from THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE GOOD: Part 1: THE GOOD (ROSE PASTOR STOKES, 1879-1933)
Book Report: Americana
by Mel Freilicher
REBEL CINDERELLA: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hoschschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021)
Rose (Raisel in Yiddish)
For several years in the late l9-teens, according to a newspaper clipping service, her name was mentioned more often in the press than that of any other woman in the United States. A Jewish immigrant socialist and union organizer, coming from abject working-class poverty in Russia, Rose Wieslander mesmerized the public’s attention by her 1905 wedding at the age of 26 to the scion of one of the country’s richest families, Graham Pastor Stokes. A quintessential Cinderella tale.
I first became aware of Rose when reading and writing about the devastating 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: 146 workers, all but 23 of them women, perished in that deathtrap which flagrantly violated the meager workplace safety regulations on the books. Outrageously, the owners were found not guilty of manslaughter, and even collected substantial insurance payments ($400 per each dead worker).
Many important young activists were actual eye-witnesses to the Greenwich Village tragedy. More than 120,000 people marched in the funeral procession, starting near the site of the fire and proceeding up Fifth Avenue, with an estimated 30,000 others lining the streets.
Building on the mass outpouring of public sympathy, about a month later, at dinnertime, 100 waiters silently walked out of the elegant Belmont Hotel, across from Grand Central Station: its public rooms adorned with frescoes, crystal chandeliers and marble pillars. In a strike organized by the IWW, at least 5,000 workers in some 50 other New York hotels and restaurants headed for the picket lines—including busboys, dishwashers, chefs and chambermaids.
Rose opened up free lunchrooms for picketing workers—most startling, when I first read about it. Who was she, and where did this money come from? Reading Hoschschild’s excellent study, it turned out I had misremembered this. Rose opened three free lunchrooms, while regularly calling on the public for contributions of money and clothing. But not directly in the aftermath of the fire or even during the waiters’ strike—two years later, during another major strike, when 110,000 garment workers walked off the job.
Active on the restaurant strike committee, Rose ran some of the union’s meetings, edited their press releases, wrote and phoned in strike news each day to the Socialist Party daily paper, the New York Call. Urging a gathering of black waiters to join the union, she was also the spokesperson announcing a lawsuit against the city for arresting a group of picketers.
The restaurant strike was the first time she worked with “Big Bill” Haywood, the organizer and central figure of the International Workers of the World, known as Wobblies, which was to become a major focus of Rose’s political life. Rose and Haywood spoke to a rally at New York’s Amsterdam Opera House of 3,000 striking waiters and hotel workers, with another 2000 outside; halfway through her talk, she was interrupted to receive a big bouquet of American Beauty roses.
A few weeks before her marriage, this new organization, the IWW, had come into being. The son of a Pony Express rider, Haywood grew up in Utah, and as a young man worked as a cowboy, surveyor, card dealer in a saloon, and miner—second in charge of the Western Federation of Miners union—in the gold and silver mines (some owned by the Phelps Stokes family in Nevada) where his right hand was crushed by a carload of rock. A miner who worked ten years at that time had one chance in three of suffering a serious injury, and one in eight of being killed.
Abundant industrial accidents claimed the lives of roughly 35,000 Americans yearly. Caused by everything from collapsing mine tunnels to exposed gears and moving belts snagging the limbs of exhausted factory laborers, resulting in the loss of hands or fingers, toxic chemical burns and other forms of maiming. Legal protection and workplace safety laws for laborers were practically non-existent.
Famously, the IWW turned no worker away. Any immigrant who had belonged to a union in the old country was instantly given membership. The more conservative AFL leader, Samuel Gompers, was appalled: labelling the IWW a “fungus” on the union movement. Contrary to the AFL’s craft unions, the Wobblies not only drew in the unskilled, but also recruited among the unemployed. Unusual for the day, Wobbly organizers included women, targeting occupations such as telephone operators and clerical workers.
“Big Bill’s” life (and ultimate escape from a 20-year prison sentence to Russia, where he unhappily drank himself to death) is legendary. So, too, are the Wobblies’ many strikes and hard core resistance. (I’ve always idealized them.) Infamous are the Sedition Acts and Espionage Act which smashed the IWW, the Socialist Party, and 75 leftist publications, including The Masses. Imprisoning and/or exiling anyone who spoke out publicly against U.S. entry into the notoriously imperialist WW1. By its end, nearly 6,300 radicals would be arrested with warrants, and uncounted thousands more without them.
