• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7367 0

like Elihu Root and J. P. Morgan. This precipitated the resignation en bloc of all other Jewish members, many of long standing. Yet this time, while the Evening Post regretted Christians’ refusal to associate with even well-bred Jews, it also allowed as how people really shouldn’t try to push in where they weren’t wanted. Sephardic aristocrats and German financiers alike found doors around town slamming shut: Jews were excluded from the Social Register, banned from Four Hundred functions (not one was invited to the 1892 ball), and rejected from private schools. Some affluent Jews responded by assimilating all the more thoroughly; others circled their own wagons more tightly and established a “Hebrew Select” society.

Social exclusion fostered economic segregation. With prep schools explicitly geared to turning out Anglo-Saxon “Christian Gentlemen,” and colleges giving preference to sons of alumni, and few if any Jews (or Catholics, or African Americans) being accepted at top clubs, it became difficult, if not impossible, to accumulate the requisite old-boy connections, and banks, corporations, and law firms became Anglo-Saxon Protestant enclaves. Shoved to the side, Jews would advance only in industries they already controlled (merchandising and one wing of the investment banking community) or in fields still open to entrepreneurial innovation (entertainment and mass communications).

Yet the sequestration of elite Jewry would prove no more fatally corrosive of upperclass solidarity than the internecine combat between Astors and Vanderbilts or the acid rivalries of merchants and financiers. For all their internal conflicts, the issues uniting wealthy New Yorkers were far more compelling than those that divided them, and in the mid-1880s none was more urgent than the challenge issued to their political and economic authority from a very different part of town.

62

“The Leeches Must Go!”

In the industrial precincts of the East and West sides, the metropolitan labor movement had revived along with the quickened economy. The world of German socialism, in particular, had been newly reinvigorated by the arrival of thousands of immigrants fleeing Bismarck’s repression. Newcomers slipped comfortably into various of the German-speaking craft unions leagued together in the United German Trades. Many also joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), as the old Workingmen’s Party was now called, and indeed political and labor organizations overlapped substantially—with the Brewery Workers, a pioneering industrial union, making significant gains under socialist leadership. German socialism, with its labor lyceums and schools for children, was deeply rooted in, though largely limited to, Kleindeutschland.

A second constellation of unionists, known as the “pure and simple” variety, concentrated on mustering skilled workers into disciplined craft-based organizations. Cigarmakers, led by Samuel Gompers, were the strongest advocates of this approach. Gompers, born in 1850 in London’s East End to Dutch-Jewish parents, was brought to New York in 1863. He spent his teens and twenties helping his father make cigars in their East Side tenement apartment. He attended lectures and classes at Cooper Union, joined debating clubs and the Odd Fellows, and developed a fierce attachment to the fledgling Cigarmakers Union. In the early days, he and his intimate associates—men like Adolph Strasser and Peter J. McGuire—shared the socialists’ conviction that unions should struggle for the ultimate transformation of society at the same time as they fought to improve working conditions in the present.

The depression years changed his thinking. Watching (and dodging) rampaging policemen at Tompkins Square in 1874 convinced Gompers that those in power would not shrink from violently repressing radical challenges to the existing order. His conviction was deepened by the hysterical response of police, press, and pulpit to the Great Strike of 1877 and by the failure of the Cigarmakers’ own walkout that year.

If capitalism were here to stay, then working people,