3

A Weighty
Decision

More than three thousand irate tenants, many of whom had been notified that their rent would be raised on May 1, 1919, attended the Brooklyn Tenants League meeting at which Socialist Assemblyman Charles Solomon declared, “If everything else fails, why there is nothing left for us to do but strike.” Before the meeting adjourned, they adopted a resolution, which was sent to Governor Smith, saying that unless state officials did something to curb rent profiteering, thousands of tenants would be forced to go on strike. As the tenants well knew, it was one thing to adopt a resolution and quite another to carry it out. If they withheld the rent, the landlords would not take it lying down. It was conceivable that they would blacklist the striking tenants, hire thugs to intimidate them, and out of spite raise the rent even higher. It was also likely that they would deny the strikers heat and hot water and cut back on maintenance and repairs. And it was all but certain that they would take steps to evict the strikers and their families by bringing summary proceedings, which would lead to what a spokesman for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor called “the dreaded dispossess notice.” For most landlords the logic of eviction was unassailable. The sooner they got rid of the striking tenants, the sooner they could fill the apartments with paying tenants. The eviction of the strikers would also send a message to other tenants who were thinking of joining the strike. At stake was more than money, said one landlord who was trying to evict the organizer of a rent strike in his tenement house on the Lower East Side: “It was not the 50 cents I wanted, it was the principle of the thing.”1

The fear of eviction ordinarily deterred even the most irate tenants from going on a rent strike. Indeed, at just about every stage of the process the tenants had good reason to be frightened. Once the landlord started summary proceedings, the tenant was caught up in the arcane world of notices, precepts, orders, and warrants that was incomprehensible to almost anyone but a lawyer. What the many first- and second-generation immigrants who could not read English made of these documents is hard to imagine. If the judge issued a precept, the tenant was required to appear in court and, with scores or even hundreds of strangers looking on, explain to a formidable figure in a black robe why he should not be evicted. The tenant was at the mercy not only of the judge, but in some cases of an interpreter too. Intimidated by the legal process, many men were “scared to death” and many women left “speechless,” said a leader of the Fair Play Rent Association. Unless the tenant could show cause why he should not be evicted, which was highly unlikely, the judge would have to order him to vacate the premises. He might grant a short stay during which the tenant could look for another place to live. But when it expired, the judge would have to issue a warrant authorizing a city marshal to remove the tenant, his family, and their belongings and turn the apartment over to the landlord.2

When a tenant was unable to find another apartment before the warrant was issued, what happened in the street was even more frightening than what went on in the courthouse. As he and his family (and often their friends and neighbors) looked on, a marshal and a team of schleppers descended on their home. If they had trouble getting in, they broke the locks and battered down the doors and sometimes climbed up the fire escape and through the windows. The schleppers carried out tables, chairs, pots, pans, toys, trinkets, clothing, even the beds in which the tenants slept. They piled the stuff on the sidewalks, sometimes with so little care that furniture was smashed and glasses and dishes broken. Some tenants were able to store their stuff in a warehouse or a neighbor's apartment. Others had to leave it on the sidewalk. In one case the neighbors took up a collection so that an evicted tenant could buy tarpaulin to protect his belongings from the rain. In another case, where a woman who was evicted became so hysterical that she had to be hospitalized, the Mother Superior of the St. John's Orphan Asylum stored the belongings in the asylum basement—though only after they had been on the sidewalk for two days. “The most heartbreaking thing you can imagine is the sight of a poor family's furniture piled on the sidewalk,” said Judge John R. Davies, whose Harlem courthouse was the scene of more than its fair share of summary proceedings. “I know of no greater misfortune that could befall a tenant short of personal injury.”³

At least as heartbreaking—and in cold weather even more so—was the sight of the tenants and their families huddled on the sidewalk alongside their furniture and other household goods. In the spring and fall of 1919, the Call reported, this sight was all too common. Writing of an eviction in East Harlem, it noted that all day long women and children hung out on the street with little food and no way to stay warm. A year or so later Marie Ganz recalled the pathetic sight of a poor woman who had just been evicted standing beside “the wreck of her home.” “Clinging to her dress were three frightened little children, the largest surely not more than six years old.” Many of these tenants had no place to go. Sometimes kindly neighbors offered to take in young children (and, less often, older children and adults). But doubling up, as it was known, was stressful. It was also risky. More than one landlord threatened to evict any tenant who provided shelter to a homeless neighbor. Since the courts were likely to evict tenants on nothing more than the landlord's word that they were undesirable, this was no idle threat. Other times the tenants sought shelter in churches, temples, and other quasi-public facilities. But as the Call pointed out, “churches were poor substitutes for homes.” So were armories. What the “suffering tenants of this city” want is not to sleep in “army cots in churches, fly filled tents and army barracks,” said Socialist assemblyman Abraham I. Shiplacoff. They want “to sleep in their own homes.”4 Given New York's acute housing shortage, many tenants had reason to be afraid that they would be homeless if they were evicted.

They also had reason to be afraid that they would be unemployed. On the Lower East Side and in other immigrant neighborhoods, thousands of families worked in their homes. As Jacob Riis wrote in 1890, their homes were their workshops. “You are made fully aware of it before you have traveled the length of a single block in any of these [Lower] East Side streets, by the whir of a thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand.” Besides sewing clothes, the tenants rolled cigars and made artificial flowers. On the Lower East Side it was common to see children carrying boxes of raw materials from the contractors to their homes. Some tenants also did the laundry of the well-to-do. (“Monday was laundry day,” writes historian Elizabeth Ewen, “and the entire household was turned upside down; the clothes were washed in big tubs filled with water boiled on the stove, then put out to dry on the famous clotheslines of the Lower East Side.”) Working in the tenements enabled immigrant women, especially Jewish and Italian women, to supplement the household's irregular income without leaving home—but only as long as they had a home to work in.⁵

It was very hard when a worker went on strike and lost his job. It was especially hard in the case of the many working people who were barely able to make ends meet when they were employed. But when a tenant withheld his rent and lost his home, it was not just hard. It was humiliating. Under ordinary circumstances a worker was fired at his factory, shop, or office, usually in private and with others in the same boat. But a tenant was evicted at his home and in public, in front of his wife and children, his friends and neighbors. An eviction revealed that the tenant could not provide his family a roof over their heads and could not prevent strangers from barging into their home and removing their worldly goods. Piled on the sidewalk, the threadbare furniture, tattered clothes, and long-used utensils were exposed to public view. Items that were once a source of pride were now an embarrassment. For all these reasons tenants saw eviction as a terrible hardship, one to which they were extremely reluctant to subject their family. As a World War I veteran wrote Governor Smith, if worse came to worst, “I can go back to the shelter of a tent, and brave the cold winds and storms of the winter.” But women and children could not be expected to live that way.⁶

Landlords had some compassion for tenants who were unable to pay the rent through no fault of their own—who, for example, got sick or lost a job. But for tenants who refused to pay on the grounds that the rent was too high, they had no compassion. Hence it was highly likely that the landlords would try to evict these tenants. And given that the tenants could not count on much support from the municipal court judges, city marshals, and New York City police, each of whom played a pivotal role in the eviction process, it was highly likely that the landlords would succeed. By far the most important of these parties were the municipal court judges. These judges, of whom there were about fifty in the immediate postwar period, were elected officials whose terms ran for ten years. Most were Democrats. With the exception of Jacob Panken, a Socialist whose courthouse in Manhattan's Second District was not far from Wall Street, the rest were Republicans. They presided over an institution that had taken its modern form in the mid-nineteenth century and was now divided into twenty-four districts, nine in Manhattan, seven in Brooklyn, four in Queens, and two apiece in the Bronx and Richmond.7 Sitting in the busiest (and more often than not dingiest) of New York's many trial courts, the municipal court judges dealt exclusively with civil matters, among the most common of which were landlord-tenant disputes. And of these disputes, summary proceedings were among the most heartrending.

