Comrade Yetta Part 16

BOOK III

CHAPTER XIII

THE STRIKE

It was near midnight when Mabel and Yetta at last turned homeward. They had talked to vest workers from a dozen shops. The article in the _Forwaertz_ had been a stirring one, and probably ninety per cent of the trade had heard of the outbreak in Goldfogle's shop and Braun's prophecy of large consequences. Yetta could not see that much had been accomplished, but Mabel, more accustomed to judging such things, was jubilant.

"Yetta, dear," she said, as she kissed her good night, "there's a beautiful French song called '_ca ira_'--which being interpreted means, 'There'll be something doing'!"

All day long the conviction had grown on her that there was promise of big development to the insignificant quarrel between Yetta and her boss.

More often than not strikes break out at the most inopportune times for the workers. Sometimes a sudden provocation will drive the men into a premature revolt. Again there will be rumbles of trouble for a long time before the crisis, and when the men walk out, they find the bosses have had ample time to make provision for the fight. But a careful study of the vest-making industry could not have discovered a more favorable moment. The rush season was just drawing to a close. On the one hand, the bosses were straining every nerve to finish their contracts on time.

On the other hand, many of the workers would be laid off anyhow when the rush was over. By striking, the less skilled, poorest paid workers risked only a few weeks' pay. And surely they had enough cause to revolt. All those to whom she had talked had told of intolerable speed, pitiful pay, and arbitrary fines, indecent conditions. There was good reason to hope that the whole trade would become involved. And so at bedtime she sang the "_ca ira_" to Yetta.

Her forecast proved true. Before two o'clock every one knew that the strike had "caught." Half a dozen shops, including one of the biggest, walked out during the morning. And after the noon hour not a quarter of the vest-makers were at work.

While it might have been possible for Jake Goldfogle to find twelve skilled workers for his small shop, it was not possible to find enough for the whole trade quickly. It settled down into an endurance fight.

Both sides "organized." The strikers rented a hall in the sweat-shop district for headquarters and a committee sat there _en permanence_, making out union cards for the strikers, and a card catalogue of their names and addresses, arranging for the distribution in "strike benefits"

of all the money that could be raised. In this detail work, of immense importance to the successful conduct of a strike, Mabel was a tower of strength. She had been through it all a hundred times before, and she never got flurried. Everything seemed like a chaos, but through it her cool-headed generalship kept an effective order.

In a Broadway office the bosses organized "The a.s.sociation of Vest Manufacturers." Their headquarters were less noisy than those of the Union. But quiet does not always mean a higher standard of ethics. As the Woman's Trade Union League was helping the strikers, so trained men were lent to the bosses by the Employers' a.s.sociation. In a few days skilled vest makers from other cities began to flow into New York. Some of the shops were able to begin work again at about half their normal capacity. The press agents of the a.s.sociation of Vest Manufacturers sent out announcements to the newspapers that the strike was over.

The Union retaliated by a campaign of "picketing." Isadore Braun took this work in hand. He marshalled the volunteer "pickets" every morning, a.s.signed them to their posts, and carefully explained to them their legal rights. They were free to stand anywhere on the street and to talk to any one who would listen, so long as they did not attract a crowd which impeded traffic. They must not detain any one by force, nor threaten violence, nor use insulting language.

Recently a justice of the Supreme Court of New York has handed down a decision that "peaceful picketing" is a contradiction in terms. From his point of view all picketing is inherently violent. As a legal maxim it is idiotic. The great majority of labor pickets are peaceful. But in any large and long-continued industrial conflict some of the strikers are starving, many have hungry children at home. They cannot be expected to love the "scabs," who are taking their jobs. And it is desperately hard for the leaders of a strike--no matter how sincerely they try--to prevent sporadic acts of violence. Braun, himself a lawyer and a Socialist, was a firm believer in legality. Again and again he impressed on the strikers the urgent desirability of keeping within the letter of the law.