This shameful period in American history marks the end of the Progressive era, of course. But for me, also signals the country’s tragic, and irreversible entanglement in the decline of western civilization. Hochschild tallies the war’s immediate consequences: DEATHS—millions of civilians, more than nine million soldiers, with another 21 million wounded. “It left a continent of bereaved families, maimed men, and what Winston Churchill called a ‘crippled, broken world.’”
About Rose’s childhood: To avoid the worst pogroms Russia had seen in centuries, after Tsar Alexander was assassinated in 1881, her mother moved to London, leaving her small stepson behind. There, Rose went to school for a year and half: the only formal schooling she ever had, Hochschild notes. When her mother remarried, they managed to move to Cleveland, where eleven-year-old Rose went to work at a nearby cigar factory, remaining there for the next dozen years. When her stepfather disappeared, Rose became the sole wage earner supporting her mother and six younger siblings. Unable to feed them all, several were placed in orphanages or foster care.
She began to write features for a New York City Yiddish newspaper, the Yiddishes Tageblatt, or Jewish Daily News, the country’s oldest and largest Yiddish daily. (Sometimes writing on her lunch break, she would describe having made 200 fewer cigars that day.) When the paper’s English page went from weekly to daily, 23 year-old Rose was offered a job as reporter in New York. (Nowhere in her writings does she ever mention setting foot in a temple, except if asked to give a speech.)
Rose was called upon to describe life on the Lower East Side, the city’s most crowded district: one survey showed 75% of its families had three to five people sleeping in each bedroom. In unsanitary and cramped tenements, 350,000 rooms had no windows at all or ones that only opened on the narrowest of air shafts. The 1910 census showed 542,061 people packed into an area of slightly less than one and a half square miles. Roughly 60,000 New York families were evicted from their homes each year.
The Yiddishes Tageblatt was the country’s main voice of Orthodox Judaism. Accordingly, although Rose called for an end to both “Jew-baiting and Negro-lynching,” most of her columns were conservative: repeatedly warning Jewish women, for example, against allowing themselves to be courted by Christian men. Also strongly opposing the placement of adopted Jewish children in Christian homes. Life changed dramatically when Rose was assigned to interview the leaders of University Settlement House.
By 1905, American cities were home to over 200 settlement houses, a number which would more than double within 5 years. Staffed overwhelmingly by young college-educated Protestants, often well off enough to afford to work without a salary. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, taught calisthenics and dance at a Lower East Side settlement house. “My god,” her cousin Franklin told Eleanor one day when he helped her take a sick child home to a crowded tenement, “I didn’t know people lived like that!”
James Graham Phelps Stokes was a member of the University Settlement Society’s board, filled with reformers from the city’s upper crust. The wary Rose was surprised to “be enchanted by the very tall slender young man…so full of sympathy for the poor.” In her unfinished autobiography (published by the University of Georgia Press in 1992), Rose gushed about Graham, “who both in features and in general appearance was so like the young Abe Lincoln…a deep thinker, and a man of the common people.”
About her trip with Graham to a camp near Quebec, she wrote, “New love is old wisdom…In the evening we walked together, and talked of many things, and a close communion was born of that hour…He talked of his dreams of the future—a future in which I was to share…I contemplated the man; likened him to the young Buddha, Siddhartha [who] left his home, his fabulous Pleasure House and all that was near him, to seek healing for the great ills of the world.”
In his childhood, when not traveling to Europe, Graham’s family divided their time between a Madison Avenue mansion, a Staten Island weekend home with a dock, formal gardens, greenhouses and a bowling alley; their summer retreat was in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The young Graham was hosted by the banker J.P. Morgan on his yacht, and by the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt 11 at his palatial estate in Rhode Island. In 1894, a 500-man construction crew completed a summer “cottage” in the Berkshires for the Phelps Stokes family. At the time the largest private dwelling in the country, with l00 rooms and several castle-like turrets.
Their fortune stretched back more than a century: rooted in a string of intermarriages among 3 affluent families: Phelps (shipping, banking, real estate); Stokes (marble quarries, wool importing); and Dodge (textiles, mining). Graham’s father was a Stokes, his mother a Phelps, who inherited a 45-room mansion on Madison Avenue, as well as $2 million (roughly $50 million today). Family names were yoked together in the compound appellations of dozens of family members, as well as in major companies: Phelps, Stokes & Co, (investment banking); Phelps Stokes Estates (New York apartment buildings), and Dodge (textiles).
