ch4

The Great
Rent Strikes

Some of the postwar rent strikes had a lighthearted, even festive air. Writing about one at 473 Powell Street, a tenement house in Brownsville, the New York Call reported in August 1918 that “the whole affair has been a picnic. The children have enjoyed the excitement. The hospitable women have enjoyed taking in their evicted neighbors. The evicted women are enjoying their visit. The rest are getting ready to take their turn when the marshal comes.” During some strikes mothers cooked meals on the sidewalks and children sang while they paraded around the block. “Strike, strike, strike!” went the songs. “I'm a striker, you're a striker!” During a strike on the Lower East Side, wrote the Call, the strikers, their children, and even their grandparents marched along Avenue C “to the tunes of the [nearby] music store's victrolas.”1 But the rent strikes were not picnics. They were serious matters, not life-and-death matters, but close enough. They were fraught with great risks. The strikers might lose their homes. Their families might end up on the street. The strikers might be attacked by thugs and beaten and arrested by the police. Their children might fall ill, especially if the strike took place in winter. And their furniture and other worldly goods might be damaged. In other words, the rent strikes were fierce, often violent struggles, the outcome of which had profound consequences not only for the tenants, their families, and their neighbors, but also for the city and the state.

For some New Yorkers, especially the leaders of the Socialist Party, the rent strikes were an integral part of an ongoing campaign to transform American society. Rents, they believed, were a result not so much of rising prices or even profiteering landlords as of the capitalist system and the institution of private property on which it was based. We do not want to reform the landlords, said Louis B. Paiewsky, a Socialist candidate for the Board of Aldermen who had joined the party in 1892. Rather, he said, “we want Socialism to supplant capitalism; we want an overthrow of the ownership of private property.” At a mass meeting of the East Side Tenants League, several Socialists spoke out in favor of taking the tenement houses from the landlords and turning them over to the tenants. William Karlin, a Socialist candidate for municipal court judge, declared, “The Socialist Party does not say you should pay less rent. It says you shouldn't pay any rent.” The soaring rents were tailor-made for the Socialists, Alderman Abraham Beckerman acknowledged. If the party helped the tenants bring a halt to the rent hikes, it would be “only natural to expect that the people we helped would vote with us.” Not all of them, but perhaps enough to gain control of the city government.2

But for most New Yorkers the rent strikes were nothing more and nothing less than a short-term measure to force the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes (and to deter them from raising the rents again in the near future). New York's tenants were no more revolutionary than its workers, most of whom joined forces to raise wages and improve working conditions, not to take the place of employers. They were much less revolutionary than the Veracruz tenants who went on strike in the early 1920s under the leadership of Herón Proal, the “Mexican Lenin,” who asked, “Why should we pay our rent? Why should our money help make the bourgeoisie fatter?” Even in Brownsville—which, wrote the Call, was the most “class conscious” neighborhood in the city—few tenants objected to paying a reasonable rent. Speaking on behalf of the Brownsville Tenants Union, which had roughly five thousand members, Samuel Spievack, its treasurer, and Henry O. Falk, its counsel, pointed out that “the fight is not against the landlords as such, but against the jacking up of rents, month by month, to the point where the man of small wages finds it impossible to pay.” The landlords, they conceded, were entitled to “a fair and equitable profit” and, at a time of rising prices, even to a modest rent hike. But for the recent increases, which ran as high as 100 percent, “there is absolutely no excuse.”³

Given their precarious legal position, the striking tenants were aware that they faced an uphill fight. But they were also aware that most landlords were vulnerable to a rent strike. And the longer it dragged on, the more vulnerable they were. With the exception of the few who had other business interests or other sources of income, the landlords needed the rent not only to support their families, but also to maintain their properties. It was out of the rent that they paid their taxes. And in the case of the many landlords who had first mortgages—and, even more so, the others who had second, third, and even fourth mortgages—it was out of the rent that they made their payments. It was also out of the rent that they paid the coal dealers and the utility companies as well as the janitors and other employees. The landlords could put off paying some bills for a while—and even cut back on heat and hot water and defer routine maintenance and non-emergency repairs. But at some point the suppliers and utilities would cut them off. The employees would find other jobs. Worst of all, the city and the banks would start foreclosure proceedings. A case in point was Yetta Kaufman, the owner of a small tenement house in Brooklyn whose eleven tenants went on strike in the spring of 1919. Unable to pay her taxes and interest, she lost the property.⁴

Moreover, if the landlords were driven to bring summary proceedings, they would have to pay someone to serve notice on the striking tenants. They would have to hire a marshal to represent them in court—to explain to the judge why he should issue a final order and then to ask him to issue an eviction warrant. The landlords would also have to pay the marshal to execute the warrant. Just how much these charges came to is hard to say. But during the 1907–1908 rent strike on the Lower East Side, it cost $8 to evict each tenant. After World War I it probably cost twice as much. If a landlord retained a lawyer to represent him in court, it cost much more. It also cost at least as much—and, in many cases even more—to remove the tenants and their belongings. The schleppers charged $10 to $12 per apartment, according to one estimate, $12 to $15, according to another. By early 1920, when the going rate was $15 an apartment, they were asking $5 a room. To empty a tenement house with sixteen to twenty-four tenants would cost more than $250, said the chair of the Harlem Tenants League, in December 1918. In September 1919 the agent for the B.F.W. Realty Company, which owned seventeen tenement houses in Brooklyn, estimated that it would cost over $12 apiece to oust the 450 tenants against whom eviction warrants had been issued from their three-room apartments. Given that the company was asking only $12.50 to $15 a month for rear apartments and $14 to $20 for front apartments, this was a substantial sum.5

Many tenants were confident that a well-organized strike—a strike that mobilized every family in the building and that dragged on for weeks and perhaps months—would expose these vulnerabilities. They believed that once a landlord realized how much it would cost to resist the strikers’ demands—how much he would lose if the tenants withheld their rent and how much he would have to spend to evict the striking tenants—he would have no choice but to give in. Modeled on the practices of striking workers, who tried to force employers to raise wages and improve working conditions by shutting down production, this strategy had been applied with limited success in the prewar rent strikes. Faced with the loss of as much as one or two months’ rent and the expense of ousting the striking tenants, some Lower East Side landlords decided that it would be cheaper to reduce the rent. Whether a strategy that had worked in some cases in one neighborhood before the war would work elsewhere in the city after the war remained to be seen. But if it was too much to expect that a rent strike would bring the landlord “to his knees,” as J. Lewis Dubow, secretary of the Harlem Tenants League, put it in early 1920, it was perhaps not too much to expect that it might force him to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement with the striking tenants.⁶