The first day Mabel and Yetta picketed together. They stood on the sidewalk before the largest of the vest shops and tried to talk to every one who went in. Mabel did most of it. She used the old, time-worn arguments of the unionists. The only chance for the workers was in standing together. If the scabs took the strikers' jobs, they were helping the boss more than themselves. After a strike is settled the bosses always fire the scabs and take back their old force. If they did get steady work sooner or later, somebody would scab on them. If they joined the union they would get enough strike benefits to live on, and with a strong organization the trade would be a good one. And after all it is dirty business stealing jobs from your brother workers. Most of the scabs hurriedly pa.s.sed them, a few listened sullenly, one or two replied with insults. To an outsider, picketing looks hopeless. You very rarely see any one quit work. But long experience has taught the unions that it does pay. It is not so much the rare cases where a dozen scabs stop at once as the regular drain of those who are ashamed to face the pickets and who do not come back to work again.

Mabel was too busy to picket very often. She had her hands full trying to save what she could out of the wreckage of the skirt-finishers'

strike. And there were a thousand and one things to do for the vest-makers, arranging meetings, trying to interest the newspapers, spurring on the Advisory Council to raise money. They had collected a good deal, but the poverty of the vest-makers was appalling; "strike benefits" kept the treasury always empty. She had to see to replenishing it daily. Yetta, however, was on picket duty every day.

Gradually it became evident that the "picket" was successful. Most of the imported vest-makers, the skilled operatives, had joined the union.

Only a few of the shops were running at all and at great expense on account of the uneconomy of raw hands. The smaller bosses were going into bankruptcy. Jake Goldfogle had been the first to fall. Five days had cleaned him out. The next day two more went under. Credit was beginning to tighten for even the biggest bosses.

The a.s.sociation of Vest Manufacturers saw that it was necessary to break the picket at any cost. There were a number of secret conferences with city politicians. The police magistrate who was sitting at Ess.e.x Market Court was transferred to an uptown jurisdiction, and his place was taken by a magistrate named Cornett, notorious for his outspoken hostility to unionism. The police also got their orders.

Busy days began for Isadore Braun. Pickets were arrested on all sides.

At first he seemed to get the better of the legal battle in the dingy Ess.e.x Market Courthouse. He had the law on his side, and a forceful way of expressing it. The early batches of pickets were discharged with a warning. But in a few days the police got the hang of the kind of testimony which was expected of them. The court began to impose fines, which of course meant imprisonment, as the girls had no money.

It is an educational maxim of Froebel that we learn by doing. Like most concise sayings, it is not entirely true. Yetta, for instance, had been making vests for four years, but she learned more about vest-making in the first four weeks of the strike than she had in her years of labor.

She began to realize that her "trade" was more than a routine of flying fingers. Braun at one of the meetings had traced out the complicated process of industry. Outside of her shop there had been men who were "cutters," men who prepared the pieces of cloth on which she worked.

Back of them were the people who wove the cloth and spun the yarn, and further back still were the shepherds who grew the sheep and clipped the wool. And when the vests had left her shop, they had gone to "finishers." From them to dealers who were buying coats and trousers of the same cloth, and at last the complete suits were sold to wearers by the retailer. And all these thousands of people, who were her co-workers, had to eat. Some one had to bake their bread. The bakers were really part of the vest trade. And so were the cobblers who made shoes for the workers, and the coal miners who tore fuel for them from the bowels of the earth, and the steel workers who made their machines and their needles. It was hard to think of any worker who did not in some way contribute to the making of vests.

Braun had said that all the people of the process were equally exploited by the same unjust system. They were all "wage-slaves." And in her daily intercourse with the strikers, sometimes on picket duty, sometimes at meetings, sometimes at headquarters attending to the clerical work of distributing "benefits," she came to realize as she never could have done from her own experience alone, what "wage-slavery" means. The tragedy of Mrs. Cohen's life was being repeated on every side.

She had never made the acquaintance of hunger--the great Slave Driver--before. And even now, she only saw it. She at least got a good breakfast at Mabel's flat. And sometimes she got a lunch or supper.

