7

Let the Women Make a Strike, Then There Will Be a Strike!

At 5:00 p.m. on May 10, 1902, U.S. Attorney Solomon H. Bethea filed the federal government’s complaint against the members of the Beef Trust with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. The documents had been prepared by the Justice Department in Washington and approved by Attorney General Knox and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Based on the Sherman Antitrust Act, the complaint was a wholesale indictment of the Big Six meat packers, and it named not only the companies, but the men in charge. It accused them of being parties to an agreement to control the U.S. beef trade by manipulating the price of beef to the “manifest injury of the people of the United States and in defiance of law.”

Among the accusations against them were that they had:

Named in the complaint were the companies Swift, Hammond, Cudahy, Armour, Nelson Morris, and Schwarzschild & Sulzberger, as well as twenty-three individuals who constituted a veritable who’s who in meat packing. Several were the firms’ founders or their close relatives. Among them were J. Ogden Armour; Gustavus, Louis, and Edward Swift; Michael, Edward, and Patrick Cudahy; and Ferdinand Sulzberger.

The petition sought an injunction against further operation of the so-called Trust, its dissolution, its adoption of measures to prevent recurrence of collusion, and an immediate hearing. The judge scheduled arguments for Tuesday, May 20.1

At the same time, Attorney General Knox quietly issued an order to U.S. attorneys across the nation to collect local evidence against the Beef Trust. This was unprecedented, but Knox knew that the more proof he could garner against this hydra-headed cabal, the better prepared he would be.2

Nor was the federal government the Trust’s only adversary. In Albany, New York State Attorney General John C. Davies, whose office had been investigating it for several weeks, had been awaiting federal action before filing a complaint of his own. On Monday, May 12, the New York Herald reported that he had amassed a list of more than a hundred witnesses who had been “unfairly used” by the Beef Trust and had collected a trove of documents pointing to arbitrary regulation of prices, division of territory, and restraint of trade, and that such an action was imminent.3

That same morning, the butchers’ boycott on the Lower East Side appeared to be gaining steam, thanks to new pledges of solidarity by counterparts in Brooklyn and Newark. Consumers, too, were generally supportive. They dutifully turned to milk, eggs, and vegetables, paid a few cents a pound more for chicken, or patronized delicatessens, which did a brisk business in processed meats as the butchers, by and large, remained closed. That didn’t mean there weren’t outliers, though. A squad of butchers on the lookout for shops that attempted to do business prowled the streets and urged or forced several to close. Police had to be called in a few cases when rocks were thrown.

In the afternoon, a delegation of 350 butchers headed by Joseph Goldman met with representatives of the wholesalers at the Forty-Fourth Street offices of the United Dressed Beef Company. Frederick Joseph, son-in-law of founder Joseph Schwarzschild and a vice president of the company, appeared for Schwarzschild & Sulzberger; Isaac Blumenthal represented United Dressed Beef, of which he was president; and M. Meyer appeared for his own company, M. Meyer & Son. Officers of smaller slaughterhouses were present as well.

The executives insisted they were powerless to lower rates because these were governed by the price they had to pay for cattle from the West. They held firm to this line throughout the meeting. “It makes no difference to us whatever,” Ferdinand Sulzberger told the New York Times later. “If the butchers do not require the meat then we will not be obliged to ship so many cattle. If they want to reduce the price they will have to go out West and try to do it. We cannot help them in any way.”4

Sulzberger was lying about lacking power over setting the price, but the threat of simply ordering fewer cattle was real, and so as a practical matter, the boycott didn’t hurt the local wholesalers as much as the butchers had hoped it would. But it was not true that calling a moratorium on beef purchases made no difference to the wholesalers. Lower volumes meant lower profits for them, too.

After the first day, the slaughterhouses simply bought fewer animals and sent most of the shoychtim home, saving the eighteen dollars a week they had to pay each of them. As they pointed out at the meeting, they could still do business with non-Jewish butchers, some of whom, they alleged, were already ordering kosher meat to sell to observant Jews. Their point was that consumers could still buy kosher meat if they wanted it; the only ones who would really suffer from continuing the boycott were the kosher butchers themselves.5

14. East Side women dutifully turned to vegetables in support of their butchers, who had closed down temporarily to exert pressure on their wholesalers. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-04487.

