10 Hebrews with Shaved Beards

On Friday morning, May 16, 1902, the Jewish quarter looked as though it had been bombed. The Forward compared its appearance to the aftermath of a Russian pogrom. For several blocks there was not a butcher shop with an intact storefront in sight; some markets had been completely demolished.

And there was no reason to believe the boycott was anywhere near over.1

A few shops displayed signs offering kosher meat for sale at twelve cents a pound, which, for some butchers, was better than not selling any at all, since the seventy-two-hour window between slaughter and kashering was fast closing, and the meat would soon no longer be able to be rendered kosher. But when their fellow butchers heard about the discount, they pressured them to close. They could still sell the meat to sausage-makers, and many did.2

Beyond this, there was little evidence of any change in the price of meat in the shops that dared open their doors. Charges for eggs, chicken, vegetables, and even coal had also risen dramatically, as had the cost of sausage, pressed beef, and other wurst meat sold at the delicatessens, which had been in high demand in recent days. The New York Tribune noted that where fifty cents a day would have been sufficient for a typical East Side housewife to meet her family’s food needs, it would now buy only two-thirds of what it had a few months ago. Spending seventy-five cents a day for what had cost fifty meant expenditure of an additional $1.75 a week, a sizeable chunk of the ten or twelve dollars the average East Side husband brought home.3

Sarah Edelson managed to find some time on Thursday to meet with a reporter from the New York World. Her interview took place in the rear of Monroe Palace as she gutted a fish. “I had no idea of starting such a big movement,” she told the reporter. “but all that was needed was a word or two. Then everybody jumped in and said, ‘No, we won’t be robbed anymore! Let’s boycott the butchers!’”

She gave a somewhat disingenuous account of how the strike got started, making it all sound quite spontaneous, and making no mention of the meeting she had called on Wednesday during which the activity had been planned. She also took pains to refute Joseph Goldman’s claim that anarchists were behind the strike.

“Anarchists? The butchers who call us anarchists are crazy,” she asserted. “You never saw a woman with a husband and half a dozen children who was an anarchist. No, no; we’re just human beings who are sick of being robbed.”

“We won’t quit,” she continued. “We will go without meat for six months, if necessary, to bring the price down. Two years ago it was 12 cents a pound. Then it was 14, then 16, and now it’s 18 and going to be 20, the butcher says. We’re going to be cut off from eating meat anyhow, and it might as well be now.”

“I was arrested yesterday. I didn’t mind. I did nothing. I was out in the street coaxing women to go home when I saw they were trying to break things. You don’t have to break butchers’ windows to win a strike. I was on my way home when a man pointed me out and says, ‘She’s a leader’. The policeman took me to court. The judge didn’t give me a chance to say a word. He says, ‘What do you know about trusts? Ten dollars fine.’ We will win this strike. We want meat for 12 cents a pound, and we’ll get it.”4

The police anticipated another day of unrest. Commissioner John Nelson Partridge ordered five hundred men to report for duty on the East Side. Surely in response to the widespread criticism of police brutality the day before, Partridge also issued orders to deal gently with the protesters, and officers were issued four-foot lengths of rubber hose and rattan canes to use instead of their billy clubs.5

By 6:00 a.m. small squads of women had already gathered, armed, as the New York Tribune put it, “with sticks, vocabularies and well-sharpened nails.” As fast as the police dispersed them, they regrouped elsewhere. They paraded up and down the streets scolding butchers and breaking windows. It was still not safe for anyone on the street to carry a package that looked as if it might contain meat.6

If things were less violent than they had been the day before, the New York Times speculated, it was because the women had been cowed by the brutal behavior of the police. Another thought was that it was the steep fines assessed by Magistrate Cornell. It may also have been the fact that so many butcher shops had closed, though some had shut only their front doors and secretly let customers in through side or back entrances.

In any event, there were many more arrests on Friday. Some protesters were taken into custody but never made it to court if they were liberated from their police captors en route by angry demonstrators armed with eggs, stones, and garbage, or by water bags and rotten vegetables dropped from tenement windows above.