In their efforts to force the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes (and in a few cases to lower the rents), the striking tenants employed much the same strategy that had been employed in the prewar rent strikes. They did what they could to reduce the landlords’ revenue. They withheld the rent—or in some cases offered to pay the old rent, not a dollar more. They told the landlords (or their agents and janitors) that “they are on strike,” said the attorney for an East Harlem landlord. Sent to collect the rent, the janitors for a large Brooklyn real estate trust “received little encouragement and less money,” reported the New York Daily Tribune. “I visited 50 families,” remarked an agent for a landlord who had just raised the rent at his apartment house in Long Island City. “Not one of the tenants would pay me the increased rent.” Some offered to pay the old rent, but he refused to accept it. Although not violent, the striking tenants were “quite abusive,” he noted. Some of the strikers took a more aggressive stance. When he came to collect the rent, a group of tenants led by three housewives would not let him into the building, complained Abraham Levow, who owned a tenement house at 1294 Lexington Avenue. The strikers not only collected the rent and held onto it, but, declaring that they would run the building “to suit themselves,” even refused to let the plumber in to make repairs. Marching into the janitor's apartment, they cried, “The Bolsheviki are in control.”7

For many landlords it was bad enough when the striking tenants withheld the rent, even worse when they collected it and refused to turn it over. According to Harry Kannensohn, who owned two six-story tenement houses on East 104th Street, forty-four of his tenants went on strike in the spring of 1919. They formed what he called “a tenant's soviet,” joined a local tenants league, and set up a strike committee, which collected and held $1,200 in rent. (To Kannensohn's charges that the strikers were Bolsheviks, one of their leaders replied, “I am 100 per cent. American. My husband and I are members of the Wichita Democratic Club,” which was part of Tammany Hall.) By collecting and holding the rent, the tenants gained a good deal of leverage over the landlords. One group refused to turn the money over to the landlord until he signed an agreement that he would reduce a recent rent hike and would not raise the rent again in the near future. Another group told Rose Rudinsky, the owner of several tenement houses on East 136th Street, that it would hold onto the money until she made what the tenants regarded as necessary improvements. (Refusing to give in to the striking tenants’ demands, Rudinsky's lawyer declared, “We claim the right to operate the house as we see fit, and not as the tenants dictate.”) In some cases the tenants leagues told the landlords “what repairs are to be made, when they are to be made, and by whom they are to be made,” wrote the New York Herald. They then held the rent until the landlords complied.⁸

The strikers also appealed to their fellow tenants—many of whom were afraid they would be evicted if they went on strike—to withhold their rent. Neighbors had a moral obligation to stand by one another, the strikers said; unless they did, there was little chance that the strike would succeed. If the other tenants ignored these appeals, the strikers resorted to ostracism, intimidation, and even violence. “The ‘evicted’ woman is the hero in Brownsville today,” the Call wrote in April 1918; “no one has any use for the woman who is submissive and pays the rent.” Writing about the strike at 473 Powell Street, the paper said, “Every family in the house but one has refused to pay the increase.” For the holdout the neighbors had only scorn. “She is the scab,” the other women said. Many strikers were so hostile to the scabs that in some cases where the landlord was willing to rescind or reduce the rent hike they refused to call off the strike unless he promised to evict them. The hostility was especially pronounced at 1574 Lexington Avenue, where an elderly tenant named Esther Domowitz broke ranks with the striking tenants and paid a $5 rent hike. Pauline Hinerfield, another tenant and owner of a nearby candy store, upbraided Domowitz, who refused to back down. After a brief scuffle, the women had to be separated by bystanders. Returning home to find his mother hysterical, Solomon Domowitz attacked Hinerfield, who was taken to Harlem Hospital. Aroused by rumors that Hinerfield had been killed, a large crowd went after Domowitz, but the police took him into custody before things got out of hand.9

Realizing that in order to generate much needed revenue the landlords had to replace the striking tenants with paying tenants, the strikers did their utmost to deter prospective tenants from renting apartments that were (or would soon be) vacant. In addition to posting signs on their windows saying that the house was on strike, they urged prospective tenants to keep away. “Don't scab,” read one of the signs. The striking tenants also set up picket lines in front of the buildings. When a prospective tenant arrived, the picketers would say in what the Call described as “a healthy stage whisper, ‘Rent strike, lady.’” The picketers would then encircle the prospective tenant, explain why they were on strike, and ask for support. Many prospective tenants, especially those who were members of labor unions, were unwilling to cross a picket line. Had they tried, the picketers would have blocked them. Even some landlords and their agents were intimidated by the picket lines. Referring to a woman who worked as an agent for Abraham Pearlman, the owner of 473 Powell Street, the striking tenants told a reporter, “She brings customers looking for rooms to this house while we are asleep at night. She takes them up the stairs in the house next door and brings them down through the roof to look at the rooms that are to let here.”¹⁰ Even in New York's tight housing market, all but the most desperate prospective tenants would probably have decided to look for an apartment in another building rather than sneak into 473 Powell Street after dark.

These measures were often effective. The pickets have “frightened off prospective tenants,” observed the lawyer for a Harlem landlady in late 1919. They “have thus far prevented [a Brooklyn landlord] from renting a single apartment,” wrote a Call reporter in early 1920. But if need be, the striking tenants were prepared to take more drastic measures. Some of them warned prospective tenants that if they moved into the apartments of evicted tenants they would be beaten and thrown out of windows. To further discourage prospective tenants, the striking tenants urged old tenants to stay in their apartments as long as possible, making it hard for new tenants to move in. The strikers also urged the unions that represented the craftsmen who decorated apartments when they turned over to ask their members to refuse to do work in any apartment from which a tenant had been evicted. They also called on the Moving Van Workers Union, which represented many schleppers, to refuse to move a new tenant into an apartment whose previous tenant had been ousted for withholding the rent. If a prospective tenant was not put off by these obstacles, a group of tenant activists from Brownsville and East New York urged the strikers to find out whether he was affiliated with any labor union or fraternal, social, and religious group. They would then report “the offending new tenant” to the organization and demand that he be expelled, which would make it hard (and sometimes impossible) for him to get a job.11

In their effort to force the landlords to submit, the striking tenants also did what they could to make it as expensive as possible to evict them. They stayed in their apartments after they began withholding the rent—and called on other tenants to stay put as well. By so doing the striking tenants left the landlords with no choice but to start summary proceedings. Hence they were obliged to employ one or more agents to serve notice on the striking tenants, to request a precept from a municipal court judge requiring the tenants to show cause why they should not be evicted, to explain to the judge why he should issue a final order and, if a stay was granted, to wait until it expired and then appeal to the judge for an eviction warrant. In most cases—in roughly 95 percent of one thousand landlord-tenant disputes in Manhattan and the Bronx in May 1919¹²—the landlords hired a marshal to represent them in court (as well as to serve the papers and execute the warrants), which was not cheap. In the other cases they retained a lawyer, which was much more costly. If all went well, the landlords also had to hire the schleppers to remove the tenants. At a time when many tenants were withholding the rent, the cost of summary proceedings was a heavy drain on more than a few owners.

