14 Vein Him as He Veins His Meat

Although the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association had not yet achieved its ultimate objective of lowering the price of meat, it had accomplished a great deal. Through a variety of tactics, women who had never organized anything remotely like it in the past had managed to mobilize the East Side Jewish community, not to mention Jews in surrounding areas, in pursuit of a common cause. And they had shut down the butcher shops, which they saw as a prerequisite to attaining their goal.

With so much bad blood among factions within the Jewish community, however, and now with a public split within the association itself and no solution in sight, it was probably only a question of time before men would attempt not only to participate, but to assume some leadership over the movement. In an age when women were expected to be homemakers rather than participate in public life, many men felt their assistance was vital to the cause.

They didn’t relish the spectacle of their wives and daughters being beaten with nightsticks by the police in the streets, and they knew the clashes weren’t doing anything to generate sympathy for the boycotters. Then, too, most of the association’s potential allies in the struggle were institutions that were better organized and better positioned to undertake the fight—all of them run by males.

The first of the efforts by men to assert some control occurred on Tuesday, May 20, when the United Hebrew Community of New York (UHC) appealed to the newly established Ladies’ Association to join them in negotiating first with the retail butchers, and then with the slaughterhouses. The UHC had been formed only a year before on a model somewhat different from that of most of the landsmanshaftn—the Jewish mutual aid societies. The latter had been founded by and for people who originated in a specific region or town in Russia or Eastern Europe. The UHC offered similar services, but without regard to a person’s place of origin, and provided free religious services as well. In that sense, it served the entire Jewish community.

A meeting between the officers of the Ladies’ Association and those of the UHC was held at the latter’s headquarters at 215 E. Broadway. Carolyn Schatzberg and a few other women spent several hours there. Afterward, the UHC Secretary, a Mr. M. Malkowitz, spoke with the Daily People, the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party.

Our plan is to get the butcher shops open the first thing, without regard to the price of meat. The Hebrew people cannot live long without meat, and we are already tired of fish, eggs, milk and vegetables. I want meat and so do they all. This rioting does no good whatever and must be stopped. If we can get the women to permit the butchers to sell meat, then our committee and the women’s committee will go together to the wholesale butchers and try to secure a reduction in prices, or a compromise of some kind. Of course it will be hard to keep the women quiet when the shops open, but the thing’s got to be done some way.1

The problem, of course, was that to permit the butchers to reopen without any stipulation as to price would have been to fly in the face of everything the women had stood for since the movement had begun. Then, too, however much the women blamed their butchers for the price rises, the retailers were, at best, responsible for only a portion of them. There was no particular reason to believe that the UHC and the Ladies’ Association, even if they joined forces with the retailers, would be any more persuasive with the wholesalers—who still insisted that the problem stemmed from the limited supply of cattle—than the butchers alone had been. And it made little sense to give up the leverage a boycott afforded them in advance of such negotiations.

The upshot of the gathering was ultimately no upshot at all. A committee of ten headed by Dr. Henry Pereira Mendes, the well-regarded rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel, was charged with meeting with the wholesalers to determine whether the retail butchers were charging fairly for their meat. But nothing ever came of his initiative.2

That night, as fifty police officers looked on, several thousand people, mostly women, assembled in Rutgers Park and loudly cheered a dozen or so socialist speakers who denounced not only the Beef Trust, but “all corporations, capitalists and oppressors of the working classes and the poor.” The meeting had been organized by the Social Democratic Club, headquartered on East Fourth Street. The enthusiasm worried the police captain, who summoned another hundred reserves, but there was no rioting.3

The next morning, however, the New York Sun reported that an unnamed socialist newspaper had announced that the Ladies’ Association had “joined hands with the socialists,” undoubtedly a reference to the Rutgers Park meeting. But there is no evidence that suggests any formal involvement by the Ladies’ Association; it was likely no more than an opportunistic effort by the Social Democratic Club to use the meat boycott to build support for its anticapitalist cause.

Caroline Schatzberg smelled a rat. “The Beef Trust has had this printed so that people will imagine we are the same as socialists and will withdraw their support,” she told the Sun.

An editorial from the socialist Daily People does survive for that day, but it suggests nothing about cooperation with the Ladies’ Association. On the contrary; its portrayal of the group was quite contemptuous:

The anti-open-Kosher-shopites on the east side have taken to fighting among themselves over the leadership of the Amazonian band that has chased those who defied their mandate, and have recklessly thrown liver to the four quarters of the globe, and have scattered mutton chops about as though they were mere gold. Mrs. Sarah Edelson started the riots, and decided that she should be queen of the Society for the Making of Hamburger Steak out of Any Kosher Butcher that Refused to Shut Up. Her ambition was defeated, so Mrs. Edelson, who weighs 250 pounds, and her little son, Isaac Edelson, who weighs 400 pounds, tried to enforce their demands.

