GENDERED LABOR “A Hero . . . for the Weak”: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924

GENDERED LABOR

“A Hero . . . for the Weak”: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924

Daniel Bender New York University

Then I throw myself into the ﬁre, become a hero and struggle like a lion for the weak; and if the bullet strike me,—I fall dead on the ﬁeld, then I, too, can perish laughing. Morris Rosenfeld, “What Is the World?”1

The view of New York Harbor was a welcome sight for Samuel Siegal, one of nearly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1922.2 For Siegal and his shipmates it was the end of an enfeebling boat journey as well as their first glimpse of the goldene medinah (golden land) they had heard and talked about so much in the Pale of Settlement (the region of Czarist Russia open to Jews). Like the overwhelming majority of his coreligionist immigrants, Siegal had traveled to the United States in steerage. There, he ate nearly inedible food—and then only when he was not too nauseated to swallow. After the experience of steerage, Siegal was physically ill-prepared for the medical examination that awaited him at Ellis Island that morning in 1904.3 When Siegal entered the crowded hall at Ellis Island he was seized, stripped, poked, inspected, and fumigated by a host of doctors, nurses, and customs officials. Luckily for Siegal he was not (yet) infected with any of the diseases and handicaps considered rife among Jewish immigrants.4 Although he makes no mention of it in his memoirs, many of his shipmates were certainly either quarantined at Castle Garden or returned immediately to the alte haym (the “old home” meaning the Pale of Settlement).5 Siegal finally made the trip to Manhattan. During his first several days in New York, Siegal labored hard to “de-green” himself, that is, to look American in the most obvious ways. The day after his arrival he purchased a new suit of American clothes. Siegal could shed his outward otherness with relative ease. However, his physical weakness persisted after his arrival in Manhattan. It fol- lowed him into his first job in a textile shop where he carried bundles of goods

I would like to thank Liz Cohen and Louise Tilly for their challenging and useful critiques. A note on the use of Yiddish: I have tried wherever possible to retain as much of the original di- alects by transliterating Yiddish words as they were written, not according to standard rules.

International Labor and Working-Class History No. 56, Fall 1999, pp. 1–22 © 1999 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 on hot summer days on weak shoulders. He “worked . . . to exhaustion.” His first few days convinced Siegal that the Lower East Side was not a golden land. It was a “humiliating beginning.”6 Weakness was hard to escape. The immigration process was the first step in casting Jewish immigrants as weak and potentially diseased. The suggestion of weakness was confirmed when Jewish immigrants went to work. In the garment factories, they encountered new sources of enfeeblement: the consumptive ravages of sweated garment labor. Siegal’s experience was not the exception but the rule for both male and female Jewish immigrants. Each immigrant went through a medical examination and the majority suffered debilitating factory work. Many feared for their lives in their jobs—if diagnosable tuberculosis did not strike first, then an exhaustion complete with coughing fits that hinted of consumption would. Many ailments commonly labeled as consumption were not strictly tuberculosis; many simply mimicked its symptoms. Among immigrants, what emerged was a social definition of consumption that was not strictly de- fined by the tuberculosis bacilli. Consumption became the fearful name for many ailments.7 Jewish immigrants understood the connection between consumptive disease and their work in garment factories. They echoed the words of doctors and reformers in suggesting that poor sanitary conditions in garment shops spread tuberculosis. The disease was evident in the stooped, pale bodies of Jewish immigrant workers. Yet in the face of disease, lurking death, and daily struggle, Jewish workers created a means of resistance that forged workplace strength out of physical weakness. Disease not only shaped the way Jewish workers understood their labor but also influenced labor-organizing priorities.8 Nearly every historian of Jewish immigrant labor on the Lower East Side has cited the miserable conditions of the garment shops. However, the larger im- pact of the clouds of dust, extremes of temperature, and cramped quarters on workers’ understandings of labor and class politics has remained largely undis- cussed.9 Yet the cultural meanings of disease, specifically tuberculosis, for Jewish garment workers are crucial in studying the ethnic patterns of Jewish labor organizing, workplace relations, and the rhetoric of class workplace conflict on the Lower East Side. Labor historians and historians in general have recently begun to examine how disease shaped understandings of proletarian daily life and political representations of the working class.10 Jewish workers on the Lower East Side recast tuberculosis as far more than a medically diagnosable physical condition. Its new role as an imagined (and sometimes real) illness raises significant and previously underexplored questions about the way workers described the physical effects of their labor on their bodies. Garment work, Jewish workers in- sisted, was a physical struggle; the conditions of the workplace and the pressures of garment manufacture were etched on workers’ bodies—on their sunken chests, their stooped shoulders, and ultimately their tubercular physique. Tracing the intersection of work and disease among Jewish workers demands the identification of the particular methods and outlets workers employed to describe their labor. Work is treated here as a discursive subject lay- “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 3 ered with metaphorical significance, not simply as the set of physical processes of garment manufacture, like sewing, stitching, or cutting. Workers’ memoirs, letters, poetry, and art reveal that Jewish workers sought to comprehend and to depict the dangers and exploitation of their labor by examining the effects of labor on their health. Work, then, becomes the subject of cultural analysis. The cultural analysis presented here extends previous labor historians’ examinations of work, which have been limited to explaining how the physical processes and conditions of labor (alongside questions of race, class, gender, and ethnicity) determined forms of resistance and organizing. When labor is examined as a subject that workers discussed, debated, and depicted, this examination offers a powerful way to identify what workers imagined to be their shared conditions. Jewish workers viewed work as an inevitable confrontation with weakness and disease, and this image represented an important part of how Jew- ish workers articulated their common experiences as garment workers. Moreover, if we examine how workers talked about their labor, we can ex- plore workplace conflict in more complex ways. How did workers describe shop- floor struggle? What metaphors did workers employ to depict their forms of resistance? And, perhaps most important, how did this metaphoric portrayal of workplace struggle shape priorities of resistance and organizing? In the end, understanding work as a subject workers sought to define and represent helps de- termine the root of particular strategies of resistance. Jewish workers used images of disease and enfeeblement to describe workplace conflict; questions of health and curing workers’ bodies lay at the heart of their organizing.11 For Jewish workers, images of weakness, dust, and physical damage became an important part of their political rhetoric. They adopted forms of worker organization that addressed a wide range of proletarian concerns beyond wages and benefits, like health care and factory investigations. Jewish workers’ understandings of work, grounded in the belief that garment labor meant a confrontation with disease, politicized workers’ bodies by transforming them into the terrain of workplace conflict. In many ways, the discourse around tuberculosis helped forge a common language of labor, as workers were able to articulate common experiences even in the highly specialized and segmented garment industry in a wide variety of workplaces from small family-owned sweatshops to larger loft factories. Al- though the discourse around tuberculosis helped crystallize a sense of shared experiences in the workplace which in turn shaped the priorities of collective ac- tion, it did little to dampen gender cleavages within the Jewish garment working class. Male and female garment workers experienced the workplace differently. Women frequently found themselves a minority plagued by sexual harass- ment and nearly always laboring for lower wages. In a survey published in 1911, only 10,108 of 45,199 cloakmakers were women. Of these women, few held the higher-paying positions of operator and cutter. Most women labored in the less skilled, lower-paying positions of baster, finisher, or buttonhole maker.12 In addition, most female garment workers were younger and unmarried. Most 4 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 women did not continue to work for wages long past marriage. The Senate Im- migration Committee reported in 1911 that only eight percent of married immigrant Jewish women worked outside of the home.13 Indeed, Jewish women considered marriage a means to escape from the consumptive world of sweatshop labor. As Clara Lemlich, the socialist union activist whose fiery speech helped rally strikers during the female shirtwaist workers’ strike of 1909 to 1910, declared: “Almost all [women] . . . work under long hours and miserable conditions . . . Their only way to leave the factory is marriage.”14 For most women, full-time garment work was often temporary. After marriage, daily wage labor gave way to housework, child care, and, at times, garment piecework and short stints in garment shops.15 For many male workers, in contrast, garment work was lifelong.16 Men’s and women’s contrasting experiences with garment work helped fos- ter different work identities and different political uses of the idea of disease.17 In popular poetry and art, male workers forged an image of a male class hero infected with tuberculosis, struggling against the conditions that threatened lifelong disease. As the sweatshop worker and poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote, the labor activist fought for the weak worker:

Then I throw myself into the ﬁre, become a hero and struggle like a lion for the weak; and if the bullet strike me,—I fall dead on the ﬁeld, then I, too, can perish laughing.18

Male and female workers alike considered disease when shaping their physical representation of class struggle in the Lower East Side. The bodily weak would battle the strong, but male workers alone were able to exploit their particular experience with disease to create the image of a gendered hero. Although Jewish workers encountered tuberculosis most intensely at work, they first stressed the importance of the body, weakness, and disease during the ethnic experience of immigration. As Jewish immigrants made the journey to the United States, weakness and the social awareness of health became inte- grated into their sense of ethnicity. Through a series of inspections, immigrants frequently came to see themselves as weak even before they entered the Amer- ican workplace, worrying that they were potentially unfit to enter the United States. After the arduous journey to the northern European ports where they boarded boats for the United States, a weak or diseased migrant might not be allowed to depart. In ports like Bremen and Posen, migrants were examined for the first time by ship company doctors. Their clothes were fumigated and their bodies inspected for consumption, skin diseases, and trachoma. Families were frequently torn apart when one member of a family was quarantined; few could afford to abandon already-purchased steerage tickets in order to remain with sick relatives.19 During the inspection, with the future of their families in peril, Jews began to consider their own bodies through the eyes of inspection officials. Hyman Cantor, who despite the strength he had acquired while a conscript in “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 5 the Russian army was forced to stay in Posen for several weeks with a trachoma, now observed his fellow migrants differently. Stripped of their clothes and ready for medical inspection, they seemed to him like “sewer rats.”20 Once migrants boarded boats for the crossing their weakness was again dra- matically highlighted. Cramped in steerage directly above the ships’ propellers, Jewish migrants, like Seigal, suffered from seasickness, malnutrition, and over- crowding. The approximately seventeen days in steerage altered older understandings of weakness.21 Israel Kasovich found himself lying on the bottom bunk of a crowded steamer bound for New York. All around him fellow migrants were either vomiting or crying. When he tried to escape from the confines of his bunk, he was vomited upon: “I wiped the vomit away, dragged myself onto the deck, leaned against the railing and vomited my share into the sea, and lay down half-dead upon the deck.”22 Isaac Antonovsky remembers only a wary few eat- ing the food: “They took the food with trembling hands, first thinking: to eat or not to eat. With some fear, they took a chance and ate.” Many who previously pictured themselves as hale, now saw themselves as wan. The migrant was the victim of steerage. Antonovsky described his shipmates as “exhausted, pale creatures, hardly able to drag their legs.”23 It was these exhausted creatures with little control over their own legs and stomachs who arrived in Castle Garden or, after 1892, in Ellis Island.24 Again the Jewish immigrants’ bodies were examined for telltale signs of disease. One journalist writing about the arrival in Ellis Island compared it to “the final Day of Judgment”; the immigrants had to prove their “fitness to enter heaven.”25 Line inspection doctors of the Public Health Service marked immigrants with colored chalk to indicate a suspected illness or defect. H noted a potential heart problem; Sc, a scalp condition; K, a hernia; and X, a mental illness. Immigrants understood that their bodies were being investigated. Some sought to disguise their defects and enfeeblement. Many remember being frightened by the doctors in uniforms, mistaking the doctors for soldiers. Those who had not been chalked filed past a doctor examining for “contagious and loathsome diseases”—consumption, venereal disease, leprosy, even eczema! More than one in five immigrants was quarantined at Ellis Island until healed and a smaller minority were simply refused entry.26 When immigrants finally arrived in Manhattan, they surveyed their new neighborhoods—for Jewish immigrants, the Lower East Side. In particular, they viewed the bodies of workers emerging from garment shops with the same crit- ical medical eye that had examined them at Ellis Island or Castle Garden. Stel- la Papiroff, for example, immediately recognized the evidence of disease: “Men and girls were coming home from the shops, thin and soaked out, with their faces yellow and green.”27 The workers she witnessed were physically very different from herself. Despite the trip over, she had arrived in the United States fully con- fident of her health and strength. She remembered that her “face . . . was shin- ing with red cheeks.” Yet Papiroff recognized that she, too, would have to join the legions of the “yellow and green.” Papiroff lodged with a landsmaidl (the female equivalent of 6 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 a landsman) who allowed her several days of leisure and exploration before seeking wage work. Papiroff’s own workplace experience confirmed her earlier diagnosis of the effects of garment labor. After only a few days working at dress- making, she began worrying about her failing health. She quit and was asked back, “but I couldn’t already go. It was too hard for me to sit by the machine. I was already not feeling so good.” But as a greenhorn with few skills, the need for food and rent money forced her back to the sewing machine. She came to understand the effect of garment labor on the bodies of her fellow immigrants, particularly of her landsmaidl Elizaveta: “In the few months what I worked in the shop I saw why Elizaveta got so thin.”28 For Papiroff the line that separated work and disease became all but in- visible. Her own bodily changes and her failing health were proof enough. The immigrant garment worker had become as conscious of disease as the medical inspectors at Ellis Island. And like the inspectors, many immigrant garment workers sought to explain their illnesses. They often drew on the language of the progressive reformers who inspected and sought to reform their bodies and workplaces. Reformers diagnosed as tuberculosis the symptoms immigrants like Papiroff noted among garment workers. Through Yiddish newspapers and pamphlets, new immigrants rapidly learned the words tuberculosis and consumption.29 Workers adapted progressive definitions of disease (especially of tuberculosis) as environmentally caused, and even appropriated some (but rejected other) progressive strategies of workplace reform. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the line between Jewish garment workers and progressive reformers grew murky as Jewish unions expressly blended their campaigns with reform and included reformers within their ranks. Yet while the language of progressive reform provided some direction and vocabulary for Jewish workers’ discourse concerning tuberculosis, this discourse was shaped primar- ily by workers’ confrontation first with immigration and later with garment labor.30 Doctors for Jewish charities were especially concerned to provide cures for workplace ailments. By 1922, there were 1,100 beds for Jewish tubercular patients in sanitariums throughout the country and at least one social worker argued that over 2,000 beds were needed. The National Jewish Hospital (NJH) was founded in 1899 and the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (JCRS) five years later, both in Denver. Over three-fourths of the two hospitals’ patients before 1920 came from the Lower East Side.31 Closer to New York, the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), a socialist mutual benefit society, constructed a sanitarium in Liberty, New York, in 1910. Within a decade, sanitariums specifically for immigrant Jewish patients were also founded in New Jersey.32 The movement among Jewish reformers to accept tuberculosis as a particularly Jewish working-class problem reveals the way socially constructed understandings of disease became related to ethnicity. Despite the prevalence of diagnosed tuberculosis among Jewish garment workers, a number of Jewish social service workers initially struggled doggedly to sustain a myth of Jewish immunity to tuberculosis that originated in western Europe.33 Maurice Fishberg, “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 7 an anthropologist, the head physician for the United Hebrew Charities, and the most concerned nonresident observer of tuberculosis in the Lower East Side, publicly argued that Jews were somehow less susceptible to tuberculosis than other immigrants. Writing in 1901, Fishberg cited statistics from the Board of Health which suggested that although the Jewish Lower East Side was the most crowded area of the city, the level of tubercular deaths was the lowest. He suggested a number of explanations, ranging from Jewish male circumcision to the low incidence of alcoholism among the Jewish immigrant population and the kosher inspection of meats. Jewish ritual butchers rejected as diseased nearly one-third of the cattle they slaughtered.34 