After graduating from Yale, Graham eventually enrolled in Columbia University’s medical school, chiefly to please his parents—never planning to practice. Still in his 20s, Graham thought of himself as a reformer, not a revolutionary: eradicating poverty meant teaching the poor basic skills, not redistributing the wealth of families like his own. But he took settlement work seriously and in 1902, the year before he met Rose, he’d moved into the University Settlement House building to live, as noted in a New York Times front-page headline: “J.G. Phelps Stokes on Lower East Side.”
Equally smitten, and somewhat shy, Graham courted Rose, eventually meeting her family in their Bronx apartment, a step up from the Lower East Side, and familiarizing her with the settlement house, which served both Jewish and Italian children. Its roof a playground; on the first three floors classrooms for English, history, economics and other subjects, as well as space for art exhibits, dances, and concerts. Other features: a library of 6,500 books, a legal aid office and something tenements sorely lacked—showers, 41 of them, used by some 800 people a day during the summer heat.
Graham’s politics were beginning to change. Like other volunteers, he regularly attended union meetings held at the house, and went out to a nearby bar with the workers afterwards. He found himself supporting organized labor. Lobbying and testifying for a pioneering New York state law limiting child labor, Graham also used his father’s office to produce and distribute leaflets for the campaign.
Over time, a distinguished array of guests at the University Settlement house included Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House settlement, and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient; the defense lawyer Clarence Darrow; the British novelist H.G. Wells; the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens; the Scottish labor leader Keir Hardie; and Ramsey MacDonald who would become Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister. Ten years older than Rose, and born in a Russian village close to her own, Emma Goldman was one of the few women guests.
A charismatic, mesmerizing speaker, and important birth control advocate, Goldman became America’s best-known anarchist. Shocking audiences by her fiery defense of free love and women’s sexuality, she claimed the only difference between marriage and prostitution was whether a woman sold herself to one man or many. Having spent a year in jail for “inciting to riot” during a demonstration against hunger, Emma found prison “the crucible that tested my faith.”
“Small wonder,” Hochschild writes, “that Rose found Goldman an inspiration and the University Settlement ‘a seething center for exchange of ideas.’” Rose began teaching an occasional class at the settlement, and Graham invited her to join a group of volunteers studying the work of Lester F. Ward, a prominent sociologist.
A year after they met, Graham and Rose became engaged. Needless to say, his aristocratic family was less than amused. One of his mother’s ancestors had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and subsequently became its governor, another had been governor of Connecticut, a third governor of both. His father’s great-grandfather, a wealthy English cloth merchant, had charted an entire ship to bring his family, servants and possessions to the U.S. in 1798. Graham’s father traced the family bloodlines back to the Plantagenets.
Although mostly putting on an upbeat face to the press, and trying to welcome Rose to the family, his mother had long shared the prejudices of the day. Learning about her son’s engagement from the Paris edition of the New York Herald, she wrote him: “You cannot realize what a very great disappointment it was to us to learn that with all the girls you have known,” he hadn’t chosen “one brought up in the same faith, same country and same surroundings as your own.” While developing an intimacy with Graham’s sister, Helen, a painter who shared her concern for social injustice, mutual bafflement at best characterized Rose’s continued relations with the rest of the family.
Adam Hochschild emphasizes how unrelentingly the press pushed the Cinderella angle. “In Gilded Age America, where the gulf between rich and poor was of unprecedented size, Cinderella fantasies had become a whole genre of popular fiction”: flourishing in dime novels sold everywhere, including pushcarts on the Lower East Side. Between the 1880s and l920s, Laura Jean Libbey, penned more than 80 such novels, selling 15 million copies.
Ironically, a week before she met Graham, Rose had roundly condemned these tales in an advice column: “What excuse is there other than ignorance for any girl who reads the crazy phantasies from the imbecilic brains of Laura Jean Libbey?” Once the engagement was announced, the Yiddish papers, generally believing Rose would convert, were quick to pounce on her former articles condemning such marriages. In fact, far less than 1 percent of Russian Jews in New York married non-Jews.