Although summary proceedings were fairly expensive, the striking tenants found a few ingenious ways to make them even more expensive. When striking tenants were summoned to show cause why they should not be removed from the premises, the case was ordinarily heard by a municipal court judge, who as a rule had no choice but to issue a final order—and perhaps grant the tenants a short stay to look for another apartment. But the striking tenants had the right to ask for a jury trial, provided they were willing to pay a modest fee. A small but not insignificant number of striking tenants exercised that right. A case in point was a group of thirty tenants at 1402 Clay Avenue in the Bronx, all of whom elected to put their fate in the hands of a jury. By asking for a jury trial, the strikers often forced the landlords to go to the additional expense of retaining a lawyer—a boon for the many lawyers who were losing business to the marshals. From the tenants’ viewpoint, a jury trial had other advantages too. Most of the jurors were tenants, who were anything but sympathetic to the landlords. And though the judges were bound to instruct them that the law was on the landlord's side, there was always a possibility that the jurors would rule in the tenants’ favor anyway. As the New York Telegram wrote, many tenants believe that by asking for a jury trial “they stand a better chance of resisting their landlord.” A jury trial also delayed the proceedings, often for a week or two, so that even if the tenants lost they were able to withhold the rent that much longer.¹³

Another way by which the striking tenants attempted to make summary proceedings more expensive was to ask the judge to deny the landlord's request for an eviction warrant. Since a final order had already been issued, most judges saw no grounds on which to grant the tenants’ motion. But there were exceptions. One was Harry Robitzek, who was fed up with the many landlords who were taking advantage of the housing shortage to jack up the rents. Citing the authority of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, he declared in April 1919 that before signing a warrant he would henceforth insist that the landlord provide a certificate showing that none of the tenants was in military service (or dependent on anyone in military service). If the landlord could not provide a certificate, Robitzek would order an adjournment. The landlords argued that to get a certificate from the War Department would take a week to ten days and put them to much additional expense. Although Robitzek was not swayed by this argument, he offered to sign a warrant if the landlord would make a sworn statement that the tenants were not covered by the Civil Relief Act. None of the landlords did so, he pointed out. A month later Judge William E. Morris took much the same position. Over the strong objections of the landlord's lawyer, Morris refused to sign a warrant until he received affidavits that none of the tenants was dependent on anyone in military service. The landlord, who was already paying the lawyer to represent him in court, now had to pay a marshal to obtain the affidavits too.14

Yet another way by which the striking tenants attempted to make summary proceedings more expensive was to deter the schleppers from removing them from their apartments. When the owner of a tenement house in the South Bronx raised the rent from $15 to $26 a month, his tenants objected. And when the landlord's agent rejected their offer to pay the increased rent in return for a six-month lease, the tenants threatened to strike. The landlord promptly served notice. And after the court issued a final order and an eviction warrant, the schleppers started ousting the tenants. But when told by the tenants that a mother of six who had just given birth to twins lived in one apartment and an elderly couple lived in another, the schleppers “threw up their hands,” wrote a Call reporter, and announced, “We won't put those people out under any circumstances.” Things were much the same in Brooklyn, where 450 tenants went on strike when the B.F.W. Realty Company raised the rents from $9 to $15 a month on some apartments and from $11 to $18 a month on others. The company brought summary proceedings. The court ruled in its favor. And armed with eviction warrants, a team of schleppers began ousting the tenants in September. But when the striking women showed they belonged to the Williamsburg Tenants League, the schleppers, who were themselves union members, stopped work.¹⁵

If the schleppers were not swayed by appeals to their compassion and class interests, the striking tenants were prepared to take more drastic (and if need be even unlawful) measures. In May 1919 Marshal David Goldberg and a team of schleppers started to evict the striking tenants at 405 Hinsdale Avenue in Brooklyn. Things went smoothly enough until the schleppers reached the apartment of a tenant whose eleven-year-old was suffering from the grippe and tonsillitis. Pointing out that the Board of Health had not issued a certificate of illness, Goldberg ordered them to press ahead. But as soon as the schleppers took the furniture out of the apartment, a group of angry women put it back. The women then took up a collection and gave $12 to the schleppers “on condition,” wrote the Eagle, “that nothing more be done to disturb the unhappy tenant.” A month later a group of Bronx tenants who were about to be evicted piled pianos, stoves, and other heavy and bulky objects in front of the door of their tenement house on Brown Place. With the schleppers faced with the task of moving these objects away from the entrance and then carrying the furniture down five or six flights of stairs, Marshal Charles Moshier persuaded the landlady to reduce the rent hike by more than half and sign an agreement that the rent would not be raised again for a year. Still other striking tenants attacked a marshal, his deputies, and the schleppers with bricks and stones and, in one case, charged the schleppers, using furniture and bedding rolls as weapons, and drove them from the site.16

The striking tenants took it for granted that it was in their interest to withhold the rent and resist eviction as long as possible. A long strike, one that dragged on for weeks or months, deprived the landlords of much needed revenue at the same time that it forced them to dip into reserves to pay the marshals, schleppers, and lawyers. A long strike also left the landlords vulnerable to unforeseeable developments that could further push back the day when they could regain possession of their buildings and fill them with paying tenants. In early May 1919, for example, the schleppers went on strike for higher wages, thereby bringing evictions to a standstill. And in early December the municipal court judges agreed to honor the holiday spirit by making every effort to postpone all dispossess proceedings until after Christmas. A long strike put the landlords at the mercy of the tenants in another way. Perhaps inspired by the prewar rent strikes, during which a few tenants threatened to burn down the houses, some strikers threatened to do serious damage to the buildings. A few carried out the threats, breaking windows and fixtures, defacing walls, and destroying stoves and hot water heaters, before vacating the premises. In one Bronx apartment house the striking tenants did $5,000 in damage before they were evicted, said the lawyer for the landlord's agent.¹⁷ If the strike dragged on long enough, the landlords might be forced to conclude that it made more sense to rescind the rent hikes than to hold the line and spend a year or more trying to recoup their losses.

The landlords believed that the way to break a strike as quickly as possible was to bring summary proceedings. For their part the tenants assumed that the way to win a strike was to drag these proceedings on as long as possible. Although this was easier said than done, the tenants had cause for cautious optimism. They could often count on the tenants leagues and socialist organizations to provide lawyers to represent them in court. The striking tenants also had reason to hope that their case might be heard by one of the many municipal court judges who were openly antagonistic to profiteering landlords. If the judge ruled against them, the striking tenants could count on some of the neighbors to take them in. They also knew that they could find temporary shelter in churches, synagogues, and armories. If worse came to worst, the striking tenants could often depend on the tenants leagues and other groups to store their belongings in nearby warehouses. And they had reason to believe that in the event such arrangements fell through their neighbors might take up a collection to buy tarpaulin to protect their belongings from the rain. The local firefighters might be willing to supply tarpaulin too.18 Given this moral and logistical support, the strikers were confident that they could force the landlords to abandon their efforts to raise the rent.