After initially refusing to attend, the wholesalers did agree to address an assembly of all of the butchers, and the next day Sulzberger, Blumenthal, and Joseph Stern courageously appeared at New Irving Hall before a crowd of somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand of them—press reports varied widely—in a meeting that began at 10:00 a.m. and didn’t wind up until 4:00 p.m.

After Goldman presented the demands of the butchers, Blumenthal and Sulzberger both spoke. As they had the day before, they maintained it was impossible for them to reduce prices because the cost of cattle had risen. They insisted they were making hardly any profit.

To support their case, Sulzberger produced bills showing the price of cattle in both Chicago and New York and the freight rates his company was charged to ship it on the hoof, though it’s a safe bet that these were the published rates, and that the substantial rebates his firm received from the railroads—off the books—did not appear. He denied that he and the other wholesalers were part of a beef trust, despite the fact that Schwarzschild & Sulzberger was the only New York slaughterhouse identified explicitly in the government’s complaint as one of the Big Six.6

To placate the butchers, the wholesalers did offer them some modest concessions. If the butchers would resume their purchases, the wholesalers agreed that they would no longer sell kosher meat to speculators, the middlemen who bought up the choice cattle and resold it to the retailers at inflated prices. They would pledge to sell only directly to the butchers.

Second, they promised that they would repurchase “wurst” meat—unsold scraps of fat used for sausage-making—from Jewish butchers exclusively, and would raise the rate paid for it from two-and-a-half cents to three cents a pound. Third, the price of liver would decrease by a penny a pound. Fourth, they would send the butchers’ association a list of Jewish butchers who purchased treyf meat that they then resold as kosher, presumably so these men could be exposed as frauds. And finally, they would support the butchers in their fight against forced Sunday closing.7

But they made it clear that this was as far as they were willing to go, so there was strong sentiment on the part of the butchers, who had by now gone several days without income, to pocket the concessions and reopen. By noon on Wednesday, May 14, most of them had done just that.8

In the grand scheme of things, however, the concessions were paltry, and no progress had been made on the central issue that had given rise to the boycott in the first place. As a matter of fact, when the butchers reopened, far from offering their customers any relief, they actually increased the prices they charged them for meat. Some were now asking as much as eighteen, twenty, and even twenty-five cents for better cuts. And even at these inflated prices, many were also now refusing to trim fat, selling meat and fat for the same price. Soup bones, once thrown in for free with a meat purchase, were now only available at six cents a pound. After four days of bologna and fish, the Lower East Side was ready to eat fresh meat again, and so there was pent up demand on Wednesday. But few would be able to afford the new prices for long.9

The New York Press claimed the butchers had “won their fight against the wholesalers.” But nobody else thought so. Indeed, when all was announced and when the women of the Lower East Side discovered that retail prices had actually risen in the wake of the shutdown, they were outraged.

And nobody was more incensed than Sarah Edelson.

Wasting no time, she and two Russian-born neighbors—Paulina Wachs Finkel, a thirty-two-year-old mother of four, and Fanny Levy, a thirty-five-year-old mother of six, both of whom had been in America for about a decade—placed an announcement in the Yiddish papers inviting East Side Jewish women to meet that night to consider their options.

The gathering was to be held at 88 Monroe Street in the hall at the rear of Monroe Palace, Sarah’s family’s saloon. Several butchers laughed derisively at the idea of a women’s gathering, the New York Post reported later, and Sarah herself didn’t expect more than fifty or so people to show up. But when the hour arrived, the five hundred–seat hall was filled to capacity. And many more who couldn’t fit inside parked themselves outside on Monroe Street.10

“New York never saw such a huge gathering of Jewish women,” the Yidishes Tageblatt proclaimed. Although they were all Jewish and principally of Russian or Eastern European origin, there was actually a fair amount of diversity in the room, both socially and ideologically. There were women from Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Ukraine. There were Litvaks and Galitzianers. Those assembled almost certainly subscribed to different beliefs, as socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and other ideologies were all popular. Some had learned of them in the old country; others had been exposed only in New York. What united them was that they all considered themselves and their families bound by the dietary laws, and that they resented, and felt threatened by, the recent increase in the price of meat.