Those who knew Rose remarked she adapted “with remarkable grace” to her new public role. Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World, with a daily circulation of more than 350,000 copies, immediately signed up this “genius of the ghetto” to write 6 articles in which she presented herself as a guide to poverty in the Lower East Side, and in the area of London where she’d been a child. Trying to persuade her readers—“surely imagining Graham’s family among them”—she was noble, good-hearted and unthreatening, never mentioning her years working in cigar factories.
With her new celebrity status, Rose was asked to write reviews and articles for many major newspapers and magazines. Both she and Graham were becoming increasingly frustrated with the limits of their volunteer work. In a letter to the Times, Graham wrote that organizations like settlement houses could risk being means “through which men who are unjust in business and private life seek to mitigate some of the evils which their extortions have caused.”
In a 1906 article, Rose complained about “wealthy women very expensively dressed attempting to encourage the so-called unfortunates by visiting them and telling them what they should do.” One woman who “opened the door of a working girls’ club, uninvited, and raising her lorgnette to her eyes…remarked in the hearing of all, ‘What a very attractive-looking lot of working girls these are!’” At a Syracuse University alumni banquet, full of wealthy executives, Rose declared, “’Sometimes, I wish I could wipe all philanthropy off the face of the earth.’”
Soon afterwards, both Rose and Graham joined the Socialist Party of America, and quietly helped fund socialist organizations and magazines. For a while she edited a weekly half page for women in the New York Call, established in 1908, and again began writing advice columns for the Yiddish press, but this time for the socialist Forverts, the popular rival to Rose’s former conservative venue.
Rose became a delegate to the Party’s national convention. Graham won a place on its seven-member national executive committee, and ran as Socialist candidate for the New York State Assembly from the Lower East Side. Apparently, they were unaware of just how many of their fellow activists were, in fact, private detectives, Hochschild notes. For example, “Recently discovered papers indicate two of the three men in a Socialist delegation sent on a mission to a Denver labor union office in 1907” were agents.
Working closely with Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and Florence Kelley, the Stokeses founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a group which before long grew to have chapters on 60 campuses, and would become the vehicle for much of their extensive speaking tours. At one point, Rose visited eight different college campuses in one week. Graham was the founding Second Vice-President, then spent several years as ISS President.
They were giving speeches 3 or 4 nights a week. To men’s clubs, women’s clubs, church suppers, a meeting in Boston of 60 odd clergymen, a demonstration of the unemployed, the Odd Fellows, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, as well as distinctly antisocialist groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution. Typically, Rose would describe her time as a cigar worker. To middle class audiences, she evoked a vivid picture of life in inner-city tenements and sweatshops.
This “proved a major turning point,” Hochschild comments. “For the first time she discovered her talent as a public speaker,” a role Rose relished till the end. Realizing, too, she could connect with audiences in a way that Graham, despite all his education, never could. Her childhood love of singing paid off. One listener described Rose’s voice as “’now calm and low, now impassioned and full of fire.’”
When Rose spoke to workers, she often included a tale of how happy she’d been at hearing a factory owner’s praise for working so fast, only to realize she’d provided him with an excuse to drop the piece rate. Graham would often explain how his medial experience with some of New York’s poorest had first led him to settlement house work, then to socialism, convincing him “’something at the bottom was wrong.’”
Paradoxically, the same year they joined the Party, the couple moved from the Lower East Side to their own island in the Long Island Sound, a wedding present from Graham’s mother. His brother, Newton, an architect, designed a spacious 14-room shingled home, surrounded by purple asters, goldenrod, wild roses, daisies, and a grove of trees. Rose moved in her mother and four younger siblings as well as a friend from the Tageblatt to provide Yiddish speaking company.
Intending the island to become a center for a community of “congenial people engaged in the same work,” as Graham put it to a reporter, several University Settlement friends moved there rent-free. Two other couples had similar backgrounds to Rose and Graham. (She liked to refer to the three women’s mates not as husbands, but as ”comrade-lovers.”)
The island hosted a number of temporary residents, like the painter Rockwell Kent and his wife, and with her ten-week old infant, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the infamous young IWW organizer who, through many vicissitudes of leftist politics, remained Rose’s lifelong friend and ally. Probably, her “first close friend who had grown up in extreme poverty but was not Jewish.”
Among the first visitors to the island, the acclaimed novelist, Maxim Gorky was treated like royalty from the moment he landed in New York. With Miriam Scott, one of the island’s residents, doing the translating, in a round of banquets, speeches, and receptions, Gorky’s goal was to raise one million dollars following the failed 1905 Russian revolution. (Nominated 5 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gorky was exiled by Lenin in 1921.)