Most municipal court judges, especially the dozen or so Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bronx judges who heard the bulk of the landlord-tenant disputes, had strong feelings about summary proceedings. They had no sympathy for the landlords, the so-called “hogs” and “sharks” who were jacking up the rent. Nor had they any sympathy for the speculators, who were raising the rent in order to drive up values and then sell at a profit, and the lessees, who were not only raising the rent, but also neglecting the property. When these rapacious landlords went to court to force the hard-strapped tenants to pay the rent or move out of their home, many municipal court judges were outraged—not the least, said Harry Robitzek, because it made these tenants “easy prey” for Bolsheviks and other radicals. (Their antipathy to these landlords notwithstanding, most of the judges were strongly opposed to rent strikes. Tenants “have no more right to strike against landlords than landlords have [to strike] against tenants,” said Aaron J. Levy. Most judges were also strongly opposed to what Levy called the “Bolsheviki” tenants leagues that encouraged their members to go on strike. Caught up in the “Red Scare” that swept over the country after World War I, these judges took great pride in their opposition to radicalism of every kind. As Robitzek boasted, he had done as much as anyone “to drive Bolshevism [out of] the Bronx.”)⁸

Still, most municipal court judges felt an obligation to put these feelings aside even when dealing with the most rapacious landlords and the most hard-strapped tenants. They had taken an oath to uphold the law. And the law was unambiguous. If a landlord raised the rent, a tenant could refuse to sign a new lease and move out when the old one expired. A tenant without a lease could move out at the end of the month. But a tenant who signed a new lease or who held over without a lease had to pay the rent, and to pay it in full. (Indeed, in late 1918 the Appellate Term of the New York Supreme Court reversed the municipal court decisions that allowed tenants whose landlords had not provided heat to deduct from the rent what they spent on heaters and fuel. The court held that in the absence of a written lease requiring the landlord to provide heat the tenant had to pay the rent in full even if the apartment had no heat.) Many municipal court judges felt that the landlords were taking unfair advantage of summary proceedings, a law, they said, that had not been enacted to enable landlords to oppress tenants. But there was nothing they could do about it. As one said, the judges have a strictly “ministerial” role in summary proceedings. If a tenant stays in an apartment and refuses to pay the rent, they have no choice but to award possession to the landlord. Judges, another pointed, were not evicting tenants because they “want to do it,” but because they “must do it.” “The law,” he said, “gives them no discretion.”9

Although most municipal court judges held that their hands were tied, some found ways to stop (or at least slow down) summary proceedings. One was to exercise the power given them by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. Passed by Congress in March 1918, roughly a year after the United States entered World War I, the act was designed to protect servicemen and their families from profiteering landlords. If a landlord attempted to evict the wife, children, or other dependents of a serviceman for nonpayment of rent, the judges were empowered to stay the proceedings for up to three months—provided that the rent was not more than $50 a month. But as the New York Telegram pointed out, the law was “violated right and left.” Many landlords raised the rent and, if the servicemen's families could not pay it, brought summary proceedings against them. Some tenants yielded. Others resisted. If they submitted proof that they were dependent on a soldier or sailor, some judges threatened to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney, which was often enough to prompt the landlord to rescind the rent hike. Other judges refused to issue a final order and advised the tenants that they could stay put for three months. William E. Morris, who had a well-deserved reputation as “a tenant's judge,” went even further. In one case he refused to sign an eviction warrant until the landlord submitted an affidavit, a sworn statement made under oath, that none of the tenants was dependent on anyone in the military. Morris stuck by his position even after the landlord's lawyer threatened to file suit to force him to sign the warrant.¹⁰

Even in the great majority of cases where the tenants were not covered by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, many municipal court judges found ways to block summary proceedings. Some took the cases under advisement, a step that allowed them to spend up to fourteen days looking into the claims before making a decision. If they ruled in favor of the landlord, they routinely granted a stay of up to five days—and, after the state legislature amended the law in June 1919, up to twenty days. Faced with a delay that might cost them a month's income—and more if the tenant asked for a jury trial—a few landlords had second thoughts about raising the rent. Some judges also acted as mediators. Exploiting their position, which was as intimidating to the landlords, especially the first- and second-generation immigrants among them, as to the tenants, they pressed both parties to compromise. Sometimes the landlords lowered the rent, and sometimes the tenants paid the rent in return for a lease that barred another hike in the near future. If the landlords were intransigent, some judges even denied their motion. “I confess I did violence to [the] law,” said Judge Levy, speaking of a case in which he ruled against a landlord who had raised the rent of a widow “of rather limited means” more than 100 percent. Although he thought justice had been served, he expected the appellate courts to reverse him. In a case where a landlord raised the rent from $18 to $50 a month, Judge Robitzek lambasted the agent, who was the landlord's son, saying, “Your very action is enough to breed discontent among the poor.” Ignoring the statute and applying what he called the “law of common sense,” Robitzek dismissed the case and said the landlord was free to challenge his ruling in the appellate courts.11

But there was only so much even the most sympathetic municipal court judges could do for a tenant who was being sued for nonpayment of rent. Indeed, as historian Jared N. Day has written, “if [New York's landlords] really wanted their tenants out, they were out.” The landlord would have to wait as many as fourteen days if the judge took the case under advisement—and as many as another five days (or, after June 1919, another twenty days) if the judge granted a stay after issuing a final order. (In the event that the tenant was protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, the landlord would have to wait a full three months.) If the judge believed that the tenant was being gouged, the landlord might be pressed to reduce the rent hike. If he withstood the pressure, he might have to bear up with a good deal of verbal abuse. If a judge refused to issue a final order, the landlord would have to ask another judge to reverse the decision. And if a judge refused to issue an eviction warrant, the landlord would have to apply to another judge for a writ forcing him to do so. All this took time, money, and, not least of all, a thick skin. If the landlord persisted, however, he was almost certain to prevail. Even the strongest tenant advocates, among them Assemblyman Samuel Orr and Morris Gisnet, counsel to the Greater New York Tenants League, conceded that the tenants stood little chance of success in summary proceedings. So did the Telegram’s rent editor, who wrote a regular column offering advice to tenants. Replying to a letter from a Bronx tenant whose landlord had raised the rent from $30 to $60 a month, he warned that if the tenant went to court, “The best he could hope for was a delay.”¹²

