains, where the young newspaperman took up bird-watching. He’d awaken as dawn was breaking at five a.m. to study them until breakfast, then return to observe them in the afternoon until darkness fell. Not surprisingly, according to his biographer Theodore Pollock, Cahan infused his new leisure-time pursuit with “the same penetrating intensity he had come to lavish upon men.”
This idyll was brought abruptly to a close on September 6, when an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Cahan raced back to New York to cover the story. Eight days later the president died. Czolgosz told authorities that he had attended a number of anarchist lectures, including some by Emma Goldman. Goldman was arrested, and the grief-stricken country vented its ire on its immigrant community. Goldman was later released, but Congress passed legislation to allow for the exclusion or deportation of anyone “who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining or teaching such disbelief.” In years to come, this anti-immigrant feeling would have catastrophic results for refugees seeking a haven in the United States.
One day that fall Cahan was walking on Broadway when someone came up from behind and clapped his hands over his eyes. It turned out to be Steffens, who had by then begun, for McClure’s, the muckraking journalism that would make him one of the most famous newspapermen in American history. His exposés would be collected in the groundbreaking 1904 book The Shame of the Cities. “The deeper you probe into corruption,” Steffens had told Cahan, “the more convinced you become that capitalism
is the source of all evil.” In any case, that day Cahan ended up at Steffens’s home, where the talk was of how a group from McClure’s was now founding another muckraking periodical, The American Magazine. Cahan wanted to hear about its literary policies, but Steffens brushed him aside, saying “Oh, let’s rather talk about socialism.”
In reply, Cahan reminded Steffens “of a similar but exactly opposite answer that he used to give a few years back, when I tried to talk to him about socialism. He used to stop me and say: ‘Oh, let’s rather talk about literature.’ ” It was a split consciousness Cahan understood well from his own life. In some sense it was a fruitful tension, never wholly resolved, one that would make Cahan’s journalism, once he returned to the Forward, encompass both art and politics.
* * *
* Cahan biographer Theodore Pollock calls Anna, during these years, “the more voracious and penetrating reader,” though he notes she had more time on her hands.
† Latin for “comrade”
‡ The title implies, and Rischin notes in his introduction, that Cahan’s immigrant feature writing anticipated the “new journalism” of the 1960s and 1970s.
7
During Cahan’s years at the Commercial Advertiser, he churned out not only hard news and feature stories but also short fiction. In 1898 Houghton Mifflin brought out a collection of Cahan’s stories entitled The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. In addition to the title story, the volume included “A Providential Match,” “A Sweat-Shop Romance,” “A Ghetto Wedding,” and “Circumstances.” Between 1899 and 1901, Cahan also published stories in popular American magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and Scribner’s: “The Apostate of Chego-Chegg,” “Rabbi Eleizer’s Christmas,” “The Daughter of Avrom Leib,” “A Marriage by Proxy,” “Dumitru and Sigrid,” and “Tzinchadzi of the Catskills.” By now he was well on his way to establishing himself as the master of immigrant narrative fiction. His stories illuminated both the pain and the wonder of the greenhorn experience, the romantic dilemmas, the retreat from religion, the attraction of personal freedom, and paradoxically, the undeniable yearning for the old world.
In 1900, while still employed by the Commercial Advertiser, Cahan found himself gravitating to Herrick’s Café, at 141 Division Street, where the tables were often crowded with members of the Forward staff, whose offices were just a few doors away. The congenial atmosphere of the café helped to ease whatever lingering resentments existed between Cahan and his former staff, and he soon began contributing freelance articles to the paper.
A lively series of fictional sketches penned by Cahan for the Forward in the winter of 1900-1 stands out as a sign of his mind-set. As Sanders writes in The Downtown Jews, the series focuses on the generational differences between family members, but what fuels their conflicts is not religion but politics. “Socialism occupies the place of religion,” Cahan scribbled in a note to himself. This was simply a reflection of what was happening in the real world. The socialist movement in America was in a state of disorder. The Socialist Labor Party, under De Leon’s autocratic leadership, lay in tatters. Eugene Debs was inspiriting the two-year-old Social Democratic Party (with which the Forward was affiliated), but it hadn’t yet muscled its way past the SLP. Cahan was becoming convinced that a realistic, pragmatic approach to implementing social change, and not the uncompromising, doctrinaire views of the movement’s orthodox wing, was the best way to achieve socialist goals.