To what extent the tenants’ confidence was warranted is hard to say. Between May 1918 and April 1920, the heyday of tenant activism, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of rent strikes in New York. The newspapers covered only a few, usually the largest, longest, and most tumultuous, and covered even fewer from start to finish. And no agency made a systematic survey of the strikes and their outcomes. What is more, the available evidence is contradictory. Judge John R. Davies, who presided over Manhattan's Seventh District Court on West 145th Street, one of the busiest in the city, wrote in late 1919 that of the 12,000 landlord-tenant disputes that came before him, fewer than a dozen resulted in eviction. Yet the Lockwood Committee reported in early 1920 that “never before in the history of the city of New York have there been so many evictions.” More than half took place in Manhattan. More than a quarter occurred in Brooklyn, where, the Call wrote in mid-1919, “Scarcely a day passed without 15 or 20 families being evicted [in Brownsville alone]” and the Eagle added that Marshal David Goldberg “has been about the busiest man [in the neighborhood].” Another sixth of the evictions took place in the Bronx, where the Telegram wrote in late 1919 that it was common to see “women and children sleeping in the hallways and basements of the buildings they have been forced to vacate.” So many tenants were facing eviction, the Home News reported, that there was talk about turning the Pelham Bay Naval Camp barracks into a temporary shelter.¹⁹

Some rent strikes were successful. A case in point was the strike at 473 Powell Street, a small tenement house in Brownsville, which started in the summer of 1918, when Abraham Pearlman served notice that he was raising the rent as of September 1. His twenty tenants objected. With the help of the Brownsville Consumers League, which was affiliated with the Socialist Party, they went on strike. All but one, who was denounced as a “scab,” withheld the rent, and some posted signs in Yiddish on their windows calling attention to the strike. Pearlman responded by bringing summary proceedings. Before long, six of the striking tenants, including one of the two leaders, were evicted. Four other tenants were to be evicted within a week. And the other tenant leader was about to appear in court, where he was unlikely to fare any better than the other strikers. The strike, however, dragged on. The other tenants withheld the rent—and took in their homeless neighbors, who stored their furniture in a nearby warehouse. Concluding that it would cost too much to oust all the tenants, Pearlman offered to meet with their representatives and their lawyer, Emanuel Mehl, counsel for the Brownsville Consumers League. Together they reached an agreement by which Pearlman rescinded the rent hikes for some tenants and reduced them for the others. He also promised that he would not raise the rents again before May 1, 1919, and in the meantime would make repairs as needed. Pearlman allowed the evicted tenants to move back into their homes—and at the insistence of the strikers even agreed to evict the “scab” at the end of the month.20

Another successful strike took place at 952 Anderson Avenue, an apartment house in the Bronx that was owned by William H. Lammars. Early in October 1919 Lammars notified his fifteen tenants that effective November 1 he was raising the rents from $23 to $45 on some apartments and from $28 to $50 a month on the others. When the tenants refused to pay the increased rent, Lammars's attorney brought summary proceedings against five of the strikers. Judge Harry Robitzek, who presided over the Bronx First District Court, appointed a lawyer to represent the tenants. At his request, the judge granted an adjournment. When the case resumed, Robitzek urged Lammars to consider reducing the rent hikes. The landlord refused—and his lawyer, George H. Hannecke, insisted that the judge had no power to adjust the rent. Robitzek said that might be true under ordinary conditions, but conditions in the Bronx were far from ordinary. When Robitzek calculated that under the new rents revenues would exceed expenses by 50 percent, he told Lammars, “I do not intend to sit here and let you or any other landlord continue practices that will make the people of this home-loving community Bolsheviks and anarchists.” Lammars refused to give in. He “wanted the money or the rooms,” said Hannecke. When Robitzek asked on what basis Lammars set the rent and Hannecke replied, “None of your business,” the judge had enough. Declaring that it was indeed “my business,” he refused to sign the eviction warrants, thereby allowing the five striking tenants to stay in their apartments. “I will test this case in a higher court,” shouted Hannecke. “That's your privilege,” responded Robitzek.²¹

Other rent strikes were unsuccessful. One example was the strike at 399 and 405 Hinsdale Avenue, two small tenement houses in Brownsville that were owned by L. Halperin. Starting in March 1918, Halperin imposed the first of five hikes, which raised the rent on his apartments from $15 to $23 a month. But when he announced the rent was going up another $2 on May 1, 1919, the tenants refused to pay. Early in May Halperin brought summary proceedings against the thirty-eight striking tenants. Shortly thereafter Judge Cornelius Ferguson, who presided over Brooklyn's Fifth District Court, ordered the strikers to pay the new rent or move out. When the tenants ignored the judge's order, Marshal David Goldberg and a team of schleppers began emptying the apartments. In short order they ousted fourteen tenants, whose families were taken in by other tenants and whose belongings were stored at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum. But in the face of mounting resistance from the tenants and their neighbors, Goldberg ordered the schleppers to stop. At the urging of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, Halperin agreed to meet with representatives of the remaining twenty-four tenants on May 20th—provided that Socialist assemblyman Abraham I. Shiplacoff did not sit in on the meeting. Although Shiplacoff agreed to step aside, negotiations soon broke down when Halperin refused to consider any settlement that allowed the evicted tenants to return to their apartments. Weather (and a schleppers’ strike) permitting, Marshal Goldberg got ready to oust the remaining tenants.22

Another unsuccessful strike took place at 740 and 744 Trinity Avenue, two rundown apartment houses in the South Bronx. The strike got under way in late September 1919 after Louis Margolies, the agent for the owners, notified the sixty-two tenants that the rent would be raised $3 to $5 a month effective October 1. The tenants, who had gone along with two previous rent hikes, protested. Forming a union, they informed Margolies that they would pay the increased rent only if he decorated the apartments and gave them a year's lease. Insisting that he would not deal with the tenants as a group, Margolies started summary proceedings. When the tenants stuck to their position, however, he agreed to meet with their representatives. But he refused to back down, even when the tenants offered to settle for a six-month lease. “I can't do anything for you,” he said. Neither, it turned out, could the courts. Armed with eviction warrants, the marshal and schleppers began removing the tenants on October 20. They soon ousted some tenants, many of whom spent the night on the sidewalks, sitting next to their furniture, or moved in with neighbors. When the schleppers balked at removing others, the marshal prevailed on Margolies to meet again with the tenants’ representatives. But there was little reason to believe that the agent would give in or that the tenants would have any choice other than to pay the increased rent or vacate the premises, which many were prepared to do.²³

Still other rent strikes were settled on more or less mutually satisfactory terms. A case in point was one that broke out in the Bronx in the fall of 1918 and, according to the Call, turned into the “biggest rent strike of the year.” Early in September the landlord, a company that owned several apartment houses on East 197th Street, notified about 130 tenants that their rents would be raised on October 1. The tenants responded by holding a mass meeting at the Seventh Assembly District headquarters of the Socialist Party. With the support of Samuel Orr and Morris Gisnet, they went on strike. For roughly two months the tenants withheld their rent. Unable to break the strike, the landlord agreed to negotiate with the strikers. Representatives of both sides held several meetings and what the Call referred to as “arbitration conferences,” which were chaired by Mary Marfdin, executive secretary of the Greater New York Tenants League. In early December they reached an agreement by which the landlord reduced the rent hike by a dollar a month, promised to reduce it again in April 1919, and guaranteed that the apartments would have adequate heat and hot water. The tenants called off the strike—and, though the Call did not say so, presumably paid the rent they had withheld in October and November.²⁴