The city marshals had fewer qualms about summary proceedings than the municipal court judges. The marshals were an adjunct of the municipal courts. Members of an old if far from venerable institution, they stood in much the same position to the local courts as the sheriffs stood to the state courts. They served summonses, executed warrants, sold attached properties, and otherwise carried out the judges’ orders. Unlike the judges, however, the marshals were not elected. Rather they were appointed, by the mayor and as a rule for a six-year term, almost always as a reward for service to the political machine. The mayor had the power to remove the marshals—though only for cause and only after giving notice and holding a public hearing. And from time to time one or another exercised it. Anyone could be appointed a city marshal, provided that he lived in the borough in which the court to which he was assigned was located and posted a bond of $2,000, guaranteed by two New York residents and property owners, to ensure he carried out his duties faithfully. Most important of all, the city marshals, of whom there were more than sixty in the immediate postwar period, were not public employees. Rather they were independent contractors who were authorized to collect a fee for each of the tasks they carried out, a fee that was set by the authorities and paid by the litigants.13

The marshals spent much of their time on summary proceedings, so much that one historian has written that they worked more for the landlords than the city. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that they “were basically hirelings of the landlords,” many of whom found it cheaper to hire a marshal than retain a lawyer. The marshals were deeply involved at virtually every step in the process. Although by law they were barred from acting on behalf of either party in summary proceedings, they often drafted the necessary papers, the forms for which were readily available in legal stationery stores, and then represented the landlords in court. It was not uncommon for a marshal to appear for a landlord (or landlords) in a dozen or more cases at one session. Judge Morris refused to hear cases in which the landlords were represented by a marshal, but other judges were not so exacting. Among other things, the marshal served the precept on the tenants and, in the event that the judge issued a final order in favor of the landlords, executed the eviction warrants, an action for which they were often vilified. Along with a team of schleppers who were paid by the landlords, the marshals showed up at the apartments. Although they did not move anything, they cleared the way for the schleppers, who operated under their supervision. Wrote one critic, “they merely stand around and see that it [the eviction] is done”—that the tenants (and their belongings) are removed and that the landlords are given possession of the apartments.¹⁴

The fees for these tasks, which were fixed by statute, were fairly low. To give a couple of examples, the marshals were allowed to charge one dollar for serving a precept and one dollar for executing a warrant. (If they had to travel more than a mile, “one-way only,” from the courthouse to execute a warrant, they were allowed to charge an extra six cents a mile.) This did not add up to much in the decade or so before World War I, when few evictions took place. But after the war, when the landlords brought tens of thousands of summary proceedings, the marshals made out extremely well. “The office of city marshal is now the surest road to quick and large wealth,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1920. The marshals were charging the landlords as much as $7 for each eviction, which was well above the statutory rate. Some were carrying out so many evictions that they were earning as much as $100 to $500 a day, far more than most New Yorkers earned in a week, even more than many earned in a month. According to a municipal court judge, one marshal once made a whopping $642 in one day. Many marshals, some of whom had three or four offices and a staff of deputies and assistants, earned enough to buy homes of their own, drive expensive motorcars, and wear diamond jewelry. There was so much money to be made as a city marshal in the postwar years that some New Yorkers who were not one of the sixty-seven mayoral appointees passed themselves off as marshals—and earned as much as $2,000 a month.15

As marshals Henry F. Tiernan and William J. Kelly wrote a few years before the outbreak of World War I, they were not insensitive to the plight of the tenants who were facing eviction. When they came across families in “real poverty and distress,” they reported them to one or another of the city's charitable organizations, which often paid their rent or found them other quarters. “In no case was a deserving family neglected,” declared Tiernan. When the number of summary proceedings soared in the postwar years, some marshals engaged in profiteering, conceded Marshal Harry Wolkoff. But most had in them “the milk of human kindness,” he said. A case in point was an assistant marshal known as “Fatty” Hagen. In mid-1921 Marshal Nicholas Zelinsky sent Hagen and three deputies to remove Rose Nowacki, a widow with four children, from her apartment on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn—an apartment from which she had been evicted for nonpayment of rent, but in which she was still living because she was unable to find another. Upon arriving at the building, Hagen learned that Nowacki's late husband, John J. Nowacki, a chief steward and then paymaster in the U.S. Navy, had been lost at sea when the Abraham Lincoln was sunk in May 1918. By an extraordinary coincidence, Hagen had served on the same ship. “I was his buddy,” he told his widow, “only I escaped when she went down.” Declaring, in the words of a Times reporter, that “he was not going to move out a stick of Mrs. Nowacki's furniture,” Hagen let her and the children remain in the apartment.¹⁶

Most marshals were seldom as sympathetic as “Fatty” Hagen. Early in September 1919, for example, Marshal Daniel McBride arrived with a team of schleppers to oust several hundred families who had been evicted after a long and bitter rent strike from seventeen five-story tenement houses in Brooklyn owned by the B.F.W. Realty Company. The schleppers started clearing out a top-floor apartment on Flatbush Avenue. But when they learned the tenants were members of the Williamsburg Tenants League, the schleppers, who were themselves members of a labor union, stopped working. McBride then announced that he would return the next morning with another crew of schleppers, one that was presumably less squeamish about removing members of a tenants league. As McBride and the other marshals saw it, they had a duty to obey the court's mandate, not to defy it. As Mayor William J. Gaynor said a few years before the outbreak of World War I, they were expected to do their job an orderly manner. But they were expected to do it. If it was at times an unpleasant job, that was not their fault. Taken to task by John S. Flynn, president of the West Harlem Community League and Tenants Association, for removing African American tenants whose landlords were charging unreasonable rents, Marshal Henry H. Lazarus replied that he could not understand what high rents had to do with the execution of a warrant—or “why Mr. Flynn should suppose I am responsible for the high rents.”¹⁷ Although the marshals did not make a point of it, they got paid for executing warrants, not for ignoring them. And as the Call pointed out, it was in their interest to execute as many warrants as possible.

By 1920 some New Yorkers felt that the marshals and schleppers were out of control—that they were “running amuck,” as Harry Allen Ely, chair of the Audubon Community Council and Washington Heights Tenants Association, put it a few years later. In some cases they were extremely heavy-handed. According to a woman who watched the eviction of forty-nine families from a tenement house on Bartlett Street in Brooklyn, the marshal and forty schleppers “made a raid upon the flats as if it were a siege.” They “pounded and battered upon doors, and broke the locks with jimmies and crowbars, when the tenants were not at home. Women were pushed and slapped, their furniture and personal belongings seized and thrown into the street.” In other cases the marshals and schleppers spared no effort to make the evictions as orderly as possible. And in still other cases the marshals and schleppers were abused by the tenants. After an eviction in East Harlem, Marshal Lazarus complained to Mayor Hylan's secretary that the tenant was a “very vindictive” woman who not only falsely accused him of stealing her husband's watch, rings, and diamond pins, but also threw bottles at him and his men, who “narrowly escaped injury.”18 But no matter how the marshals and schleppers behaved, the tenants regarded them as adversaries. They knew all too well that in the event that a judge issued a final order in favor of the landlord they had good reason to believe that the marshal would not hesitate to remove them from their homes under all but the most unusual circumstances.