Nevertheless, Fishberg soon acknowledged the medically accepted physical characteristics that made Jewish immigrants prone to consumption. With limited knowledge of the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, Fishberg (as did most doctors of his generation) claimed that consumption could be diagnosed from physical characteristics like frail chests and stooped shoulders.35 These symptoms marked the garment worker as highly prone to tuberculosis. Those who lived in crowded buildings, worked in poorly ventilated shops, and seldom ex- ercised were considered especially susceptible to consumption. Fishberg admit- ted that tailoring, the principal occupation of Jewish workers, “suppl[ies] a greater number of tuberculosis patients than outdoor occupations.”36 Indeed, Fishberg concluded, of all the immigrant populations in New York, Jews had the “lowest ‘index of vitality.’” Even in an essay that argued for a mythical Jewish immunity to tuberculosis, Fishberg could not deny the physical propensity of Jews on the Lower East Side to tuberculosis. By 1908, Fishberg had reversed his earlier thesis; he now enumerated the physical and workplace conditions that made the Jewish immigrant worker susceptible to consumption. Now he pointed out the long lines of Jewish patients for sanitariums. His principal concern became the consumptive nature of the Jewish tailor’s body. The immigrant Jew had a flat chest without sufficient muscles to support the rib cage and the spinal column. The Jewish tailor’s chest “is not only flat, but also of inferior capacity.” Fishberg cited his own anthropolog- ical measurements, which found that the average girth of Jews’ chests was less than half the measure of their average height whereas the American norm was well over half. Poor lungs and chests and deformed skeletons invited consumption. For Fishberg, the conditions of garment labor made the Jewish tailor especially at risk: “The cramped attitude of the tailor’s body while he is at work . . . in conjunction with the defective ventilation of the usual sweatshop, all conspire to reduce the vitality of the tailor and render his lungs predisposed to infection by the tubercle bacillus.”37 Fishberg reconciled his contradictory arguments by suggesting a strain of consumption that was ethnically Jewish. Jews, he suggested, were infected with consumption, but with a different strain from that which struck Italian immigrants, for example. The Jewish tuberculosis was not “galloping” or “fulmi- nant” with rapid “extension of the disease with cavity formation within a few weeks or months” and death predictably following soon afterward. Jewish tu- 8 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 berculosis was slow-moving and chronic. An infected tailor would be plagued with extreme fatigue, loss of weight, and atrophied musculature. The disease could persist for years. During the sickness some tailors could even continue working and, as Papiroff observed, many did.38 Lillian Wald noticed this form of tuberculosis among the Jewish patients she visited on the Lower East Side and those who came to her clinic at the Henry Street Settlement House. Before she began practicing on the Lower East Side, Wald believed the myth of Jew- ish immunity to tuberculosis. When she arrived, however, she found “signs everywhere of the white plague [tuberculosis].” She called the ravaging disease the “tailors’ disease.”39 For immigrant workers, the tailors’ disease that Wald named and that Fish- berg described was more frightening and insidious than galloping tuberculosis. At least in the latter case the result was understood; death came soon after infection. In the supposed Jewish strain, the disease could fester for years and emerge when tailors’ bodies were especially weakened. The Workmen’s Circle’s Liberty Sanitarium described a lingering, omnipresent disease: “Tuberculosis is a chronic disease. The seeds sown in childhood may not bear fruit . . . until adult life. The disease may be latent (asleep) for many years before it ‘wakes up’ and becomes discoverable.”40 For Fishberg, tuberculosis woke up because of the tailor’s “lack of muscular movement, because sewing by no means involves free exercise of most of the muscles.” The weak, pale, stooped garment worker’s body could therefore be considered by doctors and immigrant patients alike as already infected and constantly on the verge of falling ill. At least for Fishberg, controlling consumption meant arresting the decline of the Jewish immigrant’s body.41 The maintenance of muscles through exercise could shield the worker from illness. Fishberg argued strenuously that the solu- tion to immigrant Jews’ “illy [sic] developed muscular system, their emaciation [that] gives them the appearance of a sickly people” was gymnasiums where exercise could be organized and supervised. Gymnasiums could correct the physical damage of sweatshop labor that even Fishberg agreed made Jewish workers “physical wrecks” prone to consumption. Fishberg singled out the gymnasium of the Educational Alliance for special praise.42 The Educational Alliance was the brainchild of wealthy German Jews concerned with their eastern European coreligionists’ ill health, ignorance of Amer- ican culture, and inability to speak English.43 The Alliance’s social services were divided into four branches: social, educational, moral, and physical. The physical branch was organized around the Alliance’s gymnasium. Five evenings a week the gymnasium was open for men and boys and one night a week for women and girls. In addition, the Alliance boasted clean hot showers and provided classes on hygiene. During the warm months the Alliance offered Lower East Side Jewish immigrants “out-of-door, park and country exercise” to rebuild their battered bodies.44 In short, the Alliance sought to protect the Jewish garment worker from the ravages of consumption by strengthening their bodies. If a worker’s body did not appear tubercular—flat-chested and gaunt—then disease could be avoided, “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 9 whatever the factory conditions. At the same time, the Alliance sought to create a class of willing and able workers. As the director of the Alliance, David Blaustein, argued: “Let a young man develop his body, and he will neither shrink from . . . danger nor shirk manual work which falls his lot.”45 Stronger immigrant bodies meant more productive workers better able to withstand the alternating frenetic and slack seasons and the poor workplace conditions of garment work. Central to the Educational Alliance’s physical education philosophy was the shifting of blame for the consumptive Jewish immigrant body. The poor physical qualities of the immigrant were condemned, not the garment shop with its poor sanitary conditions. Consumption, the Alliance suggested, could be re- duced or even eradicated by targeting the immigrant body itself without ever reforming the industry. Immigrants greeted the Alliance’s physical education program with am- bivalence. Although by 1913 the average daily attendance at the Alliance (for all programs) was six thousand per day, the principal users of the gymnasium were young boys and girls, not grown workers. In fact, between 1895 and 1914, the target of the physical education program changed. In 1895 the Alliance proudly announced that the gymnasium would serve an older constituency of workers; by 1914, classes were organized principally for children.46 Older users tended to use the Alliance’s library and reading rooms instead. Attendance may have been low because, in contrast to the German–Jew- ish supporters of the Alliance, eastern European Jewish workers believed that their enfeebled bodies were shaped by the shops where they labored. For workers, any cure for tuberculosis that sought only to strengthen the immigrant body without attacking the garment factory system remained inherently flawed. They created common understandings of labor in which garment work was linked to the onset of a tangible, highly visible disease. Garment labor for Jewish workers on the Lower East Side inevitably included a confrontation—potentially fatal— with consumption, whether it was a full-blown, diagnosable tuberculosis that might land a worker in one of the many sanitariums or a minor or mimicking case that marked a worker as enfeebled. Because of the prevalence of true tuberculosis on the Lower East Side, many other ailments with symptoms similar to tuberculosis were labeled as consumption. Benjamin Kapp, for example, came down with an illness when working in a sweatshop weaving hair rats (hair padding worn by women). Within several weeks, Kapp was afflicted with an incurable, spasmodic cough. Initially, his housemates were sympathetic. Soon, however, “the household became alarmed and hinted [at] the possibility of consumption.”47 Whether workers sought the advice of a doctor or even put the name “consumption” to their illness, disease as a metaphor for fear and coming death is seared across scores of workers’ pages, stanzas, and canvases.48 Jewish workers, like the German–Jewish reformers of the Educational Alliance, accepted medical opinion identifying ethnic Jews with tuberculosis. Despite rejecting the efforts of these reformers, Jew- ish workers created common languages of labor in which the ethnic experience of disease played a central role. 10 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999

