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The Ambiguity of Class Among Eastern European Jewish LaborHistory, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2001 Class ConsciousWorkers as Immigrant Entrepreneurs:The Ambiguity of Class among Eastern EuropeanJewish Immigrants to the UnitedStates at the Turnof the Twentieth Century DANIELSOYER* Looking back in 1942, an anonymousJewish immigrant whocalled himself aª70 year oldEast New Yorkerº after his Brooklyn neighborhood remarked onthe ways in which his thinking about classand class con¯ ict had changeddepending on his stationin life. Beginning in 1902 asa sewingmachine operator, hehad eventually goneinto business for himself asa garment sub-manufacturer.During his years asan employer, theEast NewYorker wasas active in theAmerican Cloak andSuit Manufacturers’Association ashe had oncebeen in theunion. He retired in theearly 1930s. Whena worker,he had viscerally supportedstrikers andª curse[dthe bosses] bitterly.º But later, having becomea boss,he changed his position,acquiring adeepresentment of striking workers:ª All thecurses that Ihad oncelaid onthe bosses, I nowgave theworkersÐ with interest.ºNow looking back hebecame philosophical andre ¯ected,ª ¼nowthat Iam neither aworker nora boss,and I think about thepast, I donotknow when I was right.º 1 This ª70 year old EastNew Yorkerº was not alone. Many Jewish immigrants ofhis generation harbored theseseemingly contradictory impulsesÐtoward working-class militancy andambitious entrepreneurship.Unlike the East New Yorker, however, they didnot always hold theseworld views sequentially; they nurturedboth tendencies at thesame time, sometimesuneasily, sometimes with little friction at all. Asmilitant workersthey fought collectively through their unions,radical political parties, and class-basedfraternals for higher wages,better conditions, heightened control over work processes,and a more justand egalitarian society.As ambitious entrepreneursthey hopedto attain more personal independence,higher social status,and a better standard ofliving through individual movementout of the wage-earning working classinto the middle classof self-employed shopkeepers, contractors and manufacturers, and profes- sionals.2 *Researchfor this paper was carriedout while Iwas aresidentfellow with the Sweatshop Project,a RockefellerFoundation Humanities Institutecosponsored by the LowerEast Side TenementMuseum and UNITE!. 1ªA70Year Old EastNew Yorker,º Autobiography #24,37± 38, Collectionof American-Jewish Autobiographies, RG102,YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 2For perspectivesthat posit an immigrant middle classin closecontact and occasionalalliance with the immigrant workingclass, but with afundamentally differentsocial outlook, seeJohn J.Bukowczyk, ªThe ISSN0023-656X print/ ISSN1469-9702 online/ 01/010045±15 Ó 2001Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalfof The Tamiment Institute DOI:10.1080/ 00236560020017819 46 D. Soyer Theseimmigrants’ propensity tofollow twoapparently con¯icting inclinations stemmedfrom their ambivalent attitudesabout classand their ambiguous experiences ofit. Many perceivedthemselves to be of essentially middle-classbackgrounds, and their resentmentat downwardsocial andeconomic mobility beforeand after migration fedboth adesireto restore their (or their families’)entrepreneurial independenceand an opposition toa classsystem that seemedto them arbitrary andunfair. Over the courseof their lives their classposition and social statusoften shifted, and they wereat various times wage workersand independent businessmen, sometimes even both at once.The immigrants’ collectivist andindividualistic impulsessometimes interacted in complex ways:a desirefor upwardsocial mobility couldfuel labor militancy, andthe higher wageswon by unionsmight help members go into business. The deepambivalence concerningissues of class and class af® liation exhibited by Jewishworkers did not particularly distinguish them from members ofother American ethnicgroups. Unlike many other Americans,however, Jewish workers built alabor movementwith an explicitly socialist ideology, evenas they exhibited agreat degreeof upwardsocial andincome mobility. Moreover,pro-labor attitudespersisted among Jewswho had successfullyconsolidated their positionin theentrepreneurial and professionalmiddle class.Even the mouthpiece of Yiddish socialism, the Jewish Daily Forward,kept an eyeout for businessat thevery sametime it called for working-class solidarity. By proclaiming ªWorkers ofall countriesuniteº on its masthead while declaring itself theª Gatewayto the Jewish Marketº on its stationery, the Forward clearly expressedthe paradoxical aspirations ofmany ofits readers. Observers ofthe immigrant experiencehave overlookedthe ambiguities ofJewish consciousnessabout classfor nearly acentury,instead presenting a seriesof one-sided images. Early commentatorssuch as John Commons believed that theJews’ essential individualism andª commercial instinctºmade them un®t for industrial work.More- over,Commons argued, the Jewish worker’ sdesireto ª becomehis ownbossº rendered him unableto sustain collective action. 