For the tenants the arrival of the marshal was by far the most traumatic moment in an extremely traumatic process. As Mayor Gaynor acknowledged in 1910, “it is a pretty hard thing to go into the house and take a man's goods away.” If it was hard before World War I, it was much harder afterward. In the midst of the postwar housing shortage, a time when the number of evictions soared to record levels, the marshals had their work cut out for them. In many cases they had to remove dozens of families who had nowhere else to live and no place to store their belongings. In many other cases the marshals found themselves in the middle of a rent strike, with scores and even hundreds of tenants manning picket lines and as many neighbors offering moral support. Before the war it was commonly assumed that once the marshal showed a warrant from the court even the most aggrieved tenants would yield to the inevitable. Rarely should it be necessary for the marshals to ask the police for help in carrying out an eviction, said Mayor Gaynor. “Exercise your own authority,” he told them, “and let them [the policemen] keep to their posts.”¹⁹ But in the postwar years this assumption was untenable. Outnumbered by the angry tenants and their supporters, the marshals often found they had no choice but to call on the police.

Less than a century old, the New York City Police Department was far and away the nation's largest. With nearly 12,000 sworn officers, it was about as large as the Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit police departments combined. It was to these officers, the great majority of whom were patrolmen assigned to one of the city's many precinct houses, that the marshals turned when they needed help. They invariably got it. By virtue of New York's residency requirement, which forced the police and other public employees to live inside the city, just about all the officers were tenants. And as many were in the same unenviable position as the Bronx policeman whose landlord had raised the monthly rent on his apartment near Southern Boulevard from $28 in 1916 to $53 in 1920, they may have had some sympathy for the tenants who were about to be dispossessed. But they had no sympathy for the tenants who were on strike—who were withholding rent and resisting eviction. As the policemen saw it, their job was to maintain order. To them a rent strike was much like a labor strike, “by its very nature a breach of order,” in the words of historian James F. Richardson. When the striking tenants set up picket lines—when they attempted to stop the marshals and the schleppers from executing a warrant by blocking access to the entryways, sidewalks, and streets—most policemen felt the tenants were not only breaking the law. They were also undermining their authority.20

Given that most New York City policemen were first- and second-generation immigrants and nearly all were working class, it may seem puzzling that they had so little sympathy for the striking tenants, the great majority of whom were also working-class first- and second-generation immigrants. But many of the striking tenants (and many of the most militant of the striking tenants) were Jewish Americans, most of them recent immigrants from Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. And like most Americans, most New York City policemen, among them the many Irish American policemen whose ancestors came to the United States after the potato famine of 1845, were not only racist, but also xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Their anti-Semitism was underscored by the infamous Hoe Riot on the Lower East Side, which erupted in July 1902, when scores of officers lashed out at thousands of Jews, most of them part of a huge funeral procession, who tried to defend themselves from an attack by a group of factory workers. Moreover, the striking tenants drew much of their inspiration from labor unions. And the New York City police, who did not have a union of their own (and who relied on politicking rather than collective bargaining in their struggle for higher wages and better working conditions), were hostile to organized labor. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time of widespread industrial turmoil, the officers regularly sided with management. In one labor dispute after another, they broke up picket lines, disrupted public meetings, protected scabs at the workplace, and at day's end even escorted them home or to the streetcars.²¹

If New York's tenants had any hope that the police would be sympathetic to their plight, it was dashed by the officers’ behavior in the prewar rent strikes. In July 1905, for example, the police drove away scores of striking tenants who were attempting to prevent a marshal from evicting them from two tenement houses on Goerck Street on the Lower East Side. Less than a year later a similar incident occurred on Cook Street in Williamsburg. In addition to helping the marshals, the precinct captains turned down striking tenants who applied for a permit to hold a public meeting. When a group of tenant activists from the Lower East Side complained to Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, he replied, “If you don't like your rents get out. If you are not satisfied with our system of rents go back where you came from.” When the tenants went ahead without a permit, the officers broke up the meetings, charging the demonstrators with nightsticks and arresting some of them. At the request of several landlords, the officers tore down the red flags that hung from the windows. And at the urging of one East Harlem landlord, who was incensed that his tenants were posting signs reading “This house is on strike”—and by so doing, he claimed, were destroying his property—the officers took down the offending posters. Even the normally conservative New York Times believed that the officers had gone too far, taking them to task for lending “moral support” to the landlord and pointing out that nothing about the signs was so “prejudicial to public morals” to justify sending in the police.22

As historians of the prewar rent strikes have pointed out, the NYPD was especially heavy-handed when dealing with tenants who were affiliated with the Socialist Party. Like other New Yorkers, most policemen had a deep-seated fear of socialism and other radical ideologies, a fear that led them to view rent strikes not as run-of-the-mill disputes between landlords and tenants but as integral elements of an ongoing effort to foment revolution. These fears, which surfaced in the late nineteenth century, persisted in the twentieth century, intensified in the aftermath of World War I, and following the Bolshevik Revolution, culminated in the “Red Scare” of 1919 and 1920. Bolshevism “is gaining very rapidly and will soon, if not checked, be a great and grave danger to our republic,” Nathan Hirsch, chair of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, warned John F. Hylan. Judge Aaron J. Levy agreed, saying, “If one has the temerity to protest against high rents and if one urges his fellow victims to organize, he ought to be hanged.” At a time of widespread hysteria—a time when Democratic and Republican legislators had joined forces to expel five recently elected Socialists from the New York State Assembly—it was highly unlikely that the NYPD would deal with striking tenants in an evenhanded way.²³

The striking tenants sometimes left the police no choice but to move in. During the prewar strikes the tenants tore down “To Let” signs, intimidated apartment hunters, and even talked of burning down tenement houses whose residents were on strike. They threatened landlords, burned one in effigy, and assaulted the wife of another. When Samuel Cohen raised the rents on his tenement houses on the Lower East Side, the tenants not only withheld the rent, but also smashed the windows of his apartment. He and his family were not hurt, but only because the shades were down. During the strike, wrote the New York Tribune, Cohen “ventur[ed] out only under police protection.” About the tenants’ efforts to block the evictions on Cook Street in Williamsburg, the Tribune wrote, “had it not been for the timely arrival of the police, they [the marshal and schleppers] would have been roughly handled.” In the aftermath of World War I the striking tenants were well aware that they could expect no sympathy from the NYPD even if they behaved in an orderly way. Caught up in the “Red Scare,” the officers refused to grant the striking tenants permits to hold public meetings and forbade women to wear sashes that showed the location of the buildings whose tenants were on strike. They broke up picket lines even after a municipal court judge held that striking tenants had a right to picket. They even enforced a departmental directive banning anyone from speaking at a public gathering in a language other than English. The ban, which was supposed to prevent the dissemination of “dangerous propaganda,” was later held unconstitutional.24 It was highly unlikely that a police force that had no compunction about riding roughshod over the civil liberties of striking tenants would hesitate to help the marshals and schleppers remove them from their homes.