The memoirs of Rose Cohen, a young immigrant garment worker, suggest how Jewish workers described their labor as a continuing encounter with disease. She never diagnosed her ailment as consumption. Yet her memoir recounts a struggle with an illness that weakened her with coughing beyond the point where she could work. Her young life was marked by repeated visits to hospitals to recuperate. Yet when cured, she returned to the shops; her family needed her wages. She rarely lasted more than a few weeks before disease struck again.49 Only when she started work in the Henry Street Settlement House’s model workshop, where there was adequate seating, ventilation, and lighting, was Cohen able to work for a longer period. In workers’ sweatshop poetry, the cultural relationship of disease and work is even more apparent. In his “The Machine Worker,” Yacob Adler, an immigrant who arrived in the United States from Galicia in 1889 and began working in a sweatshop, described a direct link between garment labor and the decline from physical weakness to open consumption. The poem begins with a portrayal of the visible pain of sweatshop workers that so shocked Papiroff:

Weary and shaking, every bone breaking, home he comes aching, home from the shop

The workers “sit tongue-tied in trances.” The poor conditions lead to the workers’ physical decrepitude. Echoing doctors like Fishberg, Adler suggests that disease was displayed in the workers’ “barren” chests. They are already consumptive and before long “coughing and tearing/their lungs, they spit blood.”50 A comparison of a poem published by former garment workers waiting to die at a Denver sanitarium and two 1898 poems published by Morris Rosenfeld, the Lower East Side’s best-known sweatshop poet, reveals that consumptive patients’ conception of their bodies varied little from workers’ self-descriptions. As workers described their labor as a process of infection, they erased distinctions between actual patients and weak workers. One poem published in a Denver sanitarium’s Yiddish journal, Hatikvah (Hope), portrayed the patient, focusing on his symptoms:

He’s a lunger Awfully pale, Thirty years old Thin as a rail51

Similarly, Rosenfeld concentrated on the gaunt, blighted body of the worker in his poem “The Pale Operator”—a poem recognized as the archetype of Yiddish sweatshop poetry. He positions himself as a male narrator observing the “pale operator . . . using up his strength” through the months and years of work until his inevitable death. Rosenfeld implores the reader: “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 11

I ask you, how long will the weak one drive the bloody wheel? O, who can tell me his end? Who knows the horrible secret?

The secret is splayed crimson on the wheel. The blood is from the coughing operator, his latent disease coming to the surface over the years of enfeebling work. One thing, however, “is certain”; garment labor will kill the worker.52 The consumption that Rosenfeld suggests broadly in the “Pale Operator” emerges more clearly in “A Tear on the Iron,” an autobiographical poem which follows “The Pale Operator” in the collected Songs from the Ghetto. Echoing Fishberg’s connection between consumption and sweatshop conditions, Rosen- feld blames the “cold and dark” shop for his disease:

My heart is weak, I groan and cough,—my sick breast scarcely heaves.53

In lieu of a drop of tubercular blood, a tear falls on the hot iron. Thus, when Jewish immigrants sought to interpret their work, they concentrated on the consumptive body of the worker. The focus on the enfeebled worker is particularly evident in the drawings of Jacob Epstein, who probably studied at the Educa- tional Alliance’s art school. Like numerous other artists who came out of the Al- liance school, including Abraham Walkowitz and Jo Davidson, Epstein refused to accept the dictates of the Alliance and concentrate on esthetically comfort- able subjects outside of the Lower East Side.54 Instead, he chose to portray the most decrepit, enfeebled, and, ultimately, consumptive passersby he discovered outside of his Hester Street studio. It was a “tall, lean, and bearded young man” who especially fascinated Epstein.55 On the title page of Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto, Epstein contributed his own vision of the garment worker standing next to a hastily sketched sewing machine. The tailor is tall and gaunt, his abnormally large hands accenting a body twisted by labor. His shoulders are stooped, his neck is bent, and his rib cage protrudes. Epstein included a drawing of the consumptive worker in a text that sought to rescue the Lower East Side from its reputation as a despondent slum but the drawing is not out of place. The strength of the ghetto that Hapgood perceived was linked to the de- cayed body of the worker—or, at least, to the outrage expressed in the act of drawing the consumptive worker.56 Such images of weakness proved crucial in Jewish garment workers’ con- ceptions of workplace struggle. The weak, consumptive worker fought the strong garment shop owner. Epstein’s drawing, then, provides an insight into the way workers understood their labor and translated this awareness into a physical representation of struggle. Jewish immigrants employed the tubercular nature of hollow chests and poor lungs to create a deﬁnition of garment work that spanned workplaces and specialized trades. Workers used their own bodies to delineate a common set of experiences. Armed with this unifying self-image as consumptives, garment workers could explain the rhetorical terrain of workplace resistance. If the legions of nameless pale operators were forced to accept sweated work, they were not passive or resigned, even with disease and death 12 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 ubiquitous. Indeed, the consumptive worker depicted by Epstein used his enfeeblement as an indignant rallying call against the sweatshop. Again, the words of Morris Rosenfeld are illuminating. In his 1898 poem “In Svet-shop,” Rosenfeld described the quotidian struggle of his fellow workers. At midday during the short break for lunch, he no longer observes a dark, dank workshop but “a bloody battleﬁeld.” The evidence of fatigue and disease are everywhere:

I see lying the dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth.

When the bell rings to resume work, “corpses” battle once more. But the battle is more often lost than won as the corpses “disappear into night.”57 In another poem from the same year, “What Is the World?”, Rosenfeld returns to the image of the battlefield. Again, “the strong struggle with the weak.”58 The strong are bosses, not workers.59 The weak are consumptive immigrant workers. Jewish immigrants’ understanding of work as intertwined with illness allowed workers’ to translate the perceived common experiences of garment labor into powerful forms of workplace resistance. Jewish workers used their frailty to proclaim a workplace-centered movement that inexorably linked curing to reforming the workplace. Medical care became deeply political. Jewish garment workers remained unwilling to ignore the enfeebled immigrant Jewish worker’s body or to disguise it with muscles from exercise, as the Educational Alliance desired. Workers argued that their illness could not be eradicated by any method divorced from work and the workshop; after all, the blood of “the pale operator” fell on the wheel and the tear on the iron in the dark, cold shop. With disease and labor intertwined in Jewish immigrants’ descriptions of work, the curing of the body became a political act. The significance of the cultural idea of work as enfeebling for Jewish immigrants’ workplace organizing is twofold. On the one hand, male workers were able to use particularly poetic images of resignation to the necessity of work combined with indignation about conditions to create the figure of the male class hero struggling individually. On the other hand, questions of weakness helped create a coherent set of issues that consolidated and empowered the labor movement of men and women, especially after the transformative strikes of 1909– 1910. Drawing on and often subsuming the efforts of progressive reformers to combat the consumptive conditions of garment factories, Jewish workers—male and female—created a labor movement that was deeply involved with the health and care of Jewish proletarian bodies. Increasingly, this broad concern for workers’ health coalesced into a collective movement that advanced organized—and, at times, highly successful—claims to supervise and police the organization of the workplace and that offered expansive, unprecedented services to its members. In the poems of Rosenfeld and Abraham Victor (discussed below) and in Epstein’s drawings, when individual workers were portrayed as struggling hero- ically against the consumptive nature of garment work, they were generally “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 13 male. The image of the garment worker as class hero emerged from men’s particular identities as permanent garment workers and from the resignation of male workers to a lifetime of labor, unable to escape the sweatshop. The class hero presented by Rosenfeld is a tragic character, struggling doggedly against the onslaught of disease but bound to perish. Rosenfeld mournfully describes his male “pale operator”:

When the work will have killed him another will be sitting in his place and sewing.60