Now, however, the women’s ire was directed not at the Beef Trust, but rather at their own East Side butchers. The concessions the butchers had obtained from the wholesalers may have been meager, but they should have resulted in some reduction in retail prices. Not only had they failed to make a dent in prices; rates had now risen as high as twenty-five cents a pound.11

Women who had stood by their local butchers the previous week now felt double-crossed by them. It appeared as if the butchers were taking advantage of the situation by laying on additional profits for themselves to make up for their losses of the previous week, even as they placed all the blame on the wholesalers. Some women even accused the butchers of establishing a “little Trust” of their own.12

“We will go to Jerome!” one of the speakers vowed, referring to William T. Jerome, the recently elected district attorney of New York County, although it is not clear what help he was in a position to offer them. “We will go to the mayor! We will see the wholesalers! But we will not allow the retail butchers to ‘skin’ us and give us bones and stones when we are paying for meat! If we can go without meat for four days to help the retail butchers, we can go without it for a month to fight them!”

15. Monroe Palace, the saloon at 88 Monroe Street owned by Sarah Edelson’s family. Her son, “Big Jake,” is second from the left; another son is at the far right. It was at this location that the women’s boycott was planned. Courtesy of the Edelson Family.

Amid cries of “burn down their shops!” the women resolved to do to the butchers what the butchers had failed to do effectively to the slaughterhouses: boycott them.

In a passionate speech the Tageblatt described as throwing “oil on fire,” Paulina Finkel, whom the New York World dubbed the “Napoleon of the East Side,” vowed to make the butchers wish they had never been born. But the mood was perhaps best captured by Fanny Levy, who was particularly contemptuous of the butchers’ strike and its miserable results.

“Look at the good it has brought,” she noted sarcastically. “This is their strike? Let the women make a strike, then there will be a strike!”13

“Only a spark was needed to kindle a fierce flame among the excitable residents of that quarter,” the New York Press observed later, and it was the meeting at 88 Monroe that provided the ignition. Each woman present was asked to pony up ten cents and a total of $28.85 was raised for the fight. A motion was passed to establish committees of five women to patrol each block on which there were kosher butcher shops the following day and dissuade customers from patronizing them.14

Paulina Finkel drafted a call to action in Yiddish, five thousand copies of which were quickly printed and distributed that evening in an effort to recruit women for the committees. It read:

Dear Sisters:

The time has arrived when we must take a hand in this meat fight. With our money, the butchers buy diamonds and wear diamonds. When meat costs only seven cents a pound wholesale, the butchers charge us 14, and now when they have to pay only one cent more, the butchers have raised a howl and have declared a strike.

Now, what shall we say, dear sisters, when they give us stone and bone and charge us five cents more?

We therefore ask and demand of all our dear sisters in Greater New York that they refuse to pay more than 12 cents a pound. If he refuses to give it to you at that price, do not buy meat at all. And if we work and act as one woman there will soon be found butchers who do not care for diamonds and who will open stores and sell meat to us at 12 cents a pound.

Buy no meat yourselves and let no one else buy!

Committee15

The Forward, the Yiddish socialist daily, did its best to cover the story from all angles. Its reporters met with Sarah Edelson and Fanny Levy, who confirmed the details of the planned boycott, and also with individual retail butchers. One of them gave voice to the deep resentment many of his colleagues felt against the men who ran the slaughterhouses. He made it clear that although these men were themselves Jews, he saw them as an entirely different species of Jew for whom he had nothing but contempt.

“I am pious and I am honorable,” this retailer told the reporter, with tears in his eyes. “Why should these millionaire German Reform Jews—the wholesale butchers—squeeze us and draw so much blood in the name of our holy Torah on which they spit? Why should they force us to sell at a higher price when we want to sell more cheaply?” He accused them of a “swindle against poor workers, poor people and humanity as a whole” and derided them as capitalists “who had gotten fat from eating pork and treyf.”16

The women resolved to field squads on the streets first thing the following morning, which no doubt required a Herculean feat of overnight door-knocking. With an estimated six hundred kosher meat shops on the Lower East Side, well over a thousand people would be required to execute the scheme.

The East Side housewives were aggrieved, and now they had a plan. What remained to be seen was whether they had the wherewithal and the stamina to pull it off.