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| 99 13 “Our Mecca” (memoir; n.d.) Isadore Wisotsky Born in Latvia, Isadore Wisotsky (1895–1970) immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of four. He worked in the garment industry and joined the Industrial Workers of the World, perhaps the most militant labor organization in the United States during its heyday in the years running up to World War I. The following portrait of Union Square, a hotbed of radical activity in the early decades of the twentieth century, comes from Wisotsky’s unpublished autobiography. Properly speaking, Union Square—where Broadway meets Fourth Avenue and crosses 17th and 14th Streets—is not a part of the Lower East Side. But it was the Lower East Side that gave it life. The Square was our Mecca; the place where East met West, . . . where Uptown came Downtown. We gathered to make revolution and stayed to talk. And how we talked—anarchism, atheism, against the military, for birth control, against injustice, for socialism, for the rights of the workers to organize . Hardly a subject was left untouched by our excitement, by our passions, by our sincerity. I first came to the Square as a teenage immigrant boy. On tip-toe, I strained to hear and see everything. In those days, the Square was a bubbling hub with spokes reaching out into every neighborhood of the city. A rally in the Square frequently was preceded by scores of community meetings, a clustering around street corners that would turn into one large stream of human traffic moving onto it. People came there from the Lower East Side, from Williamsburg and Brownsville in Brooklyn, and from the far reaches of the Bronx, to talk, to listen, to learn. They were, in the main, working men and women, mostly young, dressed neatly as for an outing. A demonstration in Union Square was a holiday, an escape from the long hours of drudgery and the grim realities of a dull, crowded tenement life. Many in the crowd were immigrants. But not all. The Square also attracted every kind of radical and nonconformist intellectual from Greenwich Vil- 100 | In Struggle lage, as well as the diletanti and just plain spectators and rubbernecks. But the heart of the assembly was that of the labor force, working people, registering their awareness of the troubles of the world. The speakers, ah, the speakers! What attractions we had. Out of the west came big, tanned men with powerful and persuasive voices and intoxicating ideas to stand on a common platform with the thin, hungry-looking, pale figures from the slums. There was “Big Bill” Haywood,1 a one-eyed giant, who on closer meeting was a soft-spoken gentle fellow beneath a wide-brimmed battered hat. On the stand, he was a roaring firebrand, denouncing war and capitalism with fervor. Or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,2 who later turned Communist. She was then a ravishing, black-haired rebel girl of the IWW. She, too, burned with an inner fire on the soapbox. And Ed Louis, the finest orator of them all, a freelancer without any organization affiliation but ready to speak up for the “victims of capitalism.” He was just as ready to discuss labor, war, or politics over a friendly glass of spirits. From the sidewalks of New York came Harlem’s atheist -Socialist agitator Hubert Harrison,3 who later found God in Tammany Hall; and the brilliant, crippled Bohemian poet from Brooklyn Charley Sunshine , who talked his young life away against the war on the one hand and for “brotherhood” on the other. Those valuable speakers had sharpened their thinking and had strengthened their voices on soapboxes in mining towns and lumber camps and on city street corners. They had traveled in freight cars, slept in poor homes of friends, and raised grubstakes through the sale of literature at these spirited meetings. After they had passed such tests, they were eligible and ready for the important engagements at Webster or Carnegie Hall. But only the very best could expect to make it to the speakers’ stand at the north end of famous Union Square facing 17th Street. There, they were central figures in the dramas that opened and closed with “hymns” frequently from the acid pen of the Wobbly poet Joe Hill,4 who was executed on a framed-up charge of murder in Salt Lake City, Utah. “Long-Haired Preachers,” my favorite, includes these lines: Longhaired preachers come out every night, Try to tell us what...

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