Rosenfeld proclaims his own stake in the struggle, claiming the mantle of hero and pledging that he will “become a hero and struggle like a lion for the weak.” But what sort of lion (leib)? Elsewhere in the collection, Rosenfeld described himself as the “millionaire of tears,” “a machine,” and a dying, consumptive worker. The lion is the consumptive worker, struggling until the end but cog- nizant of his weakness, destined to die before the “bullet” of disease. Having struggled, Rosenfeld claims that “I, too, can perish laughing.” This conception of the class hero as a male consumptive patient is described equally clearly by Abraham Victor in writing two decades later about Denver, the city to which many Lower East Side consumptives journeyed to die in the sanitariums of the JCRS and of the NJH. For Victor, much of the glory of the western city was derived not from tourist attractions like its cathedral or the United States Mint but from the “incessant cough” from “each half-rotted chest and lung.” Out of this living cemetery of consumptives comes a “Testament” de- claring a struggle “in dawn’s red glow, in dusk’s magnificence.” The beloved poet Dovid Edelshtat, who died of consumption in a Denver sanitarium in 1892, de- claims this testament in Victor’s poem.61 As the collective strength of Jewish garment workers increased with the success of strikes in 1909–1910 that included both male and female workers, the image of the solitary hero portrayed by Rosenfeld as a single lion fighting for the weak but fully expecting to fail was increasingly replaced by the background of Victor’s verse: legions of tubercular workers—male and female—marching together. Notably, the poem was written after the victory of Jewish workers organized in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) during the cloakmakers’ strike of 1910. The strike was a watershed in the labor history of the Jewish Lower East Side, marking the increased stability and social significance of Jewish unions, workers’ associations, and political groups.62 The understanding of work as an exposure to disease remained crucial with the rise of strong industrywide unions. The ILGWU’s official magazine, The Ladies’ Garment Worker, for example, pointed out that “the girls’ thin and poorly nourished bodies . . . testified at what cost to themselves . . . they were working.”63 Indeed, the class and workplace politics of the Jewish unions emanated from the unions’ efforts to cure workers’ bodies—except now the images of garment workers, perhaps stripped of their solitary heroic status, included both men and women. Even on its masthead, The Ladies’ Garment Worker stated the val- 14 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 ue of union victories. Bread-and-butter gains like “shorter working hours” promised “longer life.” For the Jewish union, at the heart of questions of wages and conditions lay a self-conscious focus on the consumptive nature of the Jew- ish worker. As health investigators associated with the ILGWU pointed out, health underscored questions of hours and pay: “[In the past] the principal slo- gan of the labor unions were ‘shorter hours and higher wages,’ in spite of the fact that [workers] could hardly enjoy these if their health were ruined by their occupations and their lives shortened by their trade.”64 Workers like Rosenfeld came to conceive of a union deeply committed to workers’ bodies: “The union cares for the workers . . . for their bodily . . . and spiritual conditions.”65 Caring for the workers often meant providing some of the same services ad- vocated by progressive reformers. Jewish Lower East Side unions and worker associations sought to provide health care to their members as part of their own reform of the garment industry. Their efforts signaled a shift in medical care on the Lower East Side. Around 1900, physicians on the Lower East Side were ex- pensive but often poorly trained, so immigrants frequently turned to untrained charlatans.66 For chronic illnesses, including consumption, workers either suffered in silence or relied on the free, but limited, care provided by settlement houses, like Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement. In 1915, however, the Work- men’s Circle, in keeping with its goal of promoting socialism based on tangible services, proposed the idea of low-cost doctors under the auspices of the Work- men’s Circle Medical Department. The Department was eventually started in 1919. The Lower East Side was divided into branches, each served by a volunteer doctor, and the following year a board of specialists was created. The Medical Department was greeted favor- ably in the Lower East Side. In its first year alone, sixty thousand patients visited Workmen’s Circle doctors. By 1920 there were 13,877 members of the Med- ical Department. Two years later, the Department again expanded its services and set up a permanent clinic on Irving Place.67 Although branch doctors tended to a range of diseases, the Workmen’s Circle had a separate section of the Medical Department that focused exclusively on consumption. At the heart of the Circle’s campaign was its sanitarium in Liberty, New York. Although the care provided by the Medical Department was spatially separated from the sweatshop, the Workmen’s Circle never rhetorically divorced its medical care from garment labor. Rather, it consistently stressed that the diseases the Medical Department treated were workers’ illnesses; the Workmen’s Circle referred to tuberculosis specifically as the “proletarishe krankheit” (proletarian sickness). In words echoing Maurice Fishberg, the Workmen’s Circle pointed out that patients at the Liberty Sanitarium were pressers, operators, and tailors. Garment factories had induced their consumption: “The proletarian blood and flesh is the best home for the tubercule bacili.” Only an association like the Workmen’s Circle working against garment bosses could evict the bacteria. Even the battle to cure a worker of consumption was explained as a social struggle that mirrored workplace conflict: “Tuberculosis may be pictured as a “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 15 war between the tuberculosis germs and the body. When the germs are getting the upper hand the disease is active and progressive. On the other hand, when the body masters the germs, recovery is secured.”68 The curing of the body represented a triumph for workers and for the working class as a whole. In contrast to the Educational Alliance’s physical education program, the Medical Depart- ment provided care because of garment factories, not in spite of them. The ILGWU was even more explicit in connecting the medical care it provided with the political effort to cure workers ravaged by garment work. In a story entitled “The Living Skeleton and the Stout Reformer,” printed in The Ladies’ Garment Worker during the 1910 strike, the ILGWU pointed out the fu- tility of curing consumption without changing the workplace. The story is set in a cotton mill that is clearly reminiscent of the Lower East Side’s shops. All the workers, except the Living Skeleton, are young females. The skeleton is infected with consumption and is close to death. The owner of the mill is a well-fed reformer who, like many donors to the Educational Alliance, is deeply concerned with the spread of consumption. In response, he seeks to build a sanitarium in the hills: “Plenty of fresh air is what I’m after in our new tuberculosis shack.” But the Living Skeleton induces the reformer to enter the steam-filled, unsani- tary factory and the reformer is overwhelmed with his error: “‘By George, I won’t stand for all this . . . You were dead right. We’re manufacturing death faster than cloth. I guess this is about the best place to begin the fresh air cure for tuberculosis.’” The Living Skeleton, assuming the mantle of the diseased male class hero transformed into a union leader, is left “smiling down upon the young, rosy-faced girls.”69 The clear implication is twofold: First, the curing of workers must begin with the reform of the industry, and second, this reform must result from the cooperation between workers and munificent manufacturers. During the 1910 strike, the ILGWU led the largest walkout to date in Low- er East Side. Sixty thousand cloakmakers walked out of the garment factories demanding better working conditions, a shorter work week (from fifty-three to forty-nine hours), higher wages, and a closed shop. After a bitter, protracted struggle, the union settled for a fifty-hour week, higher wages, and a preferen- tial union shop, meaning that the union standards should “prevail.”70 On Sep- tember 2, 1910, major garment manufacturers and the union signed the Proto- col of Peace signaling the end of the strike. The Protocol instituted an arbitration structure designed to settle disputes peacefully and, significantly, to allow workers a voice in the regulation and improvement of garment factory conditions. For the Jewish historian Irving Howe, the Protocol highlighted the vibran- cy of the New York Jewish community and the continuity of Jewish values despite different German and eastern European heritages. For the labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky, the Protocol heralded the arrival of progressive labor relations in the previously tumultuous world of garment labor.71 While both inter- pretations are correct, they miss the cultural implications of the Protocol re- garding the control of the garment industry and its consumptive conditions. For the first time, a Jewish union—a union of self-consciously weak workers— 16 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 claimed the right to supervise and set standards for the workplace in cooperation with caring bosses. Essentially, the Protocol suggests the extent to which workers’ cultural understandings of the connections between work and disease shaped the strategies and forms of worker organization. Little wonder that one of the