Another rent strike that was settled on more or less mutually satisfactory terms took place a year later in Brooklyn. Early in August 1919 the B.F.W. Realty Company, which owned seventeen five-story apartment houses in Williamsburg, notified the tenants that the rents would be raised on September 1. Fifteen or twenty tenants responded by starting a rent strike. Before long hundreds of others, many of whom were members of the Williamsburg Tenants League, joined them. Spokesmen for the tenants justified the strike on the grounds that the increase was excessive and the houses were poorly cared for. Spokesmen for the landlord defended the increase on the grounds that the company had spent $20,000 on repairs and improvements since acquiring the properties in June. When negotiations broke down, the company brought summary proceedings against 450 tenants. Although the court sided with the landlord, Marshal Daniel McBride ran into trouble when the schleppers refused to remove the strikers who had “union cards.” After five weeks—during which, wrote the Times, the neighborhood was “a storm centre for rent striking”—representatives of the landlord and tenants sat down together and, with the help of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, hammered out an agreement. The tenants would call off the strike and pay the rent that had been withheld (and deposited in a bank by the strike committee). In return the landlord would reduce the rent hike, offer the tenants a nine-month lease, and make repairs as needed.25

Of the many postwar rent strikes, most were settled. A few were resolved out of court. In some cases the landlords and tenants came to an accord on their own. In others they reached an agreement at the urging of one of the city marshals or high-ranking police officers. But most strikes were resolved in court. According to well-informed observers, several municipal court judges tried hard to get the landlords and tenants to settle their differences amicably. Among them were Morris Eder of Manhattan, Jacob S. Strahl of Brooklyn, and Peter A. Sheil of the Bronx. Sheil was especially successful, wrote the Bronx Home News. A native of the Bronx, he went to P.S. 12, Manhattan College, and New York Law School, entered politics as a Democrat, and, after serving three terms on the Board of Aldermen, won election as a municipal court judge in 1907 and again in 1917. During the fall of 1919, Sheil heard five thousand landlord-tenant disputes in the First District Court, which he presided over with Harry Robitzek. In most cases, wrote the Home News, Sheil prevailed on the landlords and tenants to settle—and even persuaded the landlords to give the tenants a lease, usually for a year, which protected them from another rent hike in the near future and enabled them to avoid what the paper called “an almost hopeless search for a new apartment.” Asked to account for his success, Sheil replied, “There is no secret to it. I just use common sense. Both the landlord and tenants come to Court with what they believe is [a just] grievance.” After listening to both and telling them how it looked to a third party, “in nine times out of ten both the landlord and tenant see the light of day and agree to settle.”²⁶

Although Judge Sheil usually tried to persuade the parties to settle, he was not always solicitous of the tenants who appeared before him. In the spring of 1918 twenty families went on strike when their landlady, a Miss Klemann, raised the rent on their apartments at 1102–1106 Union Avenue $5 to $9 a month. Klemann responded by bringing summary proceedings. Rather than risk eviction, five tenants paid the increased rent. The other fifteen were summoned to appear before Sheil in late May. Although the tenants’ lawyer, Assemblyman Samuel Orr, offered evidence that Klemann had promised she would not raise the rent more than $3 a month, the judge was not moved. “I have no sympathy for the tenants,” he said. When Orr reminded him that Klemann had broken her promise to the tenants, Sheil declared, “That is her business.” Sheil sometimes ruled in favor of the tenants, among them a South Bronx family covered by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, to which he granted a stay of three months over the strenuous objections of the landlord. When he threatened to appeal, the judge told him to “appeal to President Wilson.” But as late as the spring of 1919 Sheil was still advising tenants that it was not in their interest to go on strike when the landlord raised the rent—and that if they did he would have no alternative but to oust them.27

By late 1919 several other municipal court judges were severely troubled by the plight of the tenants and the greed of the landlords. Among them were not only Jacob Panken, New York's only Socialist judge, who, as the Call pointed out, did not “camouflage his sympathies [for the tenants],” but also Aaron J. Levy, who was an outspoken opponent of socialism and Bolshevism. Shortly before stepping down from the bench, he said how painful it had been for him to watch hundreds and even thousands of tenants being gouged by their landlords. He was as outraged as much by the profiteering landlords as by the “Bolsheviki” tenants leagues, both of which “must be wipe[d] out.” Much like Levy, Harry Robitzek felt that the tenants “have been gouged to the limit.” Although he told one group of striking tenants that they “ought to have more sense than to listen to the babblings of Bolshevik agitators,” he acknowledged, “There is too much profiteering going on.” “It amounts to nothing more than a plunder of the poor.” And it drives otherwise law-abiding people to Bolshevism. “If anything can be found to stop this crime,” he said, “this court will do all it can.” Among the other judges who were fed up with being asked to order hard-strapped tenants to pay excessive rent hikes or move out of their apartments were Jacob S. Strahl, who told a packed court in October 1919, “I will not be a party to the profiteering landlord's game.”²⁸

As the housing shortage grew worse, many of these judges—even some who complained that under the law they had no alternative but to issue eviction warrants in cases of nonpayment of rent—took steps to ease the plight of the tenants. As early as April 1919 Robitzek announced that he would not order tenants to pay the rent except in cases where the increase was reasonable. Several months later he declared, “I am not going to issue a single eviction warrant where I am assured the tenant has been gouged.” In May 1919 Morris also said that he would not issue eviction warrants and that whenever a landlord attempted to “hog it all” he would string the case out as long as possible. By the fall Panken was refusing to issue eviction warrants too. And several Bronx judges were denying the landlords’ requests except in cases where the tenants had withheld the rent without good reason or engaged in acts of vandalism. In early October so many tenants were facing eviction that Levy, president of the Board of Municipal Court Justices, asked his colleagues to stay all summary proceedings until November. At the end of the year the Bronx judges agreed to make every effort to postpone these proceedings until after the holidays. And in early February 1920 Judge Morris said, “We are going to do what we can to prevent evictions of any kind until the fair weather sets in.” If possible, “we will keep tenants in their apartments until April 1.”²⁹

Not all the municipal court judges were as sympathetic to the tenants as Morris. A case in point was Benjamin Hoffman of Manhattan, who thought that the reports of the housing shortage were much exaggerated. There were plenty of desirable apartments for rent on the Lower East Side, he said. The problem was that most tenants, even many tenants of “modest means,” refused to live in the old-law tenements. They insisted on an up-to-date apartment, with “a marble entrance, marble stairs, an elevator, [and] a bathroom, the tub of which is not infrequently used for the baby to sleep in or to store some household paraphernalia.” Another case in point was Edward A. Richards of Brooklyn, who denounced a group of striking tenants from Brownsville as “nothing but Bolsheviks.” The law “empowered a landlord to charge as much as he wanted,” Richards said. Unless the tenants agreed to pay the rent or move out of their apartments, they “could expect nothing better than the harshest treatment from him,” the Call reported. Richards's remarks so outraged the leaders of the Brooklyn Tenants Union that they called for his impeachment. Just as Morris and other judges invariably sided with the tenants, so Richards and other judges regularly ruled in favor of the landlords. The result, said William H. Stonebridge, a Bronx real estate dealer, was that the municipal courts had no uniform standards by which they dealt with landlord-tenant disputes in general and rent strikes in particular. “This is not law or justice,” he protested. “It is just as unfair to the tenant as to the landlord. It is worse than anarchy.”30