The result was a fight, but right, backed up by 650 pounds of Edelson, was on the point of winning when the police interfered. No arrests were made and finally the matter was compromised by making Mrs. Edelson joint president of the lengthy society above mentioned.4

For the record, the author of this satirical piece got several of the details quite wrong. Sarah Edelson had pointedly rejected the role of joint president. The son in question was known not as Isaac, but as “Big Jake,” and the police never interfered with the meeting.

The Sun got something else wrong. It asserted that the Ladies’ Association had denounced Joseph Barondess for passing himself off as a leader of their movement and voted to refuse him and his followers admittance to future meetings. There is no evidence for this. On the contrary; Barondess was instrumental in securing police permission for a conference of social, fraternal, mutual aid, and religious society leaders, two per organization, to meet with the Ladies’ Association and seek a way to end the trouble, and he remained quite active in the effort. Whoever was lying to the Sun was no friend of the Ladies’ Association or their boycott.5

Harlem saw disturbances on May 20, while the East Side remained relatively calm. Riots also broke out in Newark, New Jersey. Three butcher shops along Prince Street, the major Jewish marketplace, were raided and damaged by Jewish women; one was completely stripped of its inventory. The impetus appears to have been two mass meetings attended by about a thousand people the night before. A committee of forty women was appointed to continue agitating for lower meat prices, and the Newark police assigned a special detail to Prince Street.6

But it was Boston that boiled over.

At first, the conflict was just among the kosher retail butchers. For eight hours that afternoon and evening, a mob of about a hundred who had formed an alliance against Samuel Solomont & Son, the city’s principal kosher meat wholesaler, besieged the stores of several noncooperating butchers, pelting them with eggs, vegetables, and stones. A few gunshots were also fired in the air. Solomont had recently jacked up prices, and the alliance was intent on bypassing the firm entirely and buying directly from its supplier, the New England Dressed Meat Company.

But the New England Company, which was in fact an arm of the Beef Trust, refused to sell directly, prompting the butchers to shut down to apply pressure, and the Jewish community supported them. When three butchers, including Julius Levine of Morton Street in the North End and Mendel Egyes of Spring Street in the West End, refused to agree and went on selling Solomont meat, the other butchers attempted to shut them down, and pretty soon an army of Jewish women joined the fray.

“Vein him as he veins his meat,” one of them cried as meat was thrown into the street and Levine was assaulted. But the police intervened and he agreed to close down. Egyes, however, did not, and his store was attacked three times. On one occasion, he and his son brandished knives, but the shop was largely destroyed. Two men were injured, and an agent of the New England Dressed Meat Company was bombarded with eggs, as were Samuel Solomont and his family. Things did not calm down until 10:00 p.m., and disturbances resumed the following day.7

Back in Manhattan, committees from the East Side Butchers’ Association and a newly formed Uptown Butchers’ Association called on the United Dressed Beef Company, the largest of the kosher slaughterhouses, on Wednesday, May 21, as several hundred of their members waited outside, hoping for some sort of breakthrough. No details of the discussions were released, but no agreement was reached.8

In the meantime, Sarah Edelson, who had vowed to work apart from the Ladies’ Association, had booked a hall on Grand Street for a meeting of her rump group. She was, however, prohibited from entering it by police who insisted it was not big enough for the gathering. The conference of community groups Barondess organized, however, did take place that night. It was held at the Educational Alliance in the same hall in which the women had been cursed by Rabbi Radin on Saturday.

Dr. David Blaustein, superintendent of the Alliance, was asked to chair the meeting. Born near Vilna, Blaustein had received a Jewish education and trained as a rabbi in Russia and Prussia before emigrating to America in 1886. He initially settled in Boston and studied at Harvard and Brown Universities before accepting an offer from the Educational Alliance to come to New York. His was a life dedicated to public service, and as an immigrant himself, he had tremendous empathy for the struggles of the East Side Jews and often took up their mantle.9

Admission was by ticket only, which meant that six hundred people representing three hundred organizations were permitted in, but several hundred others who showed up were not. The latter group loitered in front of the Alliance building all evening as fifty policemen kept order. There was a brief disturbance when a butcher entered the hall; had it not been for the police, he might have been injured, but he was escorted safely out of the auditorium.10

If Blaustein’s assumption of the chairmanship of the meeting was not, in itself, strong enough indication that the women were no longer in full charge of the movement they had launched, he made that fact crystal clear in his remarks. After threatening to withdraw his delegates unless the women who were present stopped “chattering,” he warned that they should henceforth let the men do the fighting for them, lest they be blamed in the event of defeat.11

Convening a forum of such a wide range of organizations with their divergent perspectives was not without its own problems, but Blaustein was equal to the task of running such a meeting. To avoid chaos, he announced that in addition to Barondess and Caroline Schatzberg, he would limit speeches to delegates from the Jewish newspapers, since they were fairly representative of the various currents within the Jewish community. It took until about 11:00 p.m. for all to be heard.

