A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City's Garment Industry

Chapter 5: Tailors and Troublemakers: Jewish Militancy in the New York Garment Industry, 1889–1910

5 Tailors and Troublemakers Jewish Militancy in the New York Garment Industry, – Hadassa Kosak J ewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth century came to dominate the clothing trades as employers , workers, and labor leaders, and they also came to be identi- fied as the restive rank and file of the garment industry. During those years, labor unrest in this industry became a hallmark of life in the newly settled Jewish immigrant community, whose majority earned their livelihood in tailoring and dressmaking. This article explores the interrelationship between industrial militancy and the political evolution of the Jewish community. It examines not only the causes and conditions of this militancy but the ways in which this activism helped to create, and articulate, a new political vocabulary used by the immigrants as a benchmark to guide, explain, and evaluate their encounters with the new society and its norms.1 The Jewish ethnic minority engaged in social turbulence that symbolized a particular type of industrial agitation. Starting in the 1880s strikes became a common occurrence, although unions did not take root until after 1909. The central themes of these struggles were wages, hours, and other issues of employment. Equally prominent, however, were the flashpoints of social unrest related to political questions of social structure and social organization, the role of the market in economic life, the legitimacy of profit, and the relationship of the individual to society. Thus, the 116 A Coat of Many Colors residents of the Lower East Side were active participants in industrial actions over employment issues, but they were also vocal actors in rent strikes and consumer boycotts, and in practices of communal ostracism— involving public humiliation and victimization of opponents. Strikebreakers , landlords, butchers, and even law enforcement agencies, as well as employers, were fair game for community agitation that linked immigrants from different walks of life in fluid alliances. These early spontaneous struggles in the garment industry contributed to a unique blend of work culture and community militancy. The frequent instances of unrest embodied a drive for the articulation of a political platform that may not have benefited the garment workers directly but did lend a distinct voice to the emerging Jewish community. Public strife over labor and social issues marked an evolving process of constructing a new ethnic identity through protests that questioned a host of societal assumptions. The emerging language of fairness and justice was largely shaped by the experience of exploitation in the all-pervasive garment industry ; its vocabulary and appeal, however, were shared by other members of this particular community in addition to workers. Thus, two simultaneous processes were at work during the years of the first generation of immigrants: industrial protest that ultimately defined and articulated the future trade unionism of post-1909, and a process of formation of a new ethnic identity marked by a distinct political language. Both unfolded in the public sphere, where community participation by men and women redefined them both as members of a social class and as an ethnic group claiming recognition from the rest of American society.2 The combination of labor struggles and community protest helped the participants to articulate their demands as a distinct ethnic group, which had experienced immigration and grasped the political possibilities offered by industrial capitalism. This was not an orderly process by which the host society bestowed rights on immigrants. It was an unruly, if highly participatory, struggle in which newcomers questioned social norms as represented by the new economic system they had entered. While contesting some basic assumptions of the new society, they laid claims to the rights of citizenship and of democratic participation. For example, women, who during that period were part of the large army of casual homeworkers in the garment industry, played an important part in the process of construc- Tailors and Troublemakers 117 tion of the new ethnic community. They were highly visible in street struggles and in rent and consumer strikes as well as on picket lines— and by 1909, they were the major actors in the shirtwaist makers’ strike they initiated.3 By 1910, labor militancy had assumed a new form. The shirtwaist makers’ strike in the previous year had started out as a traditional mass walkout but had transformed itself into an industry-wide movement striving for the establishment of stable unions and for tighter control over the process of collective...