The municipal courts had several problems other than the lack of uniform standards. By far the most serious was the staggering increase in the caseload. By virtue of the soaring number of summary proceedings, a result in large part of the great rash of rent strikes, the courts were jam-packed in 1919. The situation was bad enough in early May, when there were 2,000 landlord-tenant cases on the calendar, including 350 in Judge Michael J. Scanlan's courthouse in the North Bronx, where all records for summary proceedings were broken. It was even worse in the fall. By early October there were 10,000 cases on the calendar, a whopping 1,400 in Judge Robitzek's courthouse on East 163rd Street alone. “There has never been a time when there were so many cases to be heard in one day [in the Bronx],” the Telegram observed. The courts were very busy in Brooklyn too. More than one hundred cases were on the calendar in the second, fourth, and sixth judicial districts, and more than two hundred in the first, third, and seventh. October 6 was “one of the busiest days” ever in the Brooklyn municipal courts, wrote the Daily Eagle. The courts were also very busy in Manhattan, especially in Harlem and on the Lower East Side. All things considered, wrote the Herald, October 6 was “the busiest day” in the history of the municipal courts. The caseload declined later in the year, though in early December the Bronx courts were still so clogged that three Manhattan judges were dispatched to help their overworked colleagues uptown.³¹

In virtually all these cases the defendants were tenants, most of whom had refused to pay the rent or had “held over,” remaining in the apartments after the leases had expired. Summoned to show cause why they should not be evicted, thousands of them converged on courthouses all over much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Most were women, many of whom carried infants in their arms, wheeled baby carriages, and watched over other children who tugged at their dresses. “They're too small to leave alone,” explained Mary Nolan, a Bronx mother of four. More often than not, the tenants arrived in the early morning. But the courtrooms were so quickly filled that most had to stand outside and wait—in the sun if they were lucky, in the rain if, like Nolan and her children, they were not. Sometimes they waited until mid- or late afternoon. The crowd in front of Judge Robitzek's courthouse was so large that police reserves, who were sent from the Morrisania precinct house, told the tenants to form seven lines, which stretched from the courthouse stairs to the sidewalk and brought pedestrian traffic to a halt. The reserves also set aside an open space opposite the courthouse for baby carriages. Elsewhere in the Bronx the courthouse doors were locked from the inside to keep the tenants out until the judge was ready to hear their case. “As the cases were called,” the Times reported, “the titles of the actions were relayed through the crowds that lined the stairs until they finally reached the street, where the announcements were made and the principals involved threaded their way into the court room.”32

The courtrooms were, if anything, even more crowded than the sidewalks. They were jam-packed not only with tenants and their families, but also with landlords and their agents, marshals and their deputies and clerks, and, of course, lawyers, “some representing clients,” wrote the Home News, and “some looking for clients.” Judge Levy said that his courtroom on East Broadway was so crowded that “you could hardly enter [it].” Indeed, the courtrooms in the Bronx were so jammed that some tenants could not even get in—and thus could not answer the summons. With some courtrooms so crowded that, as the Telegram put it, they “could not have held another person,” many litigants were unable to make their way to the witness stand when their case was called. Often they had to give their testimony from their seats in the rear, wrote the Evening Post. In some cases the courtrooms (and the corridors and stairways leading up to them) were so crowded that after the case was disposed of the litigants could only get out by climbing down the fire escape. Robitzek's courtroom was so packed, the Home News wrote, that at times the noise reached a level where “it was utterly impossible for the justice or his clerks to hear a word that was being said.”³³

With the courts and sidewalks jammed with thousands of anxious tenants, most of whom were very angry at their landlords, it is not surprising that things sometimes got out of hand. When the landlords arrived, the tenants denounced them as “profiteers” and “thieves”—and, in some cases, wrote the Home News, “hissed and jeered” at them. Some tenants even pelted “profiteering” landlords with vegetables—and, in one case, with stones. In Harlem and the Bronx, said the World, the disorder “at times took on the proportions of a small riot.” And in Brooklyn, the Eagle reported, five hundred women, “weeping and wailing, with little children toddling at their heels,” stormed the Pennsylvania Avenue municipal court. On occasion police or police reserves had to be sent in to restore order. Things sometimes got out of hand inside the courts as well. A small brawl broke out in Robitzek's courtroom when Mrs. Alice Cavanaugh, who represented fifty-six striking tenants, hit Julius D. Tobias, the landlord's lawyer. Although dazed, Tobias “returned the blow,” wrote the Call. A bigger brawl erupted in Magistrate Francis X. Mancuso's courtroom in Harlem, where Louis Schecter and his brother Lazarus were facing criminal charges that grew out of a dispute with one of their tenants at 260 Riverside Drive. Toward the end of the trial Lazarus Schecter punched Assistant District Attorney William O'Shaughnnessey in the nose. O'Shaughnnessey retaliated. Shouting “you are killing my brother!” Schecter's sister then threw a book at the prosecutor. Court attendants broke up the fight, wrote the Times, but not before several chairs and tables were overturned.34

By late 1919 and early 1920 the municipal court judges were at their wits’ end. “What in God's name are we to do [with] the men and women and children, thousands and thousands of them, [who are pouring into our courtrooms?]” Harry Robitzek asked. To give each case the attention it deserved—to allow the tenants and landlords to testify, to permit the lawyers to examine (and cross-examine) witnesses, to evaluate the evidence, and, if possible, persuade the parties to settle—took a good deal of time under ordinary circumstances. It took even more time when some of the litigants could not speak English and many of them, as many as three-quarters, estimated the Home News, did not “understand what was going on.” But the judges did not have the time. With so many cases on the calendar, they “are unable to give but a few minutes to the consideration of [each one],” reported the Lockwood Committee. Often a few minutes were more than they could spare. The judges were also aware that hundreds, if not thousands, of tenants and their children were waiting outside the courts, often for hours and sometimes in the rain, which gave them another incentive, wrote the Home News, “to hurry the cases through in record-breaking time.” Small wonder that more than a few judges concluded that the only way to clear their calendars was to postpone the cases in the hope that the landlords and tenants would come to an agreement before they were scheduled to return to court.³⁵

The municipal courts were so clogged with landlord-tenant disputes that it seemed the judicial system was on the verge of collapse, wrote the Herald. Overwhelmed by the many thousands of summary proceedings, the judges had no time to deal with other types of civil suits, the parties to which were left in legal limbo. Unless the judges were able to prevail on the landlords and tenants to settle, they were likely to leave one side or another extremely dissatisfied—not only by the verdict but also by the cursory process by which it was reached. If, on the one hand, the judges applied what Robitzek called “the law of common sense”—and refused to issue eviction warrants in cases of rent profiteering—the landlords would be outraged. And as Levy pointed out, there was a good chance that these judges would be reversed on appeal. But if, on the other hand, the judges adhered to the New York State statutes (or, in Robitzek's words, “the present antiquated laws”)—and issued warrants of eviction in cases of nonpayment of rent—the tenants would be furious. And if a tenant finds that he cannot get relief from the courts, Robitzek pointed out, “he becomes not only dissatisfied with the court[s] but invariably with our form of government, and he becomes easy prey for the public agitator or socialist”—a concern that was shared by many municipal court judges.36