A distinguished array of visitors followed, including: the black intellectual W.E.B. Dubois; the feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Rose’s closest friend, the poet and playwright Olive Dargan; Irish-born labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother Jones”; the immensely popular novelist, Jack London; and Upton Sinclair. Previously, as it was being written, Sinclair had sent Graham, chapter by chapter, a draft of his novel based on seven weeks undercover in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants.
Although Sinclair hoped his portraits of such shocking events as an exhausted worker falling into a giant rendering vat would arouse a horrified public to the advantages of socialism, instead most readers became dismayed at what they might be eating. Of course, the enormously popular, The Jungle, helped push Congress into passing The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair remarked.
Caritas Island started to become more of a summer and weekend retreat for Rose and Graham who spent most of their time in Greenwich Village, a cauldron of intellectual ferment. In New York, they stayed, uncomfortably for all, at Graham’s parents’ mansion, until his mother—“her hand still controlling the family’s purse strings”—bought them a smaller home in the Village. Their circles now included muckraker Lincoln Steffens, the future Catholic radical activist, Dorothy Day, and the heiress Mabel Dodge (not her maiden name), of whom Steffens wrote, “She read everything, she believed—for a while—everything, she backed everything.”
Renowned for hosting elegant salons in her high-ceilinged apartment near Washington Square, filled with silks, brocades and Italian antiques, white linen drapes, a white marble fireplace and a white porcelain chandelier, Dodge’s “Evenings,” as she called them—Anarchist Evening, the Suffrage Evening, the Hallucinogen Evening—were overflowing with guests who would listen to an invited speaker or two, then engage in intense debate. “This extraordinary enclave,” Hochschild writes, ”was without the bitter sectarian divisions that would before long fracture the American left.”
In attendance was a wide range of Progressive era intellectuals, artists and labor activists, often including Haywood and John Reed (both, Mabel’s lover for a while), Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman (editor of the Masses) “Young women in evening dress and editors in three-piece suits mingled with workmen in denim, radicals in Russian peasant blouses, and hobo poets from the streets who might be asked to recite their work,” Hochschild writes. Nor were the Stokeses the only “millionaire socialists” who seemed to be crossing class barriers.
Deeply involved in Village life, in 1914, Rose, a rare Jewish immigrant among them, was elected to the famous Heterodoxy group of high-achieving women: including, among many others, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, novelist Fannie Hurst, the poet Amy Lowell, Crystal Eastman, lawyer and co-founder of the ACLU and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, labor journalist, Mary Heaton Vorse. Flynn described her experience with Heterodoxy as “’an unbroken delight…It has been a glimpse of the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old “femininity” which has been replaced by a wonderful freemasonry of women.’”
Rose joined the Women’s Peace Party, headed by Jane Addams, which brought together women of varying politics, futilely united in their opposition to the United States entering World War 1. Also joining the National Birth Control League, in 1916, Rose was Master of ceremonies at their dinner of several hundred people—the first time Margaret Sanger would be speaking to such a large and wealthy audience. Rose manipulated the speakers’ list so Sanger went first, eloquently making her case for access to birth control. The doctor, who’d been planning to oppose her on the grounds that such issues should be left to medical professionals, abandoned his prepared speech.
Meanwhile, Hochschild writes, Graham, “only a peripheral figure in the socialist movement,” was “adrift in the world”—having failed to write a projected book, or to win elected office in several attempts. Graham was moving away from the Socialist Party’s anti-war position, especially after the passenger liner, Lusitania, at one point the largest ship afloat, was torpedoed on the way to England and sunk by a German submarine. He began sending an increasingly paranoid stream of letters to a high State Dept. official, his classmate at Yale, accusing people of being German agents.
Nearly 1,200 people perished on the Lusitania, including 94 children. “The outrage stirred by banner headlines was fully understandable,” Hochschild comments. But, he adds, Americans paid less attention to the fact that on board the ship were 4.2 million rounds of ammunition, 51 tons of shrapnel shells and other munitions American manufacturers had sold to Britain. “The United States was trying to have it both ways, to profit from such sales, but stay out of the war.”
When war was declared, a strong majority of Socialist Party delegates to their convention passed a resolution calling it, “a crime against the people of the United States.” This incensed Graham and his pro-war friends, and in July 1917, he and Rose wrote a joint letter of resignation from the Party. Claiming they had not ceased to be socialists, but party members should now join the effort “to overcome the Prussian war machine.” But even in her short-lived defection—she rejoined the party the following February—Rose endorsed Morris Hillquit, the Socialist Party’s candidate for New York City mayor.