3 Commonswas not alone in this assessmentof theJewish character. Contemporary Jewishobservers agreed that theJewish worker wouldrather leave theworking classthan unitewith his fellows,differing chie¯y in whetheror notthey thought this agoodthing. 4 Not 10 years after Commonsmade his assessment,he was proved wrong,however, asa massive waveof strikes permanently establishedunions as forces to be reckoned Transformation ofWorking-Class Ethnicity: CorporateControl, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant MiddleClass in Bayonne, NewJersey, 1915± 1925,º LaborHistory ,25(1984), 53±82; David Montgomery,ª Nationalism, AmericanPatriotism, and Class Consciousnessamong Immigrant Workers in the UnitedStates in the Epoch ofWorld War I,º in Dirk Hoerder,ed., Struggle aHardB attle: Essays on Working-ClassImmigrants (DeKalb, IL:Northern Illinois UniversityPress, 1986), 327± 351; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: AHistory ofImmigrants in UrbanAmerica (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1985). 3ªForeign-BornLabor in the Clothing Trade,º Reports ofthe Industrial Commissionon Immigration , vol. 15,57th Congress,1st session, HRDoc. 184(Washington, DC: GovernmentPrinting Of® ce 1901), 323, 325,327. It should be noted, however,that another scholar, J.E. Pope, dissentedsomewhat from Commons’ assessment.Pope agreedthat Jewswere individualistic, but arguedthat this did not prevent them fromuniting in labor orother organizations. SeePope, The Clothing Industry in New York (University ofMissouri Studies, 1905),185. 4Reports ofthe Industrial Commissionon Immigration ,251;Abraham Cahan, ªSummer Complaint: The Annual Strike,º CommercialAdvertiser ,Aug. 25,1900, reprinted in MosesRischin, ed., GrandmaNever Livedin America:The New Journalism ofAbraham Cahan (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress, 1985), 381. TheAmbiguity of Class among Immigrants 47 with in thegarment trades.Jews turned out to be among themost devoted members of theInternational Ladies’Garment Workers’ Union(ILGWU) and other labor organi- zations.Moreover, the second decade of the 20th centuryalso sawthe short-lived heyday ofJewish socialism in America. The labor andSocialist movementsextended their in¯uence over muchof the immigrant Jewishcommunity with suchpowerful institutionsas the Jewish DailyForward ,themost widely read Yiddishdaily newspaper in theworld, and the Workmen’ sCircle,a fraternal order with tensof thousands of members.The LowerEast Side sent Socialist lawyer MeyerLondon to Congress in 1914, andin succeedingyears Jewishdistricts elected a numberof Socialists tothe New York statelegislature andthe city’ sboard ofaldermen. The successof the strikes, unions, and radical institutionsgave rise toa newimage ofJewsas class-conscious workers with an inclination towardcollectivist ideologies,an image that wasat oddswith theview previously propoundedby Commonsand others. Asthe historian SusanGlenn has noted,the idea ofJewish radicalism has remained a ªpowerfulethnic myth Jewsconstructed about themselvesand outsiders believed about them.º 5 Scholarly andpopular historians suchas Moses Rischin and Irving Howe structuredtheir general accountsof the Jewish immigrant community in NewYork on theframework ofthe Jewish labor movement. 6 Meanwhile,other historians have stressedthe relative rapidity with which Eastern EuropeanJews and their descendantsclimbed thesocial ladder in this country.Thomas Kessnerattributed Jews’comparatively speedyeconomic mobility tocultural factors, including theJews’ non-peasant European background andtheir economicgoals and ambitions.7 AndrewHeinze’ sportrait ofJewishimmigrants asexuberant participants in American consumeristculture stands in sharp contrastto the common image of downtroddensweatshop workers and earnest labor activists. ªAsa forcebehind con- sumerbehavior,º writes Heinze, ª Jewishindividualism contrastedwith thecomparative collectivism ofother immigrants.º 8 5Susan Glenn, Daughters ofthe Shtetl: Lifeand Labor in the ImmigrantGeneration (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1990), 192. For earlyattempts to identifylabor militancy as an essentialJewish characteristic,see Theresa Sperber Malkiel, Diaryof a Shirtwaist Striker (1910;reprint, Ithaca: Cornell ILRPress, 1990), 81; comments by cloakmakers’ leaderAbraham Rosenbergin IrvingHowe, World of Our Fathers (NewYork: Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich, 1976),301. 6MosesRischin, The PromisedCity: New York’sJews, 1870±1914 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press,1962); Howe, Worldof Our Fathers .Seealso GeraldSorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish ImmigrantRadicals, 1880± 1920 (Bloomington:
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