Mabel, in her immense preoccupation with the details of the strike, did not realize how often Yetta went through the day on the one meal. But the flat was twenty minutes' walk from the strike headquarters. Yetta had no money for car fare and could rarely spend the time to walk there for lunch or dinner. When there were meetings in the evening and she walked home with Mabel and Longman, they generally had a cold supper.

But she was of course earning no wages and had taken nothing from the Goldstein flat which she could p.a.w.n. The need of the other strikers was so much more appalling than her own that she could not find heart to ask for "strike benefits."

Mabel, having at once realized Yetta's remarkable power of appeal, was carefully engineering the limelight. With disconcerting frequency Yetta found herself in its glare. The half-dozen newspaper men who had tried to get a story out of this sweat-shop revolt had been steered up to Yetta. And they had all sent around their staff photographers to get her picture. The papers with a large circulation among the working cla.s.ses had made her face familiar to millions. One of them had the enterprise to get a snapshot of her, arguing with a scab, before the Sure-fit Vest Company. Even the man who signed himself "The Amused Onlooker" in the _Evening Standard_, wrote a psychological sketch of this East Side firebrand. His tone was railing as usual, but he tried to be complimentary towards the close by comparing her to Jeanne D'Arc.

Whenever there was a chance, Mabel pushed Yetta on to the platform. The various women of the Advisory Council arranged afternoon teas for her to address. To Yetta such begging speeches were much more unpleasant work than picketing. But it was not hard for her to talk to these small gatherings. She spoke to them very simply. She did not again tell her own story--in the rush of events she had almost forgotten it. Every day brought to her notice new and more bitter tragedies. On the whole the money raised was not much--ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-five dollars.

But every cent was needed. Mabel, from much experience of her own in similar circ.u.mstances, knew that Yetta was surprisingly successful. But there was hardly ever a woman present at these uptown teas whose cheapest ring was not worth many times the amount collected. Yetta, seeing the jewels and knowing the intense need of her people, counted over the few dollars and thought herself a failure.

But if these excursions into polite society did not bring the monetary returns for which she wished, they at least made Yetta's face, her great sad eyes, and gentle voice, familiar to many women of social prominence--a result which was to bear fruit in the future.

It also cured her of the envy which had cast a shadow of bitterness over her first morning in Mabel's apartment. She came to realize even more clearly the gulf which separated her people from the world of luxury.

She no longer wanted to cross the gulf. The strange country into which she got these occasional glimpses seemed a very hard-hearted place. It was always a shock to her to see such laughing, light-hearted indifference. Sometimes she went on a similar errand to the headquarters of other unions. There she found her own people and sure sympathy. She spoke one evening in a barren, ill-lit room, where the "pastry cooks"

held their meetings. They were most of them foreigners, French and German, just coming out of a disastrous strike, and were very poor. They had no money in their treasury, but some of them went down in their pockets, and she got a handful of nickels and dimes. It was not as much as she had secured from some "ladies" in the afternoon, but it was more inspiring. She felt very keenly that in some mystic way their gift, which they could so ill afford, would be of greater use to the Cause than the dollars from uptown.

The well-dressed women she met seemed to her of small worth compared to her trade-mates. She was proud of her share in the wonderful heroism of the women who went hungry. The memory of her father was the most brilliant of her mental treasures. If she had been brought up by a more practical man, if her father had taught her to consider elegance, or social success, or wealth, or culture of more virtue than loving kindness--as most of us are taught--her verdict would, of course, have been less severe. But she could not feel that the Golden Rule was taken seriously by the Christian women uptown. She doubted if they loved their neighbors as themselves. Certainly their definition of the word did not reach downtown. The diamonds of their useless ornaments threw a cruel light on the misery of her people.

In forming this harsh estimate of the world of luxury she had Mabel beside her as a standard of comparison. Why were the other women different from Mabel? They were no more beautiful, no better educated, no more refined. But Mabel was the "real thing." Yetta was ashamed of her first envy and distrust. Day by day she saw more fully the broad scope of Mabel's activities--of which this vest-makers' strike was only one--and her admiring wonder grew. Mabel gave not only her time, but she was not afraid of what the girls called "dirty work"; she carried a banner in the street on the day of the parade, she did her turn at picketing, her share of addressing and sealing envelopes. And she carried very much more than her share of the heavier responsibilities.