As internal repression became virulent, a more militant Rose and Graham found themselves on opposite sides of virtually all important issues. Graham had enjoyed serving in his school and college cadet corps, and had happily gone back into uniform during the Spanish-American War. Now, trying unsuccessfully to reach Europe in the Medical Reserve Corps, he finally managed to get into uniform as first sergeant of the 9th Coast Artillery Corps of the New York National Guard. Prompting Upton Sinclair to write years later about Graham drilling a regiment, “preparing to kill any of his former comrades who might attempt an uprising.”
One grim act of repression had a connection to the Phelps Dodge fortune. Graham’s father had been a partner in one of America’s largest mining companies, including a massive copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. The war sparked a huge demand for copper; Bisbee’s mines ran around the clock. In 1917, the IWW began a strike. The company’s response was to help the local sheriff (a veteran of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders) assemble a vigilante posse of more than 2,000 company officials, hired gunmen, and armed local businessmen.
First seizing the local telegraph office, at 5 AM, led by a car mounted with a machine gun, they swept through Bisbee, forced nearly 1200 strikers and their supporters from their beds, and marched them out of town. Eventually, leading them at bayonet point into a train of two dozen freight cars, with manure on the floors—the railroad was a Phelps Dodge subsidiary—and hauled 180 miles through the broiling desert into New Mexico. After two days without food, the strikers were housed in an army stockade before being released. The organizers of this posse, declared the Los Angeles Times, “have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy.”
Meanwhile, in 1917, American radicals were riveted by a stunning event thousands of miles away. The Czar of Russia was overthrown in the Russian revolution. Rose raised funds to purchase printing presses to send to Russia to turn out revolutionary propaganda. Although the new provisional government promised reforms, Russian parties on the left wanted to go further and immediately make the transition to socialism.
At home, labor discontent was massive—nearly 6,000 wildcat strikes broke out in 1918. After the brutal murder of IWW organizer, Frank Little, in Butte, Montana Rose applied for readmission to the Socialist Party. Beaten by six masked men who broke into his boardinghouse, Little was abducted in his underwear, tied to a car’s rear bumper and dragged over the granite blocks of the streets. Taken to a bridge at the edge of town, he was then hanged on a railroad trestle.
For the first time in her life, Rose embarked on a campaign totally opposed to what her husband stood for. “Graham was appalled.” On the road, speaking against the draft, she told one audience, “’This war is not being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital.’”
With so many dissenters behind bars, Rose was one of the most outspoken still at liberty. Federal agents arrested her in 1918 on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act. (One of Rose’s two lawyers, would soon serve as chief counsel in the government’s trial of Eugene Debs.) The outcome of the three-day trial was never in doubt: Rose was duly convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in jail. To a friend, she wrote, “The thought of a long prison term that in my case may be a life term does not appall me. It seems to me that all my life I have been preparing to meet this.”
Rose never did go to prison. More than a year after the war ended, in March 1920, the U.S. Court of Appeals finally ruled on her conviction. She’d been continuing to agitate during this period. The Socialists nominated her as candidate for the New York State Assembly, and when campaigning, she in no way restrained what she said. A panel of judges stated the evidence against her was conclusive.
But they found fault with the original judge’s instructions to the jury, and remanded the case back to a lower court. President Woodrow Wilson stated, “’I believe that Mrs. Stokes is one of the dangerous influences of the country,’” but he did not want a new trial: “I feel the time for that is past.” The case was officially dismissed. Indicted again in 1920 for sedition, Rose was not convicted.
Post-war America saw devastating inflation, unemployment, massive and violent strikes, vicious race riots. On May Day, 1919, 36 explosive devices were mailed to public officials, including to A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General; in June, a second series of bombings took place. In retaliation, the Red Scare was ridiculously amped up. The Palmer Raids, conducted by local police and federal agents arrested thousands of men and women in more than 30 cities: often without warrants, sometimes administering beatings or throwing their victims down staircases.
By the end of the largest raid, an estimated 10,000 people had been arrested. Several hundred men in chains were marched through the streets of Boston on their way to a temporary prison. Another 800 were held for six days in the windowless corridor of a federal building in Detroit, with no bedding and the use of just one toilet and sink. In Hartford, Connecticut, 100 men were held for 5 months during which they weren’t allowed lawyers and were not informed of the charges against them. Eventually, 75% of the arrestees were released.