Most tenants knew that the landlords would move to evict them if they withheld the rent. And if they did not know, they soon found out that if they went on strike the odds were very much against them. A case in point was Mrs. Aaron Stein, one of eighteen tenants at 1486 Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville who decided in the spring of 1918 to withhold the rent when the landlord's agent notified them that it was being raised again. “Everybody is against us,” she told a Call reporter. The landlord brought summary proceedings against the striking tenants. A magistrate fined the chief organizer of the strike $25. “Why,” said Stein, “nobody knows.” The police threatened to arrest the strikers if they stood in front of the building—and as the strike dragged on, charged several of them with “creating a disturbance” and “obstructing the sidewalk.” It was hard to know what the strikers could do, Stein pointed out. “One of the judges says we may picket but another says we mustn't.” Before too long “the landlord threw me out.” In the face of such powerful constraints, why did Stein and her neighbors go on a rent strike? The answer, she said, was that “we could stand it no longer.” What they could not stand was that the landlord was steadily raising the rent, which in many cases went up from $13.50 a month in April 1917 to $16.50 a month a year later. As one of Stein's neighbors said, it was “a question of starving to death or refusing to pay [the rent].”²⁵

Another thing Stein and her neighbors could not stand was that the same landlords who were raising the rent were spending little of it on the buildings. “We wouldn't have felt quite so sore about these raises in the rent if the house had been kept clean and in repair,” said Stein. “But it hasn't been fixed up for over seven years.” In the aftermath of World War I, many other tenants, especially tenants from working-class neighborhoods, felt much the same way. One after another they complained not only that their apartments lacked adequate heat and hot water, but also that they were in serious disrepair. The ceilings were full of cracks (and, in one case, “ready to drop”); so were the walls. The paint was blistering, and the wallpaper peeling—so much so that in one South Bronx apartment it was waving in the breeze that came through a rear window. Some of the windows had lost so much of their caulking that during storms the rain poured in. The stairwells were filthy, the halls full of trash, the floors unsteady, the cellars crammed with junk, and the dumbwaiters out of order. The fire escapes were rotting too. From the Allen Street elevated railroad, which ran through the Lower East Side, it was possible to see the rust flaking off them, remarked one New Yorker. If the tenants had to use these fire escapes in an emergency, “the Lord help them.” Dust and dirt were everywhere. So were insects and vermin. In many apartments, the plumbing was defective. And in one apartment in East Harlem, said Robert Ferrari, chief counsel for the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York, “mushrooms [were] growing in the toilet.”26

Time and again, said the tenants, they called on the landlords to do something. But as a rule the landlords brushed them off. Asked to fix defective plumbing, replace missing shades, and repair torn wallpaper, one Bronx landlord replied, “Pay me the rent first.” “Then,” said one of the tenants, “we never see him again till the next month”—when he comes back to collect the rent. Michael Gold, who grew up in “a junk-heap of rotten lumber and brick” in which the pipes froze in the winter and the women had to lug pails of water up the stairs, remembered that when the tenants asked the landlord to fix the plumbing, he replied, “Next week.” “A dozen times he has told us that, the yellow-faced murderer,” said Gold's mother. Sometimes the landlords promised to do routine maintenance, make needed repairs, and improve service, but they seldom kept their promises, the tenants complained. And they raised the rent just the same. Said a tenant in Upper Manhattan whose rent had been raised from $16 a month in 1916 to $40 a month in 1920, “I haven't got a single bit of improvement in [a decade].” After receiving notice that her rent was going up again, another tenant told Governor Smith, “In the years I am living here [in Harlem] they [the landlords] have not spent 5 cents on my apartment.” This attitude led a group of striking tenants who were about to be evicted from a rundown building in the South Bronx to take the position that they were willing to pay the rent hike, but only if the landlord decorated the apartments (and gave them a lease that would prevent another rent hike in the near future).²⁷

To many tenants, especially but not exclusively working-class tenants, it seemed that there were no limits to which the landlords would go to capitalize on the housing shortage. To give a few of the more flagrant examples, some raised the rents of tenants whose households included very old folks, severely ill children, and even women who had just given birth. If the tenants could not pay, the landlords moved to evict them anyway. (In some cases this was too much for the schleppers. Ordered by the marshal to oust a husband and wife who were over one hundred years old from an apartment in the Bronx, they balked. “Please give us car fare home,” they said to the neighbors, “and let us get out of here.”) In violation of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, other landlords imposed rent hikes on dependents of U.S. servicemen, some of whom were on active duty in Europe, and threatened to evict them if they did not pay. At the urging of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, U.S. Attorney Francis G. Caffey ordered his staff to investigate these infractions. After raising the rent three times in one year, a Bronx landlord not only refused to provide hot water in the summer, but also turned off the hall lights at night. When the tenants protested they could not see their way upstairs, he said it was up to them “to come home earlier.” Another Bronx landlord notified a dozen Jewish tenants that the rent was going up. They refused to pay, in part because he had made no improvements. Although the landlord was also Jewish, he had no compunction about bringing summary proceedings even if it meant the tenants would have to appear in court on Yom Kippur, the highest of the Jewish holy days.28

All this created a good deal of ill will among the tenants. Such ill will was nothing new. It went back well into the nineteenth century, a time, Elizabeth Blackmar writes, when landlords were “stock villains in antebellum melodramas.” Down through the century tenants in New York were much like tenants in Paris, who, another historian points out, viewed landlords as “idle parasites, reaping huge profits without any productive labor, at the expense, always, of the working population.” During the early twentieth century the rapacious landlord was a staple not only of novels and short stories, but also of motion pictures, in one of which, D. W. Griffith's The Usurer, he was shown squeezing the last dollar out of his impoverished tenants to pay for lavish dinners, fine wines, and expensive cigars. The animosity toward the landlords was as deep as ever at the time the United States entered World War I. The tenants, wrote the Bronx Home News in early 1917, believe that “it is the avarice of the landlords that is the cause of all their complaints and troubles.” The landlord may shut off the heat, turn off the gas, remove the phone from the building, and put in the weakest possible bulbs in the halls, said one tenant. “Still he is [always] around the first of the month before ten o'clock in the morning with his hand out for the rent.” Most real estate men held that this animosity was unwarranted. But they acknowledged that it was extremely widespread. As one wrote in late 1917, “There is, in the minds of all rentpayers, and their name is legion, a sub-conscious feeling that the landlord is a flint-hearted, grasping rascal, a grafter and a parasite on the body politic.”²⁹

If relations between tenants and landlords were bad before the war, they were much worse afterward. By 1919 they were so bad that the Times wrote that tenants and landlords were “natural enemies.” A few years later Judge Edgar J. Lauer pointed out that there was more “bad blood” between tenants and landlords than between wage-earners and capitalists. The tenants saw the landlords—or, as they called them, the “blood-sucking landlords,” the “sharks,” “gougers,” “shylocks,” and “new Czars of America”—as rapacious and merciless. They jacked up the rents on rundown tenements in order to live in posh apartments on Riverside Drive and to buy diamond pins for their neckties and fur coats for their wives. Their greed knew no limits, wrote Anzia Yezierska. In one of her stories about life on the Lower East Side, the landlord raised the rent five dollars a month after a tenant named Hanneh Hayyeh painted the kitchen in anticipation of her son's return from active duty in France. When she said she could not pay the additional five dollars, he told her, “If you can't pay, somebody else will.” Now that she had done the painting, he added, “I can get more money for [the apartment].” “'If there is any justice and mercy on this earth,’ Hayyeh cried, ‘then may the landlord be tortured like he is torturing me! May the fires burn him and the waters drown him! May his flesh be torn from him in pieces and his bones be ground in the teeth of wild dogs!'”³⁰ Although few tenants were as angry as Hanneh Hayyeh, many were angry enough to go on strike if that was the only way to protect their families from New York's avaricious landlords.