At that point, it was agreed that Blaustein would appoint a committee of ten—three from the Ladies’ Association, six from other organizations, and, presumably, himself—and that they, in turn, would elect forty more. All would work together as a Committee of Fifty that would effect “a consolidation of forces.” These would be delegates to a general convention of a brand-new, permanent organization to be known as the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat. Blaustein would lead the new organization, at least temporarily, and Carolyn Schatzberg, a Mrs. Breckstein, and Sarah Edelson were all named vice presidents.12

One of the most important tasks facing the new group was to get control of money. The Ladies’ Association, by all accounts, had been quite responsible about using the funds it collected to pay bail and fines for those who had been arrested, and to compensate many whose meat had been confiscated. But Sarah Edelson had refused to hand over the cash in her possession once she split with the Ladies’ Association. To make matters worse, other individuals had been out on the streets collecting for the boycott, and it wasn’t at all clear where that money was going. The Allied Conference aimed henceforth to represent all the Jewish people, and would put the word out that the Jewish newspapers would serve as its only official channels for donations.

Both the Yidishes Tageblatt and the Forward saw the meeting, which lasted past midnight, as a watershed. The Tageblatt praised the women for taking the movement as far as they had, but saw “dark intent” on the part of “wheeler-dealers” who had begun to manipulate it for their own purposes. Without specifying exactly who it was talking about, the paper decried people who, “like lizards out of the mud” had attempted to negotiate directly with the wholesalers for resolution that would accrue to their own benefit. Insisting that there be no more “kunkel munkel biznes”—that is, monkey business—the paper was confident that the meat strike would best be handled by “a mighty organization” that would serve as “one official power for the whole city, with representation by all classes and all people.”

The Tageblatt asserted that the movement was being taken over by the established Jewish organizations with the assent and even enthusiastic support of the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association. It quoted someone in the association as saying that the organization had decided that “we should not take the whole responsibility onto ourselves.” Indeed, if the women had resentments or reservations about their struggle being appropriated by men, there is no evidence of it. They likely accepted it without protest, since women taking the lead was something quite novel, and since men ran everything else on the East Side. And it probably appeared to them the best way of building a coalition to address meat prices.13

The Forward hailed the meeting as the “most important day in the great war between the Jewish Trust and the Jewish people.” It marveled at the diversity of the gathering—Orthodox Jews, freethinkers, socialists, and democrats—all united in a common cause.

In an editorial, publisher Abraham Cahan argued that it was in the interest of the labor unions to support the strike even though they included many non-Jews and Jews who did not keep kosher homes. “The question is whether we should allow a Trust to suck the blood of the workers,” he wrote. The payoff might come later. “If someday you fight a big battle for better wages or shorter hours in your trade, you can hope for the support of the women,” he wrote.

He exhorted freethinkers, who also did not keep kosher homes, to play their part in helping those who did “not to get fleeced,” adding that “everybody who has a warm corner in his soul and is ready to be called when there are struggles against bloodsuckers must heed the call of these brave women.” Here he was referring not only to the kosher butchers, but to religious authorities who had not supported the strike, often out of interested motives. “When it comes to the question of kosher meat,” he pointed out, freethinkers “are much more honorable than God’s thieves.”

Those religious authorities were probably the same people whose kunkel munkel biznes the Tageblatt was complaining about. Cahan was likely referring to the shoychtim and mashgichim on the payrolls of the Trust companies. Their fortunes rose and fell not with the welfare of the common people, but with that of the slaughterhouses.

The joining together in a common effort was something to be celebrated. The individual congregations, unions, and fraternal organizations had been “making Shabbos for themselves,” Cahan wrote, using a Yiddish expression connoting not celebration of the Sabbath per se, but rather an unfortunate and wasteful lack of cooperation and unity.

Making Shabbos for themselves had been a success, but it had gotten the women only so far. Perhaps making it together with others would advance them to their goal.14