Much as Robitzek feared, there were signs that many tenants were losing faith that the courts would protect them from profiteering landlords. To stop landlords from raising the rent, to deter them from bringing summary proceedings, and, if necessary, to force them to rescind or reduce the hikes, some tenants threatened to destroy their property. Late in 1919 a group of tenants told Max Feuerstein, a Lower East Side landlord, that if he tried to collect the rent, “We will break the glass, the plumbing and anything [else] we run across.” Other tenants went even further, threatening the landlord's life and limb. When Andrew O'Brien raised the rent on her five-room apartment in the Bronx from $30 to $40 a month, one of his tenants declared that “if she were a man she would take O'Brien out in the backlots and beat him as ‘they did [the usurious] landlords in Ireland.’” Lieutenant P. J. Commerford, an officer in the naval reserve who was facing eviction from his apartment on West 111th Street for withholding the rent, which had been raised from $36 to $53 a month, said that if he could get his landlord on a ship he would “throw him overboard.” Jacob A. Glass, a Bronx landlord, testified that when he threatened to evict one of his tenants if she did not stop fussing about a rent hike of two dollars a month, “she told me she would put a bullet through my heart, and, if she didn't do it, she would get a gangster to do it.” Harry Minarsky, who had raised the rent four dollars a month in a five-story tenement house he leased in East Harlem, complained that his tenants started a vendetta against him, not only threatening him but also carrying about the streets an empty coffin with a sign on it that read “Here lies Minarsky.” There was “no R.I.P.,” wrote the Call.³⁷

In many cases the threats were idle. In others they were anything but. Some tenants did a good deal of damage to their apartments before they were evicted. A few even destroyed the landlord's other properties. A group of striking tenants broke into the cellar of one tenement house and smashed the hot water heater. And following the eviction of a striking tenant, sympathetic neighbors tore apart a vacant store on the first floor of another tenement house and built a bonfire out of the wreckage. Other tenants vented their anger not so much at the landlords’ property as at the landlords themselves. After being evicted from a tenement house on Hinsdale Avenue in Brooklyn, a group of irate women went after the landlord, M. Sidman, and his son Irving. They chased the Sidmans for half a mile. When they took refuge in the Miles Bros. paintbrush factory on Pitkin Avenue, the crowd, which by then included men as well as women, surrounded the factory and threw stones and bricks through the windows. The Sidmans escaped serious injury, but only because the police spirited them away in a patrol wagon. The police also had to rescue Jacob G. Feldman, who was attacked by an angry crowd of women after he evicted more than a dozen tenants from a tenement house in Brownsville. Some tenants beat and scratched their landlords, others doused them with hot water, and one tenant even invited his landlord into the apartment, where he pointed a revolver at his head and threatened to kill him unless he agreed to reduce the rent.38

At times, as Irving Sidman found out, the landlord's family was also a target of the tenants’ rage. During a rent strike on Maujer Street in Brooklyn, a group of women tenants attacked Abraham Ernstedoff, the landlord's son. When his mother attempted to ward off the women with a rolling pin, one of them, Esther Yerkowitz, grabbed it and struck Ernstedoff. The police dispersed the crowd and arrested Yerkowitz, who was charged with felonious assault. The landlord's employees were sometimes in the line of fire as well. To give a few examples, Mary Karp, the janitor of a tenement house on the Lower East Side, served notice on Rose Sprung in June 1919. Sprung reacted by pouring hot coffee on Karp, burning her back and shoulders so badly that she had to be taken to Gouverneur Hospital. After forcing their way through the crowd, the police arrested Sprung. A month later Jacob and Sadie Gold were evicted from their apartment in Brownsville. When sympathetic neighbors moved the Golds’ furniture from the sidewalk into Beckie Scholl's apartment, the janitor urged the landlord, who was her brother-in-law, to evict Scholl as well. With the help of the Golds, Scholl then broke into the janitor's apartment and attacked her. Later in the year B. Goldstein, an agent for Morgenstein Brothers, owner of an apartment house on the Bronx's Grand Concourse, got into an argument with a tenant whose rent had been raised from $52 to $75 a month. As a crowd gathered, the tenant punched Goldstein in the jaw, knocking him to the ground.³⁹

Incidents such as these were so common in 1919, said Patrick J. Reville, Bronx Superintendent of Buildings, that “it is absolutely impossible for a landlord to walk through certain sections of the Bronx today.” One such landlord was Herman Kauffman, the owner of an apartment house on Longfellow Avenue and, according to Captain Charles A. Goldsmith of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, “a rent gouger of the worst sort.” “It was not safe for me to visit my property,” Kauffman complained. When he got within five blocks of the building from which he had recently evicted several families, the tenants “would start to throw rocks at me, trying to kill me.” Kauffman was so frightened that he carried a police whistle with him. Things were much the same in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Joseph Lazarus, the agent for the Doscher Estate, which owned several tenement houses in Brownsville, was so concerned about his safety that he hired a bodyguard to accompany him when he collected the rent. And Harry Minarsky, whose coffin was carried around the streets of East Harlem, was so traumatized, wrote the Call, that “he began to have dreams about mobs of angry tenants chasing him into the Harlem River, or stringing him from the highest span of the Williamsburg bridge.” When he imagined seeing “angry faces peering into the front windows at night” and hearing “whisperings from under his bed,” Minarsky moved his family out of the apartment and gave up his lease on the building.⁴⁰

In the face of the tenants’ threats and attacks, some landlords backed down. But others responded in kind. A Bronx landlord not only verbally abused one of his tenants, but also threatened to “break the neck” of one of her children. After conceding that he had “lost his head,” he was found guilty of disorderly conduct and fined $25. A Brooklyn landlord struck a tenant who he claimed had incited the other tenants against him. He was ordered to post a $500 bond and keep the peace for six months. Accompanied by police officers, a Manhattan landlord pulled a revolver out of his pocket when a tenant refused to allow him to enter her apartment and take down the strike signs. Another Bronx landlord came to collect the rent with a man masquerading as a police officer who drew his gun and threatened to shoot two striking tenants. Some landlords left the dirty work to others, especially in Brownsville and other working-class neighborhoods. They hired thugs to harass picketers, disrupt meetings, and do whatever else was necessary to break the strikes. The thugs, wrote the Call, “are doing all in their power to provoke a riot,” which would have forced the police to intervene, presumably on the landlord's side. (One landlord took the unusual step of ordering the janitor to lock the doors of his apartment house after dark to prevent the striking tenants from going out. Although Judge Robitzek held that the landlord “has no right to make the tenants in the house prisoners at night simply because they refuse to pay their rent,” he nonetheless issued eviction warrants against the strikers.)41

By themselves these confrontations between the landlords and tenants were a threat to public order. And when the marshals, schleppers, and police officers got caught up in them, as they often did, the threat became more serious. During 1919 and early 1920 it was not uncommon for striking tenants to attack the marshals, schleppers, and police officers—even, in some cases, to pour boiling water, straight out of the teakettles, on them. In May 1919, for example, a group of women assaulted six schleppers after they evicted three tenants from a tenement house on Williams Street in Brownsville. The police arrested two of the women, one of whom was charged with assault and the other with interfering with a policeman, but the crowd wrested them away from the officers. Reserves had to be summoned from the Liberty Avenue police station to re-arrest the women and protect the officers. It was also not uncommon for police officers, though not marshals and schleppers, to use excessive force in dealing with the striking tenants and, in some cases, innocent bystanders. During the long strike against the B.F.W. Realty Company, for example, an officer knocked down a pregnant tenant who was manning the picket line. Suffering from contusions and shock, she had to be confined to bed, prompting other tenants to threaten to file charges of police brutality with Police Commissioner Richard C. Enright. Another officer arrested a striking tenant and a mother of seven just for asking why he had taken one of the other striking tenants into custody.⁴²