But even for the angriest and most desperate tenants, it was still a weighty decision to go on strike. And it was a decision that fell in large part on the housewives. As Rachel Panken, the wife of Judge Jacob Panken, pointed out, the women ran the household.31 It was to them that the husbands (and older children) turned over their wages—and that the lodgers and boarders paid the rent. Based on these modest (and often irregular) sources of income, the housewives had to calculate how much to spend on food, clothing, housing, and other items. In the event that the landlord raised the rent, it was largely up to them to figure out whether they could afford to pay it—and, if they could not, whether they would have to move, cut back on other expenditures, or possibly withhold the rent. If the family decided that they had no choice but to go on strike, the housewives were well aware that they would have to play a leading role. With their husbands (and older sons and daughters) at work, it would be up to them to persuade other tenants to join the strike, mobilize the support of neighbors and shopkeepers, walk the picket lines, discourage prospective tenants from renting apartments in buildings whose residents were on strike, and perhaps put up other tenants whose families had been dispossessed (and whose belongings had been put on the sidewalk). More than the men, it was the women who would have to stand up to the landlords (and their agents) and face the marshals, schleppers, and in some cases, police officers—and do so without neglecting their families.

Down through the late nineteenth century, few New York housewives had the stomach for these confrontations. But as the prewar rent strikes revealed, things began to change after the turn of the century. And as the years passed, they continued to change—so much so that by the end of the war many women were ready to challenge the landlords in ways that would have once been unthinkable. Underlying the changes was a growing militancy among working-class women, a willingness to resort to collective action to curb a wide range of abusive practices. Inspired in large part by the trade union movement and the Socialist Party, both of which had made deep inroads on the Lower East Side and in other ethnic neighborhoods, women in New York did what women in other cities did. As one historian puts it, they “took to the streets to defend their families against the encroachment of capital.” This newfound militancy was manifested in a host of strikes that erupted in the late nineteenth century, notably in the garment industry, and culminated in late 1909 and early 1910 in what was known as “the uprising of the 20,000.” Led by a young Jewish immigrant (and passionate Socialist) named Clara Lemlich, tens of thousands of women, many of whom were still in their teens, walked off the job at the shirtwaist factories to protest low wages and abysmal working conditions. For three months, writes labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky, they “walked the picket lines and suffered the tribulations—cold, hunger, bodily injury, and personal insult—which were part and parcel of the strikers’ lot.”³²

The newfound militancy was also manifested in a host of boycotts that were aimed at shopkeepers who were taking advantage of customers. Among the most widespread of these protests was the boycott of kosher butchers that swept through the Lower East Side and other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in 1902. Outraged by the rising price of kosher meat, up from 12 to 18 cents a pound, housewives stopped buying from kosher butchers and urged others to follow their lead. They denounced women who ignored the boycott as scabs and even broke into their homes and tossed the meat onto the street. The housewives stormed the butcher shops too, one historian writes. They “dragged the huge sides of meat from their hooks and trampled upon them.” They also “impaled the meat on painted sticks, carrying it around ‘like red flags.’” Even more widespread were the food riots of 1917, in which housewives joined forces to drive down the soaring prices of bread, milk, vegetables, meat, and eggs, which had gone up from 32 to 80 cents a dozen since 1916. Hard-pressed to feed their families, even forced to dilute milk with water, they started a boycott of bakers, greengrocers, and butchers. Besides threatening shopkeepers, they attacked peddlers, overturning their pushcarts and scattering their produce. They also lashed out at police officers, who were sent in to restore order. By the time the United States entered World War I, New York's working-class women were so militant that many of them even went on strike when the Board of Education attempted to introduce a version of Progressive education known as the “Gary Plan” into the city's elementary schools.33

New York's middle- and upper-middle-class women were much less militant. But during the war they too showed a growing willingness to act together, especially in the efforts to curb the rising price of food and conserve wheat, meat, sugar, and other scarce products. Even before the United States entered the war, President Wilson had been seriously concerned about the issue, a concern spurred in part by the riots that erupted in New York and other cities in early 1917. In May that year, a month after the nation went to war, he appointed Herbert C. Hoover U.S. food administrator. Under the auspices of the Food Administration, writes historian Meg Jacobs, “prominent women [in New York and other cities] lent their names and organizational talents to enlist housewives in the anti-inflation campaign.” Their aim was to reduce prices by curtailing demand. Shortly afterward the Food Administration shifted its focus to conserving food that was sorely needed by the nation's troops and its allies. Through its state and local offices—and through Community Councils for National Defense, which were sponsored by the War Department—housewives were mobilized all over the country. Inspired by the belief, as a Food Administration spokesman put it, that “the war is going to be won in the kitchens of America,” millions of them—300,000 in New York City alone—pledged to conserve food. They also agreed to report anyone who wasted food to the nearest Food Administration office. “Every housewife became a war worker,” writes one of Al Smith's biographers, “asked to participate in a national effort run by the U.S. government.”³⁴

To the dismay of most Americans, who had expected the inflationary spiral to wind down after the war, the price of food continued to soar in 1919. So did the price of clothing and other necessities. Before long a nationwide campaign was launched against the “high cost of living.” In the forefront was what the New York Times called “a small army of women,” which was mobilized in large part by the Community Councils for National Defense and the local chapters of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. With the backing of the Food Administration, these women set up “fair price” committees that monitored the price of food (later clothing and shoes too) and provided housewives with lists of what grocers should charge for their produce. Under the leadership of Mary Rumsey, the daughter of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, fifty thousand New York women went from store to store checking prices and reporting cases of profiteering. “We are not going to set off any bombs under retailers,” Rumsey assured New Yorkers, “but we do want to learn if they are justified in charging the present prices.” To reduce the high cost of living, housewives were urged not only to seek out the lowest prices, but also to cut back on consumption. “It is time to stop buying,” said the chair of the National Housewives League. “Rich and poor alike are asked to help.” In support of this position, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer encouraged housewives to ignore “the buy-now propaganda” of retailers and manufacturers.35

By the end of World War I many New York City housewives, working-class and middle-and upper-middle-class alike, were ready to join forces to stop (or at least slow down) the repeated rent hikes that were wreaking havoc on their families. If women were mobilizing to bring down the price of food, housewives wondered, why should they not be mobilizing to hold down the price of housing? If women had the courage to confront rapacious employers and heavy-handed foremen—who, said Clara Lemlich, treated workers no better “than I imagine slaves were [once treated] in the South”—why should they be afraid of greedy landlords and abusive agents? If women were willing to walk off the job even if it meant standing up to brutal policemen and hostile judges—one of whom told a striking cloakworker, “If you were in Russia, you would be sent to Siberia”—why should they be less willing to withhold the rent even if it meant standing up to unsympathetic marshals and indifferent schleppers?³⁶ If women were ready to risk losing their jobs in order to improve their wages and working conditions, why should they not be ready to risk losing their homes in order to make sure that their families had enough to eat? If the women of New York were up to taking part in strikes and boycotts to protect their families against unfeeling employers and unscrupulous retailers, why should they not be up to going on strikes to protect them against avaricious landlords?

