15 Patience Will Win the Battle

Despite nascent efforts at mediation, the violence continued unabated on Thursday, May 22.

Barnett Azwolonsky braved the fury of his neighbors and opened his Norfolk Street butcher shop in the early evening. When a mob of seven hundred massed in front of his store and ordered him to close, he resisted, unleashing an assault on his property. One woman threw a can of ashes into the shop as others hurled objects through his windows. A poor fish peddler perched nearby watched in horror as his wagon was looted of its stock for use as projectiles. Police were pelted with fish, ash, stones, and garbage and responded with their billy clubs. As Azwolonsky cowered in fear, several boys and girls who had been egged on by the rioters were injured. In the end, police arrested four people.1

That same day, a female-led mob of one thousand marched through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, destroyed half a dozen butcher shops, and attacked several of their customers. Confiscated meat was carried aloft in triumph at the ends of sharpened sticks. Some was not only doused in kerosene, but also set aflame. The crowd set fires in some of the stores they raided, though these were rapidly extinguished by their owners.2

Williamsburg was also the setting for what might have been the most barbarous police attack of the entire protest. It occurred on the corner of Moore Street and Manhattan Avenue, where Abram Krieger had set up his pushcart. Nearby, a gathering of Jews were ruminating about the meat strike but not bothering anyone. Several policemen arrived on the scene and, without warning, fell on the Jews and beat them with billy clubs. The crowd quickly dispersed in all directions, but Krieger did not. He refused to abandon his pushcart and was struck on the head until he bled. His pregnant wife, who was nearby, screamed. But when she approached her wounded husband to aid him, a policeman beat her unconscious. She was finally taken by ambulance to St. Catherine’s Hospital, her little children running after the vehicle, screaming and crying.

The Yidishes Tageblatt was scandalized. “Even a stone would be moved” by such a story, it asserted. “Brooklyn Jews will not be silent about those ‘thugs in blue jackets,’” it predicted, and it demanded the arrest of the officer involved.3

In Boston, the struggle moved from the North End to the West End. In the morning, about three hundred people attacked Isaac Leibman’s Brighton Street meat store, pelting it with rotten fruit, breaking his windows, and assaulting one of his customers. Later, a mob went after Samuel Solomont & Son, the major kosher meat wholesaler, which had brazenly and opportunistically opened three retail stores of its own that morning. Here, however, it was marauding butchers, furious at this new competition organized by their former supplier, who led the charge. A mob of several hundred tried to prevent customers from patronizing the stores, and there was much yelling and smashing of windows. Showers of bricks and eggs greeted the police as they attempted to intervene. Several officers were injured: two lost teeth in the fracas, and one had his thumb badly bitten. Fifteen arrests were made in the course of the day.

Samuel Solomont then went to court seeking an injunction enjoining a list of forty-four butchers—presumably his ex-clients—against threatening or intimidating his customers. He alleged that the butchers were conspiring to destroy his business, which amounted to somewhere between $150,000 and $175,000 ($4.4 million to $5.1 million today) annually. He managed to secure a police guard for his premises, and continued to do business with those who dared buy from him.4

Hyman Pike, president of the Boston Hebrew Butchers’ Association, laid out his colleagues’ grievances in a statement to the Boston Globe. He maintained that his association was amenable to appointing a committee to confer with local rabbis and a delegation of wholesalers other than Solomont & Son. He added that the retailers hoped to resume business on Saturday night, selling kosher beef from a different supplier.5

And that is exactly what happened on Saturday, May 24. The kosher butcher shops opened that evening. Prices were all over the map; depending on where they went, customers could buy beef at twelve, sixteen, or seventeen cents a pound. Solomont & Son, determined to win back business, charged only fourteen cents for chuck steak, a middle-grade cut. Although there was a general understanding that the battle was not yet over, meat-starved Bostonian Jews rushed to make their purchases, grateful to enjoy the rewards of the truce as long as it lasted.6

Back in Brooklyn, not even the arrival of the Sabbath stopped the rioting. A wholesale butcher in Brownsville named George Davis, the only kosher meat dealer in the borough who remained open, was injured, as were two policemen who were escorting him to shul. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle counted fifteen hundred people involved in the incident, which resulted from a meeting the night before in which Davis was criticized for refusing to close. He was saved from more serious injury by police reserves wielding clubs, but one officer was hit in the head with a brick and had his uniform torn off of him.7

The uptown Jews were getting fed up with the constant stream of embarrassing news, which they felt reflected badly on them. That day, the New York Times, under the editorial control of Adolph Ochs, of German-Jewish extraction, ran a vicious and condescending editorial critical of the events in Williamsburg. In it, the paper justifiably decried the recent violence, but it also made clear exactly what it thought of the Russian Jewish rabble in its city:

The class of people, especially the women, who are engaged in this matter have many elements of a dangerous class. They are very ignorant. They mostly speak a foreign language. They do not understand the duties or the rights of Americans. They have no inbred or acquired respect for law and order as the basis of the life of the society into which they have come. They have known authority mainly as wielded despotically, and as something to be submitted to only under compulsion, not as the source of their own safety. Resistance to authority does not seem to them necessarily wrong, only risky, and if it ceases to be risky, the restraint it can have on their passions is very small; practically it disappears.