Protocol’s most vocal supporters was the national secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, Gertrude Barnum—the author of “The Living Skeleton and the Stout Reformer.”72 Central to the ILGWU’s claim to the right to control the conditions of garment work was the Joint Board of Sanitary Control, one of the least examined el- ements of the Protocol. Begun after the Protocol went into effect, the Board, composed of union officials, businessmen, independent reformers, and state inspectors, inspected garment factories and set standards for workplace conditions. Pauline Newman, a one-time worker who in 1912 became the ILGWU’s health education director, recognized that the union understood factory conditions better than anyone else (including the state Board of Health): “We knew there was no ventilation. . . . We knew that many of them still used gas—instead of electric light and those who used electric lights were not shaded so that the glare of the electric bulb was constantly in front of the operator or any worker who used it.” The Board set standards that directly addressed the factors that made the Jewish immigrant worker’s body so susceptible to consumptive attack. It man- dated “regular chairs instead of sitting on boxes” to prevent the “cramped attitude” of work that Fishberg and others claimed damaged the worker’s ribcage and chest. It also demanded proper ventilation to rid shops of the insidious dust that weakened workers’ lungs. Shops “should be thoroughly aired before and after work hours, and during the lunch hour.”73 The Board’s suggestions were spe- cific enough to demand the enforcement of a law requiring disinfected cuspidors to prevent infection from the saliva of consumptive workers. The Board divided shops into three classes based on compliance. The most compliant shops were to be inspected twice a month, the second-most weekly, and the least compliant every other day.74 Even though the “Protocol” collapsed after 1916, many of the strictures and structures of the Joint Board remained. The ILGWU fundamentally advanced a plan for an ideal workshop designed to prevent the spread of consumptive disease. Between 1900 and 1910, cloakmaking increasingly shifted from cramped tenements on the Lower East Side to roomier lofts along Fifth Avenue. In 1911 the Joint Board reported that of 1,738 shops investigated, 1,411 were in loft buildings. Although many loft shops, like the older sweatshops, had cramped conditions and poor ventilation, the increased space permitted potential improvement: better fire escapes, separate lunchrooms, clean toilets, and, most importantly, large windows. Unfortu- nately, the Board discovered that only 3.83 percent of the shops it investigated employed the electric ventilators necessary to provide the three thousand cubic feet of clean air per hour per worker that the Board deemed necessary for the eradication of dust and bacteria. By investigating shops with the potential for improvement and by widely distributing pictures of (the few) “modern” shops, the Board and the ILGWU were in effect setting the standards for the “clean- “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 17 air cure” in the workplace referred to by the “stout reformer.” The union was cautiously saluting changes in the garment industry. The vision, if resisted by the most recalcitrant employers, was understood elsewhere. In 1913 the Committee for the Care of the Jewish Tuberculosis, composed of German and Russian immigrant Jews, opened the Altro Works, a sanitarium in the form of a garment factory. It was a model shop complete with an up-to-date shop floor. Its goal was to care for its workers, all of whom were consumptives, as well as to produce clothing. The Committee boasted that the Works were “Where garments are well made . . . and patients made well.” Like the Educational Alliance, the Works sought to create well-trained, strong workers; yet the training in the Works was on the shop floor, not in the gym. The sanitarium and workplace were perceptibly becoming one through the twin visions of the Committee for the Care of the Jewish Tuberculosis and the ILGWU. The Altro Works plan for large windows, a separate lunchroom, and a clothes dryer “for rainy days, with a change of stockings and slippers for all employees” was strikingly similar to the political health demands listed by the ILGWU and the Joint Board.75 At the same time, the Joint Sanitary Board and the ILGWU provided care for garment workers who were already ill. In particular, the Board found that “a large number of our people . . . [are] infected with tuberculosis” but unable to seek medical help because of the prohibitive cost and because of the loss of time and earnings.76 Increasingly, with work and disease intertwined in workers’ cultural understandings of labor, consumptive workers came to consider unions the appropriate institution for care. As Morris Sigman, manager of Local 35 of the ILGWU, remembered: “Men with pale and emaciated faces, infected with consumption, would come to the office [of Local 35] and beg and cry for help.”77 Starting in 1913, Locals 35 (pressers), 9 (finishers and tailors), and 23 (skirt- makers) all started tuberculosis relief funds. Between 1913 and 1922, Local 35 alone distributed $19,672 in benefits from its fund.78 The ILGWU’s Union Health Center on Union Square housed X-ray machines, electric cardiographs, and a free pharmacy. In addition, the Board distributed leaflets in shops urging medical checkups and warning of the danger of diseases, especially tuberculosis. Pauline Newman and the ILGWU avowed that the Joint Sanitary Board and the Health Center were unique to the Jewish labor movement. Indeed, for New- man, the principal success of the Protocol was the link forged between bread- and-butter issues like wages and the sanitary reform of the industry: “I think its achievements tells the possibility of securing from the employers not only higher wages and shorter hours but things like sanitation. . . . Ours was the first and only Joint Board of Sanitary Control which [sic] purpose it was to safeguard the people’s health.”79 The pride that Newman felt in the Joint Sanitary Board was not simply the pride of a union worker who devoted her life to workers’ health (she worked at the union clinic until she was well past ninety years old), but also a broad recog- nition that health concerns were central to the working identity of Jewish garment laborers. When asked what should be included in the World’s Fair labor 18 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 building in 1936, B. Charney Vladek, the general manager of the Forverts (Jew- ish Daily Forward, the popular socialist Yiddish daily), listed reproductions of sweatshops, models of labor’s ingenuity (like a transatlantic steamer), and an ex- hibit on the Workmen’s Circle Liberty Sanitarium.80 When the ILGWU in 1910 proclaimed that “the masses of cloak and skirt makers are all eager for the strength which only union can give them,” the word “strength” carried many related meanings. Union meant collective strength and collective strength meant challenging the forces of enfeeblement. Paradoxically, only by politicizing workers’ bodies by proclaiming a struggle of the weak against the strong could Jew- ish workers gain these two strengths.81 Jews had begun to confront the conditions that made their bodies tubercular. They did not merely remake their own bodies as their German coreligionists suggested. Rather, they linked curing to workplace struggle. As the ILGWU declared through the mouth of the “stout reformer,” treatment must begin first in the workplace—not in the gymnasium. By 1920, workers had won the right to inspect workshops and the same organizations that fought for this right had begun also to heal workers’ bodies. When immigrants first arrived they were inspected by doctors who would exclude those found to be diseased; by 1920 doctors tied to the Jewish labor movement were curing enfeebling disease. Ironi- cally, after workers created the means to confront the proclaimed causes of their illness, the focus on weakness was ready to be abandoned. By the second decade of the twentieth century this was nowhere more obvious than in the shift away from the emphasis on consumption. Although care for Jewish consumptive patients continued throughout the 1920s and beyond, Jewish labor activists were prepared to transcend the consumptive culture. In his 1919 poem “Memento Mori,” the poet Moyshe-Leib Halpern introduced a new, nontubercular death entirely antithetical to the grim, sweatshop death that lurked so ominously and ubiquitously throughout the poems of Morris Rosen- feld.82 Like Rosenfeld, Halpern had long labored in the shops and had suffered in the same dangerous conditions. But Halpern’s death was “not gray and dark, but dazzling and cheerful.” He witnesses death in a different environment from Rosenfeld. It is no longer in the sweatshop but where “thousands of people were/In the water, madly enjoying life.” Perhaps the thousands were at Coney Island or another new area of Jewish, working-class leisure. Halpern concludes his poem, one of the most oft-cited in Yiddish literature, by wondering whether these thousands will acknowledge the new vision of death: “Will they believe Moyshe-Leib?” For the Workmen’s Circle, it was certainly time to accept a new death. One of the cardinal rules at the Liberty Sanitarium, for example, forbade even the mention of consumption: “Never talk of your case or symptoms to anyone else except the doctor, and avoid the ‘pest’ who talks of his symptoms at every occasion.”83 The Jewish worker was now to be cured, not simply by rest and clean air, but by rejecting the emphasis on consumption embodied in the “pest.” And who was the pest but Rosenfeld, Victor, Epstein, Cohen, and even Edelshtat, for whom talk of consumption had been central to the cultural understanding of labor? “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 19