Hence for the many tenants who were fed up with the frequent rent hikes, enraged by rapacious landlords, and confident in the efficacy of collective action, a decision to go on strike was a much less weighty one during and after World War I than it had been before. One reason was that the tenants were convinced that a rent strike was the only way to protect their families. Another reason was that the tenants were hopeful that if they went on strike they stood a fair chance of forcing the landlords to rescind or at least reduce the rent hikes. Yet another reason was that the tenants felt that a rent strike was justified on moral grounds because it contributed not only to the well-being of their families, but also to the nationwide campaign against profiteering. Viewed in this context, a rent strike was not so much a struggle between landlords and tenants as between profiteers and patriots. It was a struggle between those who were taking advantage of the housing shortage to enrich themselves and those who were doing their part to win the war and, when the war was over, to drive down the high cost of living.

The campaign against profiteering got under way before the United States entered World War I. At first it was aimed at the munitions makers and other companies whose profits would climb to record levels during the war. In 1916 Congress went so far as to enact the nation's first excess-profits tax, the bulk of which was paid by E.I. du Pont de Nemours, the giant chemical company. When the United States went to war, the campaign gathered momentum. In the summer of 1917 Congress passed the Lever Act, which was designed to regulate the prices of a wide range of commodities. Shortly thereafter Food Administrator Hoover declared that those who sold “the blood of our sons for profit” were as bad as Judas Iscariot. As the prices of virtually everything soared—and according to the Federal Trade Commission, as corporate profits rose 100 percent (and in some cases, even more)—the campaign against profiteering extended from munitions makers and steel, copper, and chemical companies to meat packers, mine owners, lumber dealers, dairymen, greengrocers, fishmongers, bakers, butchers, druggists, and even, wrote the New York Call, “casket makers.” The war came to an end in November 1918, but prices continued to soar. And far from slowing down, the campaign against profiteering picked up. “By all means,” wrote the New Republic in September 1919, “let the profiteers be harried.”37 And harried they were—by consumers groups, which mounted strikes against butchers and bakers, by big-city newspapers, which launched campaigns against profiteering storekeepers, and by the U.S. Justice Department, which went after meatpackers and other high-profile companies.

Shortly after the United States entered the war, the campaign against profiteering was extended to housing as well. It was triggered by what historian Roy Lubove described as “an orgy of rent profiteering” that erupted in New London, Norfolk, and the other cities into which hundreds of thousands poured in search of well-paying jobs in war-related industries. It was widely feared that the skyrocketing rents in these communities would undermine the war effort. Under the auspices of the U.S. Housing Corporation and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which had been authorized by Congress to build housing for workers in war-related industries, scores of cities and towns created Rent Profiteering Committees (or Rent Adjustment Committees), all of which appealed to the landlords to go easy on the tenants. If appeals did not work, they resorted to threats. As the war dragged on—and as rents soared—the campaign spread to other cities. The Socialist Party spoke out against rent profiteering. So did the American Federation of Labor and local tenants organizations. Pointing to the rising rents in New York City, Mary Marfdin asked, “Is this the way the landlords are helping to win the war?” Speaking for the Williamsburg Tenants League, Joseph Klein told President Wilson that it was outrageous that at the same time that the nation's servicemen were risking their lives, “their families and dependents are left to the mercy of [profiteering] landlords.” “Somewhere along the line a check must be put on this profiteering,” wrote the Call. “If the government does not do it, then the people may, and in their own fashion.”38

Far from winding down after the war, the campaign against rent profiteering gathered force. Indeed the concern over skyrocketing rents was so widespread that the National Housing Association made rent profiteering one of the principal issues at its annual conference in Boston in late 1918. (According to the Call, a couple of the participants took the position that hanging was “the only fit punishment for landlords who took such advantage of the workers’ need for shelter.”) This concern was especially deep-seated in New York, where a former soldier told a mass meeting of angry tenants, “We went to war to protect our homes, and now that we have returned we find them wrested from us by an enemy more insidious, more villainous, than the Hun.” That enemy, he said, “is the war profiteer.” Of all the forms of profiteering, rent profiteering was “the most flagrant and most acute,” not to mention the hardest to avoid, declared the Lockwood Committee. Governor Smith agreed. So did Mayor Hylan, who branded the rent profiteers “a public menace.” It is worth noting that when Hylan finally bowed to pressure to form an official body to deal with the rising rents, he named it the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, a name that did not sit well with the city's real estate industry. Although the charges of rent profiteering were voiced most forcefully in New York, where there was even talk of a “rent rebellion,” they were made, “in varying degree, in virtually every other city in the United States,” wrote the Literary Digest in early 1920.³⁹

The real estate interests took strong exception to these charges. Some property owners might have taken advantage of the housing shortage to boost their profits, their spokesmen conceded, but they were very much the exceptions. Many may have made what a title insurance company executive called “a proper adjustment of rents,” but they were forced to do so by the soaring costs of labor, materials, taxes, and mortgages. In so competitive a business as rental housing, a business that was not dominated by a handful of giant companies, profiteering was “practically impossible,” declared the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. At a time of rampant inflation, it was unfair to “ask the landlord to give away his commodity for the same old dollar,” said Morris Morganstern. Isidor Berger made the same point. Stressing that profiteering was an extremely vague term, he insisted that New York's landlords were acting much like grocers, butchers, and even tailors, all of whom were raising their prices. “A person who cannot pay fifty dollars for a suit of clothes must be satisfied with a twenty-five dollar one,” he pointed out. And in New York, “There is as much a shortage of good $25 suits as there is of good $25 apartments.”⁴⁰

But as Berger and other real estate men learned, they had their work cut out for them. As hard as they tried, they could not disabuse other Americans of the notion that most landlords were profiteers. Well before the war was over, rent profiteering was widely regarded as a serious problem not only in many cities and states, but also in the nation's capital. Believing, in the words of Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, that “profiteering in rents is just as oppressive as profiteering in food,” several congressmen introduced legislation to protect ordinary tenants in ways that servicemen and their dependents were protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. Many of the bills dealt with the District of Columbia, the one American city that was under congressional control. And after a long struggle Congress imposed rent control in the capital, prompting Senator James A. Reed of Missouri to say, “The day will come when the lovers of liberty will charge us with having sown the dragon's teeth from which an army of anarchists have sprung up.” Other bills were introduced to extend rent control to the rest of the country. One bill, which applied to all cities of thirty thousand or more, would have prevented landlords from raising the rent of any apartment whose “normal rental,” which was defined as the rent on the day the United States entered World War I, was $50 a month or less. Another bill would have imposed the provisions of one of the most stringent Washington, D.C., rent control bills on other cities. Although Congress did not enact these bills—or for that matter, any form of nationwide rent control—its members did much to lend credibility to the charges of rent profiteering.41

In June 1918 New York Call reporter J. C. Duckworth went to Brooklyn to talk with Mrs. Stein and other tenants about the ongoing rent strike that had started at 1486 Pitkin Avenue and then spread to much of Brownsville, a largely Jewish neighborhood that had a well-deserved reputation as a “Socialist stronghold.” Duckworth left favorably impressed with the strike, which he called a “novel weapon” in the struggle against “profiteering landlords.” Although there had been other such strikes in New York—in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan in the winter of 1917–1918, for example, and in Williamsburg in March and April 1918—a rent strike could still have been described as a novelty as late as mid-1918. But the novelty soon wore off. Following another round of rent hikes, a great many tenants went on strike in the fall of 1918. During the next few months relations between landlords and tenants grew so strained, wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, that some neighborhoods were “like Mount Vesuvius on [the] point of eruption.” And when the landlords raised the rents again in the spring of 1919, many more strikes broke out. Some were confined to one or two apartment houses, others involved a handful, and a few, including one in Brooklyn that took place several months later, extended to dozens of buildings, with hundreds of tenants and thousands of residents. By the fall of 1919, when there were signs that the tenants were growing more restive, the New York Globe wrote that the rent strike was now as much a feature of everyday life in the city as the boycott, the lockout, and the blacklist.⁴²