This belief is reflected in the sketches in Cahan’s Forward series. In one story Dr. Bunimowitz, a former socialist, now has a booming medical practice as well as real estate holdings. A good and generous person, he is also an unapologetic capitalist. “When I was a fool, a socialist, I used to talk a lot and do nothing,” Bunimowitz says. “But now I don’t tell stories, and I know full well how much good I do—and so do the hundreds of people I help.” These sketches were popular among Forward readers, and buoyed by their success, Cahan began contributing even more to the paper. After he left the Commercial Advertiser at the end of 1901, some Forward staffers floated the idea of Cahan returning to the paper.
One afternoon in early March 1902, as Cahan was walking on East Broadway, heading toward the paper’s offices, he spotted two advertising agents for the Forward, William Lief and Albert Feller. The three chatted about the difficulty the paper was encountering in gaining the custom of the big retailers, and about the stagnant circulation numbers, which just couldn’t seem to push past 6,000. Some at the paper feared it was on the brink of closing. Both ad men believed that a new, forceful editor might be able to turn the paper around by moving it toward a more colorful and lively format. Cahan, Lief and Feller declared, was just the man.
Cahan considered their offer. He would need assurances that he would have a free hand—“absolutely no interference with my editorship” was how he put it—and that he would be occupied for no more than two hours a day by the paper. His plan was to get the edition on course in the morning and then head home to work on his fiction.
Not a problem, both men said. The paper was put to bed by two p.m. every day; it would be easy for Cahan to leave by then.
Cahan thought about it as they continued down East Broadway. “I’m afraid you’re making a mistake, Lief,” Cahan finally said. “The comrades are the same as they were, but I am not. I have been in the outside world, I have discovered that we, the socialists, have no patent on honesty and knowledge. The outside world is more tolerant of us than we are of it.” He said socialists of the Lower East Side needed to know something about the world beyond their own. “It’s as important to teach people to carry a handkerchief in their pockets as it is to carry a union card. And it’s as important to respect the opinions of others as it is to have opinions of one’s own.”
“I’m not the one making a mistake, Comrade Cahan. You are,” Lief answered. “We don’t quite know how to give expression to our inner aspirations.… What we need is, precisely, someone who can put it all into words for us.” They were by now standing in front of the Forward’s offices.
“I want to think about it,” Cahan finally said. “An editor should have unlimited authority.”
He walked home to East 7th Street, his mind awhirl. Could he really return to the Forward? Hadn’t he left the parochial world of the Yiddish press far behind? But what if he could apply to the Forward the lessons he had learned at the Commercial Advertiser? What if he could truly create the paper of his dreams, “a living novel,” as Steffens used to call it, and continue his fiction writing as well?
Anna argued against it. “Have you forgotten the Party frictions and how they embittered your life?” she warned him, adding that the conflicts would be “worse than the pot-boilers” he was writing. He had acquired a name in the literary world; he was assured a fine future and peace of mind. Her advice was to “serve the Socialist Party as an ordinary member and devote yourself to literature.”
At the next meeting of the Forward Press Association, Cahan’s name was put forth as editor. All his demands had been met, including the most difficult, given the paper’s precarious economic state: the Forward would be expanded from six pages to eight.
Cahan couldn’t resist—he returned to the Forward. His first issue was scheduled for Sunday, March 16, 1902. From the start he made his ambitions abundantly clear. “There will be much more to read than there has been so far,” he wrote in an announcement to readers that appeared in the paper the day before he officially came aboard. “The news and all the articles will be written in pure, plain Yiddishe Yiddish, and we hope that every line will be interesting to all Yiddish-speaking people, big and little.”
The paper he inherited had employed a serious, dry tone, “a kind of highbrow Yiddish with a lot of Hebrew and German and Russian terms that only the educated man could understand,” Cahan later told an interviewer. Its editorial cornerstone had been the daily “lead article,” which was not a news story but generally an essay filled with theo
retical arguments about socialist ideas.
For that first issue, Cahan wrote many of the articles himself, working late into the night (so much for leaving the office at two p.m.). In place of the usual leading essay on socialist theory, he ran a human interest story. A translation of a piece he’d written for the Commercial Advertiser, it was headlined “In Love with Yiddishe Kinder” and told lively tales of young Gentile men and women who had fallen in love with Jews and in some instances married them. Forward readers weren’t used to reading about domestic relationships in their paper, let alone frowned-upon ones.
“Send your children to college if you can, but don’t let them become disloyal to their own parents and brothers!” admonished the headline of Cahan’s inaugural editorial. Instead of a theoretical discussion or a political statement, the piece began with the simple details of working life in the city: “On Second Avenue, after 8:00 a.m. each morning, one can see hundreds of Jewish boys—from fourteen to eighteen or nineteen years old—walking with books under their arms. They’re going uptown from Houston or Christie Street. They travel in pairs, or in great companies, chattering happily amongst themselves. Their clothes are for the most part old.… These are Jewish college boys, children of immigrants.”
