Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism

Chapter 8. The Multicultural Front: A Yiddish Socialist Response to Sweatshop Capitalism

 ��� c h a p t e r 8 8 The Multicultural Front a yiddish socialist response to sweatshop capitalism Daniel Katz In  two competing May Day parades in New York City drew two hundred thousand participants and spectators. The mood was both festive and tense throughout the city. Riots had erupted in France and Ireland in recent days; the Nazis were taking elaborate precautions to prevent any communist demonstrations in Berlin; Newark, New Jersey, banned the socialists from marching; and police in Queens, New York, brutally suppressed an illegal march of communists the night before. Nearly two thousand heavily armed police monitored both marches and both rallies at Union Square and Madison Square.1 In this highly charged moment, during which general strikes across the country were building and being led by various communist and Marxist parties, both of the major radical marches and rallies in New York emphasized the multicultural as well as the anticapitalist dimensions of their revolutionary movements.2 Through songs, placards, banners, and speeches at the Union Square rally, the communists expressed their commitment to racial and ethnic inclusion. The New York Times reported, “There were Negro, Chinese and Japanese speakers proclaiming the solidarity and unity of aim of all working men to overthrow the capitalist system and set up a soviet of America.”3 Uptown, near Columbus Circle, the Dressmakers’ Local  of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers ’ Union (ILGWU) assembled in Central Park to march down Broadway, led by their manager, Charles “Sasha” Zimmerman, to join the Socialist Party demonstration in celebration of a stunning organizing victory six months earlier. Photographs from the march show members riding on and marching alongside a horse-drawn float that unified themes of multiculturalism, labor militancy, and antifascism. In the center of the float, in place of a May Day pole,  daniel k atz a single, upright fist clenched ribbons held at the other end by white and black members. Crowned by a rendering of the Western Hemisphere, the medallion on the right flank reads, “THE POWER OF LABOR LIVES IN ORGANIZATION AND MILITANCY.” The central slogans proclaims, “WORKERS OF  NATIONALITIES UNITED: DRESSMAKERS UNION Local , ILGWU” and “ONE ARMY UNDER ONE FLAG FIGHTING FOR ONE CAUSE—THE CAUSE OF LABOR.” The horse drawing the float is draped with a banner reading, “DOWN WITH NAZISM.”4 Like the podium speakers in the communist rally, the image created by Local ’s float reflected the interracial and international revolutionary sensibilities that form a familiar narrative for historians of American labor and the Left. But a second look at the photographs reveals something different from what scholars have assumed about the militancy underpinning the rise of industrial labor in the s. Union members are dressed in traditional peasant and village costumes from eastern, northern, and central Europe, the Middle East, Spain, Mexico, South America, and the West Indies. At a time that few historians of multiculturalism noticed any appreciable movement embracing multiple ethnic identities, one of the most prominent local unions in the Figure .. Local  members constructed this May Day float in  to illustrate the links between multiculturalism, union militancy, and anti-Nazism. File , box , collection /p, ILGWU Papers, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University. the multicultur al front  country broadcasted not only its diverse membership but the diverse cultures those members brought to the militant wing of the labor movement.5 The point was made repeatedly over the next several years, as in Local ’s fondness for an interracial collage of members’ faces in a broadside that read “A UNION OF MANY CULTURES.”6 Over the past two decades, labor historians who have investigated the rise of the industrial labor movement in the s have concluded, in varying degrees, that class consciousness increased among first- and second-generation immigrant industrial workers as their ties to ethnic working-class communities weakened or transformed. In his study of French Canadian and Franco Belgian textile workers, Gary Gerstle saw an increasing class consciousness among workers Figure .. The ILGWU used this collage frequently in the mid-s. After the August  strike, Local  boasted that it represented workers from thirty-two nationalities, including Jewish, Italian, Spanish, and African American. Growing Up:  Years of Education with the I.L.G.W.U., – (New York: Wolff, ). From the private collection of Daniel Katz.  daniel k atz who in the s felt “a deep ambivalence . . . about their ethnic heritage.”7...