Magistrate Cornell began his day by clearing his backlog. He heard the cases of forty women and ten men arrested outside New Irving Hall the night before, and then turned his attention to new defendants. Most were demonstrators, but some were butchers. Now in a decidedly irritable mood, Cornell was more than willing to hand out ten-dollar fines with impunity. He ordered the courtroom cleared, and even insisted that police clear the street outside the courthouse, where nearly a thousand had taken up positions. This was easier said than done, because in the course of the day sympathizers and relatives of prisoners unable to make bail kept coming; many denounced Cornell and the police in impromptu speeches. Officers made valiant efforts to repel the crowd, which swelled to about three thousand at one point, but at times it seemed a futile endeavor.7

Cornell found Minnie Ostlander of Orchard Street guilty of terrorizing the family of Abraham Schwartz. She and others had chased Mrs. Schwartz up the stairs of the tenement at 82 Norfolk in which she lived, demanding that she hand over a chicken they had seen her buy. Mrs. Schwartz was determined to stand her ground, but when the women threatened to wreck her flat, her husband handed the bird to Ostlander, who held her quarry high above her head and screamed with delight as she carried it down to the street, where she was promptly arrested. Schwartz swore to the judge that he had thought he was going to be killed. Ostlander was fined ten dollars.8

Twenty-seven-year-old Annie Sonnenschein, twenty-four-year-old Anna Karpf, and thirty-six-year-old Rosa Edelman were all assessed ten dollars for throwing kerosene on the floor and fixtures of Matthias Burnett’s butcher shop at 103 Rivington. Someone had then thrown a match and a small fire had broken out.

The widespread use of kerosene concerned the police and fire departments greatly. The meat shops, which were saturated with fat and grease, were located mostly on the ground floors of large, densely populated tenement buildings, where fire could threaten many lives. According to the Forward, within a half hour of the start of a fire on Monroe Street, it had spread among the tenement houses until ten o’clock, “when the entire Jewish quarter, from Cherry Street to Houston and from Grand Street Ferry to the Bowery was lit up by the brave striking balebostes.” Captain Walsh later called it one of the worst days of his police career.9

Some people received especially severe treatment from the judge, whose “ten dollar fine” refrain was compared by the Forward with tongue in cheek to a nigin—an improvised, repetitive Jewish religious melody. Ida Basucky of Forsyth Street, a large, muscular woman, was sentenced to three months in the workhouse for beating up Officer James J. Devine, a policeman trying to clear a path through a crowd in front of the Essex Market Court. The World described her as a “giantess” who “put a neck lock on Devine, back-heeled him, threw him down and fell on him.” Elsewhere, the Tribune made a reference to “Amazonian warfare.”10

Two important meetings took place on Friday afternoon. The first, called by Sarah Edelson and held at Monroe Palace, was to decide how to deal with kosher delicatessens. Their business had thrived over the past several days, and they had raised prices as butcher shops had closed down. Reasoning that, preserved or not, meat was meat, the women assembled voted to extend the boycott to the delicatessens. And sure enough, later in the day a mob of five hundred attacked Herman’s Restaurant on Allen Street. They enjoined a man who had ordered cured meat to send it back, and when he refused, someone snatched it from his table and several men pulled him out onto the sidewalk and beat him.11

Like the butchers, the delicatessen owners felt ill-used. The proprietor of an East Broadway café gave voice to what many were surely feeling:

Who is there looking after our interests? The Mayor doesn’t care; he rides home in his automobile. Jerome takes a vacation, the police beat our women and drag them to jail. Even in Russia we were not so badly treated. In my own province I have known the governor to compel the bakers to sell bread so the poor could buy. But here we have no one. Why, the price of meat and provisions has risen so that it makes the difference of $20 a week to me in this café. The people here lay it to the Low government. They will have to pay the piper.12

The second meeting that day involved Paulina Finkel, Clara Korn, and Caroline Schatzberg, the trio appointed at the New Irving Hall meeting the night before to call on Mayor Low. Although they were not permitted to see the mayor, they were granted an audience with his secretary, James B. Reynolds, that afternoon.

“The Christian butchers are buying and selling their meat at about the same price as formerly, and we do not see why the kosher butchers should try to raise their prices six and eight cents a pound,” forty-three-year-old Romanian-born Clara Korn asserted. “They say they have to pay 16 to 20 cents a pound for their meat. But we hear that the retailers are making a profit of four or five cents a pound, and we do not see why the poor should have to pay that.”13

“I think the blame rests with the shopkeepers, and too much censure cannot be given them,” Reynolds observed. “At the same time, when attempts are made to burn stores and officers are assaulted there can be no two ways of acting,” he warned.

The women had also come seeking a permit for a mass outdoor meeting and to ask the mayor to order the police not to molest them while it was going on. Reynolds referred them to police headquarters for both requests. When they were told there that no permit would be granted, they headed for Rutgers Street to call on District Attorney Jerome, but he was not at home.14

By the end of the day, Magistrate Cornell had fined ninety people, seventy of them women. Twenty-five of them, like Sarah Wasserman and Sarah Reich, convicted of assault, had no money to pay and were kept in jail. This left many small children with no one to care for them and, as a result, about two hundred husbands, brothers, and other male relatives of the women gathered outside the Essex Market Court to protest.

