In the wee hours of Thursday, May 15, 1902, female pickets took up positions on all the blocks of the Lower East Side of Manhattan on which kosher butcher shops were located. Some three thousand souls, Jewish women recruited by their peers the previous night, had assembled in the pitch black and formed squads of five by the time the stores opened at 7:00 a.m. Although they had trusted their butchers and bought meat from them for years, that faith had all but evaporated.
Rather than buy from these men, they were now intent on shutting them down.
The proximate cause of the conflict was a sudden spike in the retail price of kosher meat, on which these women, mostly immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, depended to feed their families. The price of a cheap cut of beef, twelve cents a pound a few months earlier, had abruptly risen 50 percent. At eighteen cents a pound—$5.25 in today’s dollars—kosher beef was now beyond the reach of families that had to pinch pennies to make ends meet. And for most, buying the nonkosher variety was unthinkable.
The kosher butchers had seen the problem coming. When the local slaughterhouses from which they bought meat raised wholesale prices, the owners of many retail shops, envisioning passing the increase on to customers who could ill afford it, had shut down for several days to pressure their suppliers into lowering them. And the wives and mothers of the Lower East Side had fully supported them in this effort, dutifully doing without meat for several days.
But when the retailers reopened and actually raised prices a few cents a pound, the East Side women felt betrayed. Persuaded that their butchers, even as they loudly pinned all the blame on the wholesalers, were taking advantage of a bad situation and profiteering at their expense, they decided to take to the streets.
The demonstrations were supposed to be nonviolent, but they did not stay that way for long. Customers who insisted on patronizing the butchers were assaulted and their purchases thrown into the gutter. Sometimes meat was doused with kerosene so it could never be eaten. Butchers who refused to close were attacked, their windows smashed, their stock ruined, and, in many cases, their fixtures destroyed. There were even reports of arson. Police, summoned to the neighborhood by the hundreds, viciously attacked the pickets. The brutal blows from their nightsticks sent many to local hospitals and many more to jail.
To several newspapers reporting on the boycott at the time, it was nothing less than a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party. New York had never seen anything remotely like it, and where it would all end was anyone’s guess.
How all hell broke loose on the Lower East Side in May of 1902 is the story of a cartel of mostly gentile midwestern beef barons colluding to restrict competition and control the price of meat, and of trust-buster President Theodore Roosevelt and his Justice Department, hell-bent on stamping out their anticompetitive business practices. It is the story of a handful of greedy and disingenuous German-Jewish slaughterhouse operators determined to maximize their profits. It is the story of six hundred or so retail kosher butchers, many struggling to eke out a living, caught between avaricious wholesalers and hard-up consumers. And it is the story of New York’s first and only chief rabbi, imported from Europe at great expense, and his quixotic efforts to rationalize the corrupt system of kosher slaughter in the city.
Most importantly, though, it is the story of Sarah Edelson, Caroline Schatzberg, Paulina Finkel, Sarah Cohn, and countless other forgotten immigrant Russian and Eastern European Jewish women who, with steely determination and a laser-like focus on their goal, took to the streets to right a perceived wrong and remained there until their cause was won. In the process, they would set a pattern that future generations could employ to address injustice wherever and whenever they experienced it.