NOTES

1. Morris Rosenfeld, “What is the World?” in Songs from the Ghetto, bilingual ed. and trans. Leo Wiener, (Boston, 1900), 31–33. Throughout I have retranslated sections of poems in order to retain as much of the sense of the original Yiddish as possible, perhaps at the expense of English readability. 2. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 38–68; Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881–1910 (New York, 1969). 3. Samuel Siegal, unpublished autobiography, YIVO, American Jewish Autobiography Collection (AJA) ࠻281a, 110. 4. Alan Kraut, “Silent Strangers: Germs, Genes, and Nativism in John Higham’s Strangers in the Land,” American Jewish History 71 (1981):269–84; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Westport, 1955). 5. Kraut, “Silent Strangers,” 146. About one percent of all arrivals at Ellis Island were immediately deported; a much larger number were quarantined. 6. Siegal, unpublished autobiography, 113–15. 7. On the different social definitions of disease, specifically of tuberculosis, see David Ros- ner and Gerald Markowitz, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 1991), 6–7, 32–33; Charles E. Rosenberg, “Introduc- tion: Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick, 1992), xiii–xxvi. 8. For a cultural analysis of Jewish physical self-perception, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986), 109–37. 9. The labor history of Jewish immigrant workers is extensive. See, for example, Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, 1990); Nan- cy Green, Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, 1997). 10. Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, 1997), 187–218. See also Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epi- demics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1992), 278–317. 11. For a recent effort to trace how workers’ conceptualized their resistance and struggle, see, for example, Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 1–16, 103–22. 12. Joint Board of Sanitary Control, “A General Survey of the Sanitary Conditions of the Shops in the Cloak Industry” (New York, 1911), 6–7. Women rarely composed a majority in any shops except in the shirtwaist industry, where they were virtually the only workers. They also composed the overwhelming majority of home workers. In 1900, there were 10,982 females compared to 1,049 men in tenement homework. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Factory In- spector of the State of New York for the Year Ending November 30, 1900 (Albany, 1901), 39. 13. Reports of the Immigration Commission, “Immigrants in Cities,” Sixty-first Congress, Second Session, vol. 1 (Washington, 1911), Table 70, 231. 14. Quoted in Sydney Stahl Weinberg, World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immi- grant Women (Chapel Hill, 1988), 211. 15. On women and homework, see Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of La- bor (Albany, 1885), 158–61. On tenement house manufacturing, piecework, and homework, see Fourteenth Annual Report of the Factory Inspector of the State of New York for the Year Ending November 30, 1899 (Albany, 1900), 37–53 (especially 48, on contagious disease in tenement manufacture), 777–84. See also Cynthia R. Daniels, “Between Home and Factory: Homeworkers and the State,” in Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, ed. Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels (Urbana, 1989), 13–16. 16. Twentieth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Year Ended Septem- ber 30, 1902 (Albany, 1903), Appendix A, Tables 1–2, 13–21. One of the few ways that male garment workers were able to leave the garment factories was by moving into small business, whether by opening small garment shops or other minimally capitalized shops. 17. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Ger- many, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996), 218–82. 18. Rosenfeld, “What Is the World?” 31–33. 19. Pamela Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam: The Jews of Eastern Europe in 20 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999

Transition,” American Jewish History 71 (1981):269–73; Abraham Cahan, “Bleter fun meyn lebn,” I, II, in The Education of Abraham Cahan, ed. and trans. Leon Stein (Philadelphia, 1969), 193–216; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976), 26–39. 20. Hyman Cantor, His Thoughts, undated autobiography, YIVO AJA ࠻102, 79. 21. Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam,” 274–78; Sorin, A Time for Building, 45–46. 22. Israel Kasovich, The Days of Our Years (New York, 1929), 172–73. 23. Isaac Antonovsky, Memoirs, 1975 (English translation, 1980), YIVO AJA ࠻334, 334. 24. Ellis Island was opened in 1892 in order to ameliorate the crowded conditions at Cas- tle Garden. See Sorin, A Time for Building, 47–48. 25. Stephen Graham, With Poor Immigrants (New York, 1914), cited in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 42. 26. On the medical examinations at Ellis Island, see: Kraut, “Silent Strangers,” 145; Eliz- abeth Yew, “Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891–1924,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 56 (1980):488–510. Between 1891 and 1898, two doctors inspected from 2,000 to 5,000 immigrants daily. By 1914, eleven doctors examined that number, suggesting that examinations became more stringent. 27. Stella Seligson Papiroff, With Open Eyes, undated, YIVO AJA, ࠻368, 20–21; Marcus Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (New York, 1917), 59–68; Bernard Weinstein, Fertsig ior in der idisher arbeiter bavegung (idisher sotsialistishen farband) (New York, 1924), 12. 28. Papiroff, With Open Eyes, 32; Interview with Abe Zwerlin and Wife, Irving Howe, YIVO, Box 1, Folder 4; Isaac M. Rubinow, “The Economic Condition of the Russian Jew in New York City,” in The Russian Jew in the United States: Studies of Social Conditions in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with a Description of Rural Settlements, ed. C. S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia, 1905), 103–7. 29. Benjamin Kapp, Immigrant Physician, undated, YIVO AJA ࠻300, 134–35. Although the tuberculosis bacillus had been identiﬁed as early as 1882, reformers, public health ofﬁcials, doctors, and garment workers remained confused about the application of modern germ theory. On early understandings of germ theory see, John Farley, “Parasites and the Germ The- ory of Disease,” in Framing Disease, ed. Rosenberg and Golden, 34–49; René and Jean Du- bos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (New Brunswick, 1987 [original, 1952]), 92–110. 30. Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption 1862–1954 (New York, 1988); John M. Eyler, “The Sick Power and the State: Arthur Newsholme on Poverty, Disease, and Responsibility,” in Framing Disease, ed. Rosenberg and Golden, 276–96; Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Mak- ing of a Vast Industry (New York, 1982), 180–97. 31. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 149–50; Jeanne Abrams, Blazing the Tuberculosis Trail: The Religio-Ethnic Role of Four Sanatoria in Early Denver (Denver, 1991), 21–32; Milton An- fenger, The Birth of a Hospital: The Story of the Birth of the National Jewish Hospital in Den- ver, Colorado (Denver, 1942), 15–16; Samuel Goldsmith, “The Jewish Tuberculosis: Some Na- tional Aspects of the Problem,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly 1 (1924):20–22. 32. Goldsmith, “The Jewish Tuberculosis,” 22; Finf un tsvantsig yorniger iubilei fun medikal department, arbeiter ring (May 17, 1944), Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Papers, Box 10, Folder 57, 1–7; Deborah Dwork, “Health Conditions of Immigrant Jews on the Low- er East Side of New York, 1880–1914,” Medical History 25 (1981):1–40. 33. On this immunity see Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (New York, 1995), 176–78, 204–5. 34. Maurice Fishberg, “The Relative Infrequency of Tuberculosis Among Jews,” reprint from American Medicine, November 2, 1901, Judaica Division, New York Public Library (here- after, Judaica Div.), 4–10; Second Report of the Factory Investigating Commission (Albany, 1913), 1504–5; Kraut, Silent Strangers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York, 1994), 105–35. By the kosher laws, all slaughtered beef had to be examined for evidence of im- purity, namely bovine tubercular pustules. Only meat with lung tissue found to be glat (smooth) and thus not tubercular, was kosher. On the spread of bovine tuberculosis to humans, see Bar- bara Gutmann Rosenkrantz, “The Trouble with Bovine Tuberculosis,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985):155–75. 35. For medical and social histories of tuberculosis see Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia, 1992); René and Jean Dubos, The “A Hero . . . for the Weak” 21