The more easy it is to explain or even to excuse their lawlessness on account of their utter ignorance, the more important it is to make them feel the immediate and severe imposition of the proper consequences of their lawlessness. The instant they take the law into their own hands, the instant they begin the destruction of property and assail peaceable citizens and the police, they should be handled in a way that they can understand and cannot forget.

It will not do to have a swarm of ignorant and infuriated women going about any part of the city with petroleum destroying goods and trying to set fire to the shops of those against whom they are angry. The attempted incendiarism could not happen in an American crowd at all. These rioters were plainly desperate. They meant to defy the police and were ready for severe treatment. They did not get treatment nearly severe enough, and they are therefore far more dangerous than they were before.8

The Times couldn’t have been more wrong, or more prejudiced, in suggesting that “an American crowd” would not behave in this way. Food riots had occurred in New York before, notably in 1837 when prices were high. Merchants were denounced and two hundred barrels of flour and a thousand bushels of wheat were dumped in the streets, stones were thrown, and windows were broken. Although the paper was within its rights to call the women to account for illegal and violent actions, there was no mistaking the disdain it felt across the board for the immigrant matrons. Nor was there any sign of empathy for the desperation that had driven these otherwise peaceable and law-abiding people to violence.9

But at least the Times was willing to tolerate their presence in Manhattan. In an editorial that purported to be sympathetic to the East Side Jews, the Jewish Messenger more or less suggested exiling them:

The agitation in certain sections of New York, Brooklyn, Newark, and Boston against the local kosher butchers has quieted down. Much sympathy has been felt for the thousands of working people who, in their frantic excitement at the rising prices for meat, came in conflict with the police, and had in some cases to pay the penalty of the law. The incident is unpleasant to chronicle, and illustrates rather painfully the difficult problem which must be solved in overcrowded sections of New York and elsewhere.

There should be no delay in applying the policy of dispersion and distribution which has already been adopted by the Hirsch Fund. There is a danger in local congestion with its hysterical manifestations from time to time, and of this our leaders are well aware.10

“Dispersion and distribution” was a reference to plans that had been discussed for two decades by establishment Jews who felt their own status in America threatened by the antics of their unenlightened and seemingly unassimilable Eastern European kin. The paternalistic schemes aimed at relocating them elsewhere in the country, where their presence might not be so obvious and embarrassing. The “Hirsch Fund” was a foundation established in 1891 by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German Jewish financier and philanthropist, to fund agricultural colonies, such as those in southern New Jersey, and trade schools aimed at making farmers and craftsmen of the new immigrants.11

The Messenger, of course, never made clear how relocating the East Siders to farms in New Jersey or making plumbers and carpenters of them would lower the price of kosher meat. It just wanted them banished.

On the East Side, the end of Shabbos shepherded a renewal of the unrest. At precisely sunset, when the rest day was over, crowds began to assemble in front of three shops on Orchard and Rivington Streets owned by the United Beef Company, one of the larger retail concerns, that had stubbornly attempted to open. This appears to have been a targeted effort. They immediately began to drive away customers, but then they attacked the shops. Windows were broken and managers threatened, but the effort was isolated and short-lived, as police were able to move in quickly and scatter the crowds.12

Also on Saturday night, at a closed-door meeting that included Carolyn Schatzberg, Paulina Finkel, Sarah Edelson, and some fifty retail butchers who were not Butchers’ Association members, an effort at mediation was made by Dr. Blaustein. A proposal was floated by the butchers to permit rabbis to decide whom to permit to resume business. The meeting lasted until midnight and apparently led to an important change in policy. The next day, the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat issued a circular. It read:

Women! Victory is near! Order and persistence will win the struggle against the butchers. Do not buy any meat. All the organizations fighting against the Jewish Meat Trust have now united under the name of the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat. Brave and honest men are now aiding the women. The conference has decided to help those butchers who will sell cheap kosher meat under the supervision of the rabbis and the conference. The Trust must be downed. For the present, do not buy any meat. Patience will win the battle. Seek the sympathy for your cause of old and young.13

The announcement was signed by Dr. Blaustein, Mrs. Schatzberg, two rabbis, and the Committee of Fifty. The Allied Conference would permit independent butchers—that is, not members of the Butchers’ Association—to reopen if they agreed to sell meat at a reduced price, and rabbis would furnish them with a certificate to hang in their windows that would signal customers that the boycott did not apply to them. Appealing to rabbis to adjudicate the issue was a throwback to the old world, when the chief rabbi of a given community had the final word over matters affecting the kohol.14

That, of course, did not mean the end of the strike, which was still active against most of the butchers. The next day, the Allied Conference released a longer statement. It was, in the main, a response to critics:

The spontaneity of this movement for cheaper meat is the best proof that the grievances of the poorer classes on the East Side against the Jewish Kosher Beef Trust are very real and serious. Prices have been raised six and seven cents a pound. It is conservatively estimated that 50,000 Jewish families have been abstaining from the use of meat for over two weeks. The people feel very justly that they are being ground down, not only by the Beef Trust of the country, but also by the Jewish Beef Trust of the city.