Adam Hochschild, in another fine study, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, argues the Palmer Raids should “really be called the Hoover raids,” as they were his doing. But he shrewdly let his boss (at 24, J. Edgar had been put in charge of a new Justice Dept. division to investigate “domestic subversive activity,” reporting directly to Palmer) take the credit, and later the blowback.
Between 1920 and ’23, membership in the Ku Klux Klan was reaching its all-time peak. Across the country, returning veterans swelled the ranks of vigilante groups. Even the moderate AFL lost more than a million members. The government used new criminal syndicalism laws to arrest hundreds of the decimated IWW’s remaining members. Its very history went up in smoke, quite literally in 1923. Nearly all the records and correspondence seized by national raids on Wobblie offices were burned by the Justice Department.
Anti-immigrant feeling was at its zenith. After a two-year jail sentence, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, were deported back to Russia, on a decrepit former troopship along with 248 other foreign-born leftists and their guards. Arriving there, Emma wrote, ‘My heart trembled with anticipation and fervor.” Nearly two years later, she left the country, bitterly disillusioned by the arrest and execution without trial of her fellow anarchists, pervasive censorship, the crushing of independent unions.
Rose harshly condemned her old friend, telling a public meeting Emma Goldman should be burned in effigy. At first, many of Rose’s circle joined a faction of left-wing Socialists, “one of several American groups that, after a confusing period of doctrinal feuding, and name changes, eventually merged into what would become the Communist Party.” Rose served on its executive committee, and became national secretary of the Women’s Division of the Friends of Soviet Russia.
American leftists were eager to believe in Russia as an alternative to the world which had just sent so many millions of young men to senseless deaths—especially since its new government had rapidly withdrawn from World War 1. On returning from a trip there, Lincoln Steffens, the venerable muckraker, famously declared, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” At the same time, Graham wrote an angry diatribe for the Times against the “propaganda” of John Reed and others, and urged the government to support the White Russians who were still holding out in Siberia against the Reds.
In 1922, Rose was part of the American delegation to a congress of the Communist International, or Comintern, the body through which the Soviets coordinated the activities of Communist parties around the world. On her return, she wrote articles for small leftist publications extolling the glories of the Soviet Union, which she referred to as “the sun of the world.” Rose ran (with miniscule vote totals) as a Communist candidate for Congress and then for borough president of Manhattan.
The American CP remained powerless throughout the 1920s, due to government harassment and factional disputes. Many writers and intellectuals, initially sympathetic, became disillusioned: increasingly finding the distant Comintern’s edicts irrelevant and damaging. Few of the Village socialist crowd, Rose wrote in her autobiography, “survived the acid test of the Russian Proletarian Revolution.”
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rose’s IWW comrade, was markedly not among them. Joining the Communist Party USA in 1936, Flynn became its chairwoman in 1961. She died during a visit to the Soviet Union, and was accorded a state funeral procession in Red Square. Rose, too, maintained an unquestioning belief in the Soviet Union. Understandably, Hochschild views those attitudes as Rose’s downfall.
“A similar rigidity was apparent in how she now saw America,” he comments. In a letter to Upton Sinclair, for example, she complained about his appeal to “the public” in one of his books. There is no public, she remarked, only workers and capitalists. Now, speaking rarely, and mainly to an audience composed of Communists like herself, “Her language lost its spark, and there are no more accounts of her mesmerizing effect as a speaker.”
Rose’s position in the distinctly marginal Communist Party itself became more marginal. ”Like many who work in quasi-underground group,” Hochschild writes, “she had become obsessively wary of infiltrators and several times accused party members of being government spies,” including one of her closest female friends. Rose’s continuing marriage to Graham caused uneasiness among Communists as well. After 1924 she would no longer serve on the party’s executive committee.
Although both Rose and Graham remained faithful, having never shared the “free love” ethos of their Greenwich Village compatriots, and Graham had uneasily stood by his wife during her trial, the couple had grown irrevocably apart. His anticommunism outlook grew increasingly strong. In a letter to Rose, he told her of the “wonderful invitation” to travel “as a guest of the Navy” on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Another letter described “the great privilege” of meeting John J. Pershing, the former commander-in-chief in Europe, at a banquet given by a British-American friendship society.