White Plague; Michael Teller, The Tuberculosis Movement: A Public Health Campaign in the Progressive Era (New York, 1988). 36. Fishberg, “The Relative Infrequency,” 1–2; Frederick L. Hoffman, “The Mortality from Consumption in Dusty Trades,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 79 (1908):633–41, 829– 43. Like many of his contemporaries, Fishberg attempted to integrate germ theory with physical explanations of disease. See also Nancy Tomes, “The Private Side of Public Health: Sani- tary Science, Domestic Hygiene, and the Germ Theory, 1870–1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990):509–39. 37. Maurice Fishberg, Tuberculosis Among the Jews (New York, 1908), reprint from Med- ical Record, December 26, 1908, Judaica Div., 1–2, 8–9, 19. 38. Fishberg, Tuberculosis Among the Jews, 18–19; Maurice Fishberg, Health Problems of the Jewish Poor (New York, 1903), reprint from The American Hebrew, Judaica Div., 11–13; Papiroff, With Open Eyes, 20–21. 39. Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York, 1915), 53–54. 40. Arbeiter ring sanitarium, liberti, niu iork, onveizungen tsu patsientn, Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Papers, Box 10, Folder 57, 3. 41. Fishberg, Tuberculosis Among Jews, 9. 42. Maurice Fishberg, Health and Sanitation of the Immigrant Jewish Population of New York (New York, 1903), Judaica Div., 5; Dominck Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia, 1981). 43. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 230; S. P. Rudens, “A Half Century of Community Ser- vice: The Story of the New York Educational Alliance,” The American Jewish Year Book 46 (1944–1945):73–88. On German–Jewish relations with East European Jewish immigrants see Gerald Sorin, “Mutual Contempt, Mutual Beneﬁt: The Strained Encounter Between German and Eastern European Jews in America, 1880–1920,” American Jewish History 81 (1993):34– 59; Sorin, A Time for Building, 86–88; Arthur Goren, Quest for Community: The Kehillah Ex- periment, 1908–1922 (New York, 1970). 44. Souvenir Book of the Fair in Aid of the Educational Alliance, Folder 19, Records of the Educational Alliance, YIVO, 23 [the fair was given on December 9, 1895, to raise money]; Miri- am Blaustein, ed., Memoirs of David Blaustein (New York, 1913), 38–40. 45. Souvenir Book, 23. David Blaustein, “The Making of Americans.” Paper read before the New York State Conference of Charities, November 19, 1893, in Memoirs of David Blaustein, 127–37. 46. Minutes of the Committee of Social Work of the Educational Alliance, April 2, Octo- ber 8, December 3, 1914; November 2, 1916. 47. Kapp, Immigrant Physician, 134–35. Kapp recalls coughing up balls of hair, suggesting an illness medically distinct from tuberculosis. 48. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1989 [original, 1978]). 49. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side (Ithaca, 1995 [original, 1918]), 194–96. 50. Yacob Adler, “The Machine Worker,” in A Century of Yiddish Poetry, ed. and trans. Aaron Kramer (New York, 1989), 91–92. 51. Hatikvah, May 1924, reprinted in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 150. 52. Rosenfeld, “The Pale Operator,” in Songs from the Ghetto, ed. Wiener, 7–9; Morris Rosenfeld Papers, YIVO, folder 44; Forverts, June 23, 1923. 53. Rosenfeld, “A Tear on the Iron,” in Songs from the Ghetto, ed. Wiener, 9–11; Rosen- feld Papers, folder 41; American Israelite, September 25, 1906. 54. Milton W. Brown, “An Explosion of Creativity: Jews and American Art in the Twen- tieth Century,” in Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900–1945: A Trib- ute to the Educational Alliance Art School, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe (New York, 1991), 22–27; Abraham Walkowitz, Faces from the Ghetto (New York, 1946); Jo David- son, Between Sittings: An Informal Autobiography (New York, 1952). 55. Jacob Epstein, An Autobiography (London, 1963), 2. 56. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto, Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York (New York, 1965 [original 1902]). 57. Rosenfeld, “In the Sweatshop,” in Songs from the Ghetto, ed. Wiener, 3–5. Rosenfeld’s description of the sweatshop at midday is echoed artistically by Jacob Epstein in his drawing for Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto. 58. Rosenfeld, “What is the World?” in Songs from the Ghetto, ed. Wiener, 31–33. 22 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999

59. This image of workers as meek is in marked contrast to images advanced by other contemporary radical movements that focused on physical strength. See Elizabeth Faue, Commu- nity of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915– 1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 69–99. 60. Rosenfeld, “The Pale Operator,” 7–9. 61. Abraham Victor, “Denver,” in A Century of Yiddish Poetry, ed. and trans. Aaron Kramer (New York, 1989), 245–46; see also Dovid Edelshtat, “My Testament” (c. 1882), in Kramer, 60–61. 62. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880– 1920 (Bloomington, 1985); Elias Tcherikover, The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States, ed. and trans. Aaron Antonovsky (New York, 1961); Louis Lorwin, The Women’s Gar- ment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (New York, 1924); Weinstein, Fertsig ior in der idisher arbeiter bavegung, 232–73. 63. The Ladies’ Garment Worker, April 1, 1910. 64. “A General Survey,” 39. 65. “Kunst un iunion,” Morris Rosenfeld Papers, Folder 75. 66. Gold, Jews Without Money, 143–47; Jacob Jay Lindenthal, “Abi Gezunt: Health and the Eastern European Jewish Immigrant,” American Jewish History 70 (1981):429–430. 67. Finf un tsvantsig-iorger iubilei fun medikal department, arbeiter ring, Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Paper, Box 10, Folder 57; S. Koner, Barikht tsum fuftsn iorkn iubeils fun medikal department, arbeiter ring, 1919–1934, Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Paper, Box 10, Folder 57; A. S. Zaks, Di geshikte fun arbeiter ring, 1892–1925, ershter teyl (New York, 1925). 68. Zaks, Geshikte fun arbeiter ring, 357 (my translation), “zelbst-hilf,” February 12, 1912, Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Papers, Box 10, Folder 58, 3–4; Arbeiter ring sanatorium, liberti, niu-irk, onveizungen tsu patsientn, Bund Archives, Workmen’s Circle Papers, Box 10, Folder 58, 3–4. 69. Gertrude Barnum, “The Living Skeleton and the Stout Reformer,” The Ladies’ Gar- ment Worker, July, 1910. 70. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 302. 71. Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst, 1968), 63–85. 72. Independent, October 3, 1912. 73. Independent, October 3, 1912. 74. Interviews with Pauline Newman, January 26, 1965, and January 19, 1965, YIVO amerikaner yidisher geshikte bel-pe, Box 4; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganiz- able: Three Jewish Women and their Union,” Labor History 17 (1976):5–23; Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York, 1977), 293– 95. 75. Altro Health and Rehabilitation Services, Life and Living: Report of the Committee for the Care of the Jewish Tuberculosis (New York, 1937); “A General Survey,” 26–30. 76. Interview with Newman, January 26, 1965. 77. “Ten Years of Fraternal Aid” (New York Cloakpressers’ Union, Local 35), 20. 78. Lorwin, The Women’s Garment Workers, 476–78. 79. Interview with Newman, January 26, 1965. 80. B. Charney Vladek to William Lescaze, March 31, 1936, Vladek Papers—Addendum, Tamiment Institute. 81. The Ladies’ Garment Worker, April 1, 1910. 82. Moyshe-Leib Halpern, In niu-iork (New York, 1919), 141. My translation. 83. Arbeiter ring sanatorium, liberti, niu-irk, onveizungen tsu patsientn, 3–4.