The conference wishes to state most emphatically that the leaders of the movement do not countenance any violence, but it desires to state also that the sensational reports of violence committed on the East Side are a libel upon the good name of a peaceful, honest and industrious section of the city.

The conference further calls the attention of the general public to the fact that the Jewish press has from the very beginning and continuously headed the news columns of the strike with injunctions to maintain order. The people of the East Side feel that the unwarranted summary action of the police in refusing to allow the people to assemble peaceably under police protection is tantamount to an attack on the right of free speech. It is to be admitted, however, that such unprecedented action was due to the sensational reports of the newspapers. The conference wishes to enlist the sympathy of the public at large in this cause.15

The statement was unlike earlier declarations by the Ladies’ Association, probably reflecting the addition of men of affairs to the movement’s leadership. It was notable, first of all, in that it drew a clear distinction between the national Beef Trust and the local merchants, whom it branded the “Jewish Beef Trust.” It renounced violence and maintained that responsible voices in the Jewish community had always done this, and it blamed the press—but not the Jewish press—for portraying them in an unfavorable light. It also revisited the disapproval of the demonstration permit, framing it as a denial of free speech, a criticism that had not been articulated in the past.16

On Monday morning, May 26, about fifty kosher butchers on the Lower East Side reopened for business. These, however, were not independent butchers who had agreed to roll back prices. Rather, they were members Joseph Goldman’s East Side Hebrew Retail Butchers’ Kosher Guarantee and Benevolent Association who had opened in a pre-emptive move to forestall competition from independent butchers who, they feared, would soon have certificates from the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat. They had taken delivery of meat from wholesalers the night before and obtained promises of police protection from Commissioner Partridge. True to the stated principles of the Allied Conference, there was almost no violence against them.17

But that didn’t mean they sold much meat.

Instead of throwing rocks, members of the Ladies’ Association, which continued to exist as a constituent organization of the Allied Conference, tried a new tactic. Their women went from shop to shop and asked at each one to examine the various grades of beef offered for sale. After it was brought out of the ice box, they would handle it as much as possible and expose it to air in an effort to spoil its fresh appearance. This accomplished, they left each store without making any purchases.

The decision by the Allied Conference to appeal to rabbis to decide whom to permit to resume business brought Orthodox congregations, some of which had kept their distance until now, squarely into the alliance, and gave them considerable latitude within it. Control by socialists and unions of an organization whose goal they saw as essentially a religious one had never sat well with them. And the quality problem—that of butchers selling nonkosher meat as kosher—which was a huge issue, had never been adequately addressed. Now, at a meeting at 412 Grand Street on May 27 attended by more than two hundred Orthodox Jews representing dozens of congregations, the boycott “took on a new character,” according to the Tageblatt, which now jubilantly declared it a “truly kosher movement” led by genuinely pious Jews.

In something of an overstatement, the Tageblatt also crowed that “all honorable Jews have now aligned themselves with the struggle,” and insisted that “socialists, anarchists and plain free thinkers had agreed to transfer the whole movement into the hands of the pious Jews, because the great mass of Jews who want kosher meat should not be able to have any excuse that non-pious Jews are leading the movement.”

If the socialists were actually happy with the ascendance of the Orthodox, however, nobody told the Arbeiter Zeitung, their newspaper. The paper didn’t see why the issue had suddenly become the “kosherness” of the meat when it had always been its cost, and it believed the struggle had been co-opted. It served socialist purposes far more when it was portrayed as a battle between common people and nefarious capitalist enterprises, and, like Abraham Cahan, it believed some of the “holy rabbis” to be tied up with corporate interests and lax in their enforcement of the rules of kashrus. In short, the socialist paper was deeply skeptical of the new arrangement.

“It will be no surprise if the whole agitation is used in the interest of certain businesses or companies, if not the Meat Trust itself,” it wrote acidly.18

But even with the Orthodox now in the driver’s seat, there were apparently no defections on the part of the other organizations, socialists included. Dr. Blaustein gave the gavel to Austrian-born Rabbi Adolph Spiegel, the widely respected head of Congregation Shaare Zedek, who was elected chairman, though Blaustein said he intended to remain active.

The Tageblatt revealed that more butchers were poised to negotiate with the Allied Conference with the goal of selling cheaper meat. The New York Sun reported that about 150 of them, some of them defectors from Goldman’s association, had signed an agreement to sell meat at thirteen cents a pound, and had applied to the Allied Conference for certificates. And the Daily People proclaimed, in a headline, that “Butchers Resume. Kosher Meat War Appears To Be Over.”19

But it was not quite that simple.