When in New York, Rose continued to receive at their house people Graham called “ingrate enemies of America.” He even threatened to fire their maid, if she again allowed them entry. “Girlie,’ Graham wrote in a letter, “There are lots of people whose political differences are even greater…Our troubles are due, or at least 99% of them are due, to your selfish determination to disregard my feelings in our home and to do exactly as you like at all times…”
Hochschild clearly views this period as also heralding Graham’s deterioration. “When he abandoned all his involvement with progressive politics, he also seemed to abandon whatever empathy went with it.” In the depths of the Great Depression, with a quarter of the country’s labor force out of work, he remarked to one visitor that at least public health was doubtless improved, because people were no longer overeating.
New York law only granted divorce on the grounds of adultery. At age 45, Rose had almost no income from writing or any other source. Her friendship with Irving Grossman led to a job doing advertising and public relations for his family owned hotel in upstate New York. (Simultaneously she organized a Communist Party study group for its waiters.) Soon, the job led to a passionate romance with Grossman which provided the legal grounds for the Stokeses’ divorce. Rose was “fiercely determined despite the urgings of her lawyer and friends” to ask for no alimony.
Six months after the divorce was final, in 1925, Graham remarried Lettice Sands, 20 years his junior: the daughter of a railroad executive whose family, often on the society pages, could trace its ancestry back to colonial times. They had no children, and Graham spent less and less time at his office, leaving for weeks on frequent ocean cruises. The lengthening list of charities whose board or membership rolls he joined ranged from the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities to animal protection groups like the Defenders of Furbearers.
Paradoxically, at the very moment when Rose freed herself from the man who came to oppose everything she stood for, she too seemed to lose interest in political work. Remaining a party member, she joined an occasional demonstration, but no longer gave speeches. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Rose sometimes went hungry. She shared a $40-a-month flat with a roommate, then moved to a heavily mortgaged cottage in Connecticut where she took in a boarder. She finally found a secretarial job at a small, Communist Party-connected relief agency.
At age 48, and on the rebound from the faithless Irving Grossman, Rose fell in love again with Victor Jerome. Seventeen years younger, he’d also been born in a Jewish shtetl in imperial Russia. The couple shared a love of literature and politics. On one of their first dates, they went to see Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, Battleship Potemkin. “From all appearances,” Hochschild reports, “they were happy together.” Jerome would have a long career as a Communist Party functionary.
Several newspapers picked up the story—one headline read, “Once Rich ‘Ghetto Rose’ Now Reported Destitute.” Rose was taking care of Jerome’s ten year old son while he was working, or, often during the Depression, job hunting. Reporters also revealed Rose was suffering from cancer.
A Rose Pastor Stokes Testimonial Committee, whose members included authors Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Langston Hughes, as well as old friends like Lincoln Steffens and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn organized a mass meeting in New York of some 500 people to raise funds for Rose’s medical treatments. From his prison cell, the famous labor martyr, Tom Mooney, sent a letter of support. Graham replied to Upton Sinclair’s plea, “If I could help her without helping her work, much of which appears to me to be so very abominable I should gladly do so, but I don’t see how I can.”
When Rose was hospitalized in New York, it was Graham’s sister, Helen, still a close friend, who paid the bill. Rose became convinced her best chance to prevent the metastasis of the tumor in her breast lay with a prominent German doctor who’d developed a new form of radiation therapy. The two of them hit it off. Referring other patients to this English-speaking physician, she wrote letters to American foundations asking them to support his work.
Rose returned to Germany for six months of further treatment. Although arriving there in February 1933, two weeks after thousands of torch-bearing Nazis marched jubilantly through the streets of Berlin to celebrate Hitler becoming Chancellor, apparently Rose didn’t know that Hans Holfeder was an outspoken anti-Semite. He would later become a colonel in the SS and give a notorious illustrated lecture portraying cancer cells as Jews and victorious beams of radiation as Nazi storm troopers.
From his clinic, Rose wrote that “Holfeder never charged a penny for X ray or for treatment.” They exchanged letters when she was back in New York, and he sent her some medicine he hoped would be helpful. To one correspondent, Rose wrote, “I feel I owe him my life.”
“Every anti-Semite has his favorite Jew”—Hochschild cites a Russian proverb.
After asking a nurse to play some Schubert on a piano, Rose died in Frankfurt on June 20, 1933, a month before her 54h birthday.
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.