New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [329]
The whole, wretched business had begun in the fall. Some of the garment workers in the downtown factories had started to complain about their working conditions. Perhaps they had a case. Rose didn’t know. But in no time, agitators—socialists and revolutionaries from Russia mostly, she’d heard—were whipping them up. The garment workers were threatening to strike, and the factory owners were outraged.
But not Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, the owners of the Triangle Factory. They had provided an in-house union for their employees, but they told them firmly that anyone who joined the militant outside union would be dismissed.
Soon the whole garment district was in an uproar, with the workers calling a general strike, and the braver employers, headed by Triangle, locking them out and hiring others instead. Some employers paid thugs to beat up the leading strikers. Tammany Hall, which controlled the police, was on the side of the employers, and there were arrests. But the union used women on the picket lines, and when they were jailed and sent to hard labor, there was some public sympathy. Even the New York Times, which usually supported the employers, began to waver.
Rose didn’t condone the bad treatment or the violence, but these things had to be kept in proportion, they mustn’t get out of hand. And things wouldn’t have got out of hand, if it hadn’t been for a certain group of women. The women in this room.
You had to give it to old Hetty, Rose thought grimly, she’d assembled quite a crowd. There were half a dozen Vassar girls—they should have known better, for a start. Rose was never sure what she felt about women going to college. Vassar and Barnard in the state of New York, Bryn Mawr down in Philadelphia, and the four colleges up in Massachusetts—the Seven Sisters as they were called, like a sort of female Ivy League. All respectable enough, no doubt; but did one really want girls from the old families getting a lot of foolish ideas put in their heads? Rose didn’t think so.
Just look at the results. Vassar girls had been parading round the city with billboards supporting the strike. They’d been living down on the Lower East Side with the poor. All for what? To show they were enlightened? Well, at least they had the excuse of being young. And that certainly could not be said for the next figure to greet her eye.
Alva Vanderbilt—at least that was her name in the days when she’d forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the Duke of Marlborough. Alva always got her way. After she’d divorced Vanderbilt for a pile of money, married August Belmont’s son and built a huge mansion up in Newport, Rose suspected Alva had got bored. So next she’d decided to make herself look important by demanding votes for women. One might argue about the rights and wrongs of female suffrage, but not about Alva’s unquenchable thirst for publicity. And it was wholly typical of Alva, seeing the strike in the garment district, to decide to hitch these unfortunate women to her own bandwagon and proclaim that their dispute was about women’s rights.
To the astonishment of the factory women, she’d started turning up in the courts to pay their fines. She’d organized monster rallies. She’d even shipped in Mrs. Pankhurst, the British suffragist leader, to make an appearance. She certainly had a genius for publicity, and the Hearst and Pulitzer papers were trumpeting the cause. But her shrewdest move had been to go to the woman who was approaching Rose and her two young charges now.
“Hello, Rose. Didn’t expect to see you here.” Elizabeth Marbury was wearing a dark coat and skirt, with a small black hat on her head. She always filled any room she was in. It wasn’t just that she was broad in the beam; it was her presence. Literary agent to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and many others, she went where she pleased. Having taken up the cause of the women strikers, she’d brought support from the acting profession,