“Release the women!” several shouted as they attempted more than once to storm the jail’s gate, but under the direction of Captain Walsh, police from the Eldridge Street Station, nightsticks at the ready, managed to drive them away. One man, Isaac Weisberger, refused to move, asserting that as an American citizen he had the right to stay right where he was. The police had a different view of his rights, however, and he was taken into custody himself and charged with disorderly conduct.15

Some of the newspapers were getting impatient with the rioting. “The East Side demonstrations against the kosher butchers have gone too far,” the World asserted on its editorial page. “It is time cooler counsels prevailed. Public sympathy undoubtedly is with the poor who have been deprived of meat by the cruelly unfair advantage taken by these retail butchers of the Beef Trust’s extortion. They have made the situation much harder for the East Side people than there was any need of its being. But the public peace requires that such disturbances as have been taking place shall be stopped.”

Long on platitudes, however, the paper was short on practical recommendations. “The proper remedy lies with the more intelligent citizens in the communities affected,” the editorial went on. “The World urges them, as the leaders of the people, to give calm counsel, to point out that there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by rioting, and so persuade these unfortunate people out of the passionate mood which, though they are under great provocation, they must restrain.”16

The New York Sun expressed sympathy for the butchers. “The kosher butchers against whom the mob rose are poor men, whose characteristic industry gains but a scanty living for them,” the paper opined. “Because they did not carry on their business precisely as their neighbors liked, the latter broke into their stores, destroyed their stock and defied the police.”

“The butchers are entitled to the full protection of the law, and insofar as they need that, the undivided sympathy of the entire city,” it continued. “And the rioters should be taught as impressively as possible that one of the first rules of law is that people mustn’t interfere with other people’s business.”17

To the extent that both papers were criticizing the lawlessness of the past two days, they certainly made a valid point. The violence wasn’t doing the women’s cause any good. But how did the World propose “the more intelligent citizens” solve the problem of unaffordable meat? What did the Sun suggest the women who were destroying butchers’ stock do instead? Neither paper offered any practical suggestions likely to break the impasse.

The Forward, by contrast, made no mention of rioting in its coverage, and placed no blame on the women, whose struggle it found heroic. It depicted their picketing as friendly and well organized. The Forward saw only women speaking pleasantly to butchers and asking them to be true to the great strike, and, the paper assured readers, when they remonstrated with would-be meat purchasers, “99 out of 100 stopped and obeyed with enthusiasm and stood with the strike.” In the Forward’s world, there were apparently no broken windows.18

The paper, however, saw a bigger enemy than the local butchers. In a May 17 opinion piece, editor Abraham Cahan reminded readers that the enemy was not so much their retail butchers as the “Hebrews with shaved beards.” By this he meant the German “millionaire Jews” who “themselves eat treyf,” and he demanded to know why “they are so pious at the expense of poor tailors’ pockets.”

But Cahan went even further. He suggested that the shoychtim and mashgichim appointed by Rabbi Jacob Joseph—the ones who were supposed to bring order and integrity to the kosher meat market—were in fact working corruptly in cahoots with the German-Jewish slaughterhouse operators to profiteer off the sale of kosher meat. He didn’t blame Rabbi Joseph for this; a truly pious man, the good rabbi had suffered a series of strokes, the last of which, two years earlier, had rendered him an invalid. He could barely move and could no longer work. It was, rather, the people operating in his name who were to blame.

Cahan accused them of affixing “all kinds of crooked karobkes” to their meat, and noted that Rabbi Joseph’s son, parading around town in a carriage, continued to collect fees in his father’s name. He implied it was all a conspiracy to skim money by selling unkosher meat as kosher and driving good Jews to eat treyf unknowingly, “all in the name of their true enslavement to the Trust.” He did not, however, present evidence for his case.

“One thing we know,” Cahan concluded, “is that the poor people who want true kosher meat can and should do away with this harmful union of the Trust and the rabbis who serve it so faithfully.” And they should take aim at the rabbis. “Against these true servants of the Trust, one must strike,” he wrote.19

The unrest wound down quickly that Friday after sundown, which occurred just after seven. It was the onset of the Jewish Sabbath, widely observed among the East Side’s Orthodox Jews. But what would come next? If the butchers reopened on Saturday night or Monday morning and maintained their high prices, more trouble was a foregone conclusion. Many of those whose shops had not been raided were now sitting on surplus stock with which they would have been happy to part at discounted prices. But more than seventy-two hours would have passed since the meat was slaughtered, which would mean it could no longer be kosher.

The arrival of the Sabbath brought peace of a sort to the East Side. But, as the New York Press warned readers, “neither the police nor the people themselves looked on the interlude as more than a brief truce.”20