The postwar rent strikes had much in common with the prewar rent strikes. The housewives appealed to their neighbors to withhold the rent and lend moral support to the striking tenants. In the meantime the leaders of the Socialist Party and the tenants leagues, most of whom were men, tried to organize the rentpayers by houses, by blocks, and by neighborhoods. These “soap-box orators,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called them, held mass meetings and street-corner rallies over much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The housewives also walked the picket lines, one of the principal ways by which they tried to discourage prospective tenants from renting (or even looking at) vacant (or soon-to-be-vacant) apartments in buildings whose tenants were on strike. Speaking of Brownsville, the Call wrote in late April 1918, “On every block there is a procession of women wheeling baby carriages back and forth in front of the ‘struck’ houses or a row of them.” Sometimes older children joined the picket lines after they were let out of school. To call attention to the strike, the tenants posted signs on their windows, often in Yiddish as well as English, that read “This house is on strike!” and “Down with profiteering landlords!” They put similar signs in nearby grocery stores and barber shops and even on the trucks of sympathetic expressmen. In another practice that infuriated the landlords, the striking tenants hung flags outside their windows, American flags in some households, red (or Socialist) flags in others.43

More often than not, the landlords served notice on the striking tenants, forcing them to appear in court to “show cause” why they should not be ousted from their apartments. Before long, wrote the Call, “the courts [were] filled with women with dispossess notices in their hands” and often with young children in tow. On their own—and sometimes with counsel provided by the Socialist Party or one of the tenants leagues—the strikers attempted to dissuade the judge from issuing a final order. Failing that, they requested as long a stay as possible in order to find another place to live. Unless the strike was settled (or the tenants moved out), the landlords then asked the court for a warrant authorizing the marshal to remove the tenants and their belongings. Although the marshal and schleppers often ran into strong resistance, they usually prevailed sooner or later. So many tenants were being evicted in Brownsville, wrote the Call in 1918, that “doubling up” was becoming common. Many tenants opened their homes to their evicted neighbors and offered to store their worldly goods. “No sooner than the furniture of a family is carried out it is brought in again on[to] another floor of the house, in[to] the home of a tenant whose time to pay the rent has not expired.” Even so, said the Call, “it is almost an unusual sight to pass a street without furniture in front of a tenement house.” Nor was it unusual to see tenants and their families spending the night on the sidewalk next to their former homes.⁴⁴

For all that they had in common with the prewar rent strikes, the postwar rent strikes attracted far more tenants—tens and hundreds of thousands, as opposed to thousands—and affected far more buildings—hundreds and maybe even thousands, as opposed to dozens. In late 1919, the Call reported, hundreds of rent strikes were under way on Manhattan's Upper West Side alone. Unlike the prewar strikes, which were confined largely to the Lower East Side, the postwar rent strikes spread to other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. A few strikes broke out in Queens too, but not in Staten Island, which had very little in common with the other boroughs. Unlike the prewar strikes, the postwar strikes drew support not only from Jewish Americans, but also from Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and other first- and second-generation immigrants. (It was especially risky for African Americans, who were barred from all but a few neighborhoods, to go on strike. But pointing out that “the only Negroes who can pay the rents [in Harlem] are the ones who run a buffet or a crap table in their apartments,” William Nichols tried to organize three houses on West 142nd Street anyway. He was promptly evicted for his efforts.) As well as many working-class radicals, who had been the mainstay of the prewar strikes, the postwar strikes even galvanized some policemen, firemen, and letter carriers. As one observer wrote in 1919, rent strikes were under way in “respectable neighborhoods far removed from the influence of the bomb-throwing anarchist fraternity.” Even some upper-middle-class tenants went on strike. “From the Bronx and the [Lower] East Side,” the Call pointed out, also in 1919, “the rent strike movement [has even] made its way to the exclusive and fashionable circles of Riverside Drive.”45

Unlike the 1904–1905 rent strike, which was taken over by the New York Rent Protective Association, an offshoot of the Jewish labor movement, and the 1907–1908 rent strike, which was controlled by the Lower East Side branch of the Socialist Party, the postwar rent strikes spurred the formation of a host of tenants leagues (or tenants unions). Among the first was the Washington Heights Tenants League, which was established early in 1918. The Williamsburg Tenants League was formed shortly afterward. Before long, tenants leagues could be found in dozens of neighborhoods all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—among them Harlem and Yorkville, Brownsville and Borough Park, and Tremont and University Heights. By 1920 these tenants leagues were nearly as ubiquitous as the city's many property owners and taxpayers associations, most of which had been organized along neighborhood or ward lines before the turn of the century. Many of the tenants leagues were closely tied to the Socialist Party, with which they were “blood relatives,” said Abraham Beckerman, a Socialist alderman and president of the East Side Tenants League, whose offices were located in Socialist Party headquarters on the Lower East Side. Other tenants leagues, among them the East Harlem Tenants League, operated out of the party's branch offices. Although run on a shoestring, the tenant associations mounted rent strikes, offered advice to striking tenants, negotiated for them with landlords, represented them in court, and engaged in lobbying in city hall (in Lower Manhattan) and the state capitol in Albany. They also joined forces to set up boroughwide and even citywide tenant associations, first the Greater New York Tenants League and later the Federation of Tenants Organizations of Greater New York.⁴⁶

“Every house should be organized,” said Samuel Orr, a Socialist assemblyman and leader of the Greater New York Tenants League, “and every block.” Every neighborhood should be organized too, every borough, and, if possible, the whole city. The tenants had to be well organized, explained Abraham I. Shiplacoff, whose wife was one of the leaders of the Pitkin Avenue rent strike, because the landlords, who were doing everything in their power to break the strikes and evict the strikers, were well organized. Like the tenants, the landlords had a great many neighborhood associations, some of which went as far back as the late nineteenth century. Brownsville, the scene of some of the New York's largest rent strikes, had several such associations, among them the Landlords Protective Association and the Brownsville Landlords Association, which was one of the most bellicose of its kind. The landlords also had a few citywide associations. Among the most important were the United Real Estate Owners Association, the first citywide real estate group to include tenement house owners, which was set up by several of New York's leading real estate men in the aftermath of the Tenement House Law of 1901, and the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, which was set up by a hundred Lower East Side tenement house owners to break the rent strikes of 1907–1908. In the face of such well-organized (and well-heeled) opposition, the tenants knew they stood little chance of forcing the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes unless they joined forces and stuck together. “Call it Bolshevism or anarchism,” Socialist Alderman B. C. Vladeck said at a mass meeting of tenant leaders and their supporters in March 1920, “but I call it real Americanism, when the people of the city get together to better their condition.”47