The postwar housing crisis, of which the rent strikes were the most dramatic manifestation, not only pitted tenants against landlords. They also pitted tenants against tenants. A case in point occurred in Brooklyn in the summer of 1919, when thirteen tenants went on strike after the landlord raised the rent three dollars a month. They were summoned to appear before Judge Jacob S. Strahl, who declared that he would not go along with a rent hike unless the owners provided better service and ordered their agent, J. Louis Bookman, to meet with a committee of striking tenants. After a long meeting, Bookman agreed to reduce the increase to one dollar a month, paint the rooms in need of it, and make repairs where necessary. But the tenants insisted they would not end the strike unless he evicted the three families who had refused to join the strike. On that point negotiations broke down. Said Morris Jaffee, secretary of the Brooklyn Tenants Union, “The tenants would not agree to any settlement whereby the strikebreakers would remain in the house.” The housing shortage pitted landlords against landlords too. An investigator for the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering found that a Bronx property owners association was “using every possible means to bring pressure to bear upon those landlords who have thus far refused to raise their rent above the fair profit mark.” Also, in an effort to drive up property values, speculators were urging landlords who were not taking advantage of the housing shortage to boost rentals. According to Nathan Hirsch, several Bronx lessees had joined forces to raise rents in their neighborhood and threatened other lessees who did not want to. “One woman who refused to be coerced was told her house would be wrecked,” Hirsch reported.43

As well as pitting tenants against landlords, tenants against tenants, and landlords against landlords, the postwar housing crisis further divided a city already sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines. Drawing on a deep-seated strain of xenophobia, many New Yorkers placed much of the blame for the soaring rents on “foreigners,” most of them recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. These “greedy landlords,” most of them Italians, Germans, and Hebrews, are “hardly able to speak our language,” said J. J. McDonald of Brooklyn. They are not even citizens, noted State Senator Peter A. Abeles of the Bronx. These landlords “don[']t give a dam[n] for the American people,” wrote a tenant who called himself an American Soldier. “They laugh at our flag[,] they spit on our flag.” The authorities “ought to put them on one ship and sink them of[f] Sandy Point,” a spit of land off the coast of New Jersey. After noting that his landlord “looks as if he might have been a fugitive from the Czar of Russia at one time,” a Bronx tenant observed, “It is a curious state of affairs when a foreigner can come to America, and by thieving tactics throw an American into the street.” Pointing out that “we Americans are up against it,” two other New Yorkers declared that the profiteering landlords should be sent back to Russia. Even as sophisticated a New Yorker as Judge Robitzek shared these views. As he told a meeting of the Taxpayers Alliance, more than half the landlords and lessees who appeared before him—among them a man “who controls more than a million dollars worth of property in New York”—had not bothered to learn English and could not even sign their names. “How,” he asked, “can we expect honesty or fair dealing at the hands of this class of men and women?”⁴⁴

The postwar housing crisis further divided the city along ideological lines as well. Much like other Americans, many New Yorkers were caught up in the “Red Scare” that swept through the country after World War I. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, they feared that anarchism, socialism, and above all Bolshevism were gaining force. Indeed, warned Stewart Browne, there were already over two hundred thousand “potential anarchists” in the city waiting for “a favorable opportunity to raise the flag of Soviet government.” Browne and other New Yorkers placed much of the blame for the spread of radicalism on the tenants leagues and their leaders. These demagogues “stand on soapboxes and do nothing else but excite the populace,” said Alexander S. Greshler, a spokesman for the Brooklyn Board of Real Estate Brokers, “rousing them I may say to the border line of revolution.” They are “fomenting a spirit of unrest and endeavoring by every means possible to overthrow [the government],” added James Brackenridge, president of the Bronx Board of Trade. Judge Levy, to whom Bolshevism was “the most despicable thing in the world,” pointed out that for all their talk of reducing rents and otherwise helping tenants, these agitators were “sowing the seeds of discontent,” in the hope of leading New York “into anarchy, riot and revolution.”⁴⁶

Levy detested the Bolsheviks so much that he once favored deporting them and later decided “the noose would be better.” But he believed that the profiteering landlords—the “shark[s]” who were raising the rents well beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest New Yorkers—were almost as much to blame for the current unrest as what he called the “Bolsheviki Tenants Leaguer[s].” Robitzek agreed with him. So did state senator John J. Dunnigan, who told one profiteering landlord, “You are making Bolsheviki all over the Bronx by your treatment of the tenants, and you know it.” Many other New Yorkers felt the same way. “If Bolshevism ever comes to this country,” wrote one tenant, “there is no one to blame but [the profiteering landlords],” whom he denounced as an “organized band of thieves.” Another tenant even held the profiteering landlords responsible for the rise of the IWW (the International Workers of the World), one of the country's most militant labor unions. By a twisted sort of logic, some New Yorkers charged not only that the profiteering landlords were breeding Bolshevism, but also that they were themselves Bolsheviks. At the same time that he defended most landlords as honorable businessmen, Alexander Greshler condemned the few “the Bolsheviki [rent] profiteer[s].” And Reverend G. A. Carstensen, the pastor of Holy Rood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights (and a tenant whose rent had just been raised nearly 50 percent), railed against “the affrontary [sic], the thievery and the Bolshevism of these men [the profiteering landlords] of whom some of us are the victims.”47

In the aftermath of World War I it seemed that the housing shortage, and especially the rent hikes and rent strikes that it set in motion, were eroding the social fabric of the city, pitting landlords against tenants, “Americans” against “foreigners,” and Christians against Jews. With the courts clogged by the record number of summary proceedings and with the streets convulsed by fights between the marshals and schleppers, on the one side, and the tenants and their sympathizers, on the other, it also seemed that the rent wars were undermining public order. As the Red Scare gathered momentum, it even seemed that the city was on the verge of civil disorder. As a Bronx landlady who had not raised the rent in fourteen years told the members of the Senate and Assembly committees on cities in early 1920, “Between the Bolshevism of the poor, helpless, ignorant, illiterate alien[s],” by which she meant the low-income tenants, who “came here believing that this was the golden land[, and] the Bolshevism of the people,” by which she meant the profiteering landlords, who “squeeze every last dollar out of their fellow men and women … between the Bolshevism below and the Bolshevism up above, it is a case of God help the rest of us.”⁴⁸ As these fears grew, elected officials came under enormous pressure to ease the housing shortage, curb the rent hikes, and stop the rent strikes. As it became increasingly clear that Congress was not going to do anything about the nationwide housing crisis—that, in other words, the federal government was not going to follow the lead of the many European countries that had adopted rent control during the war—the pressure on local and state officials became intense. And nowhere was it more intense than in New York City.