Yetta found it hard to understand how other women, who also knew the facts of misery, could act so differently. Yet, day after day she told them the facts, and they were content to give five or ten dollars. No.

Yetta did not want to be a "lady."

Almost every day some of the pickets were arrested and sent to the workhouse. But others always volunteered to take their places. There is no surer lesson to be learned from history than that persecution is like oil to the flame of enthusiasm. Instead of breaking, as the bosses--with the fatuousness of Nero--had hoped, the picket became more intense and more effective. The bosses decided that "something decisive must be done." There were several conferences--very quiet and orderly they were--with the expert strike-breakers who had been loaned to them by the Employers' a.s.sociation. A long statement was prepared, which informed the public that the vest manufacturers, feeling that they were not getting sufficient a.s.sistance from the city police, had employed a private detective agency to protect their property and the lives of their faithful employees from the outrages of the strikers. All the English papers published this statement without any inquiry as to whether life and property needed special protection. The more complaisant ones published the stories which the "press agent" of the a.s.sociation furnished on the "outrages." So the impression was spread abroad that the striking vest-makers were smoky-haired furies, who brawled in the streets and tore the clothes off respectable women.

But there was hardly any one who had ever been involved in a strike, employer or employed, hardly a cub-reporter in the city, who did not know what this announcement meant. The bosses had failed to break the strike by "legal" means. The "private detectives" had been called in to do it by intimidation and brutality. Girls began coming into the strike headquarters with bleeding faces, with black and blue bruises from kicks.

No justice of the Supreme Court has handed down a decision on the probability of the public peace being disturbed by the use of thugs, calling themselves "private detectives," in labor disputes.

Mabel, realizing Yetta's special usefulness as a speaker and money-raiser, tried to persuade her that this other work was more important than picketing.

"No," Yetta said. "If I didn't spend the morning with the girls, I would not have anything to say at night."

Mabel did not urge her further; she no longer called her _la pet.i.te_ when she spoke of her to Eleanor. Every one who came in contact with her during these weeks knew that she was growing very rapidly into womanhood.

Yetta expected to get arrested. Why should she not? In a way she had started all the trouble. Why should the other girls be knocked about by the ruffian private detectives and she escape? Day after day she took her post before one or another of the vest shops and did her duty as she saw it, as the other women were doing it. There were always two pickets at each post, and it was in these morning watches that Yetta got her deepest insight into the lives of her comrades.

She was having a very easy time of it. She had a pleasant place to sleep. She had her one sure meal a day. There were no children crying to her for food. The other women were faring worse than she. Some were sick, almost all were hungry and insufficiently clad. And while Yetta was often called away to the less fatiguing work of the office, or to some uptown tea, these women, used to sitting all day before a machine, were standing hour after hour before their posts. But it was not the sight of them, pitiful spectacles as many of them were, which hurt Yetta most. It was their stories--unintentionally told for the most part. The words dropped by chance, which called up visions of sick husbands and the hungry babies. Some of the pickets were gray-haired and bent, some were younger than Yetta, and they all seemed to be suffering more for the strike than she. And the hungry babies! Her sleep was troubled at night by dreams of their cries.

That she had been spared by the police and thugs seemed to Yetta the most unjust thing of all the injustice she saw about her. A week on "the Island" would mean little to her; she had no one dependent on her. But always they picked some widow, who had no one to care for her children while she was in prison. Yetta felt herself strong and healthy. Why did the thugs always beat up some old woman or some frail consumptive girl?

Although she had escaped trouble so long, she quietly and without excitement expected it. Whenever she met any of the girls who had been in the workhouse, she asked about it--in the same way that we, if we were expecting to winter in Paris, would inquire from friends who had been there about the rents and shops and so forth.

But when at last her turn came, it happened in a manner utterly unexpected.

CHAPTER XIV

ARREST