1910

  

__________ 

A “money monopoly” controls the nation. 

Woodrow Wilson

__________

Marie Radziwill by Boldini

 

U.S. POPULATION increases by 21% in the previous decade, rising to 92,228,496 in the 1910 census. Cleveland is the sixth largest city in the country, with 560,663 residents. (Today, the city has fewer people.)

 

*

 

Still claiming the divine right of kings.

    Wilhelm II explains his claim to the royal crown; it was “granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies, and popular decision…Considering myself an instrument of the Lord, I go my way.”

 

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; p. 95)

 

Coal mining was highly dangerous in 1910.

 

* 

April: Woodrow Wilson goes to Pittsburgh to speak. Walworth explains how his words struck a chord:

 

The “children of Israel” – the God-fearing, hard-working marrow of America – were crying out for a prophet, a responsible leader, someone who could tell them what it all meant, who could either justify or curb the vast power that sheer money had gained. Their hope for a revival of the old, rosy spirit of the frontier lay in the appearance of a political messiah – a prophet who would utter wisdom and give justice. (10/133)

 

Wilson himself warned:

 

I feel it my duty to say that they – at least the Protestant churches – are serving the classes and not the masses of the people. They have more regard for pew rents than for men’s souls. They are depressing the level of Christian endeavor … the American people will tolerate nothing that savours of exclusiveness. Their political parties are going to pieces. (10/138)

 

    Walworth explains,

 

In unmasking deep personal feelings the speaker had touched sensitive chords in millions of his fellows who identified themselves with the “masses of men upon whose blood and energy” a “handful of conspicuous men” were “subsisting.” Woodrow Wilson had played – by ear – the music that lures votes. (10/139)

 

    Convinced he should run for governor, he explained:

 

The future is not for parties “playing politics” but for measures conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders are statesman not demagogues, who love, not their offices but their duty and their opportunity for service. We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people, the beginning of an age of thoughtful reconstruction that makes our thought heart back to the great age in which democracy was set up in America. With the new age we shall show a new spirit… (10/158)

   

 

    Wilson once referred to “the cold bath of public opinion.” (10/177)

 

    He spoke of a “money monopoly.” (10/211)

 

    He once referred to the Bible as “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the human soul.” (10/205)

 

*

 

August 10: A young man from Abilene, Kansas, sends a letter to his congressman, asking for appointment to either Annapolis or West Point. He wins a place at West Point – and goes on to change history.

 

    His name: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

*

 

“A Jewish Search for Freedom”

 

    Harry Roskolenko was born into a “self-contained Yiddish ghetto,” on Cherry Street in New York City in 1907. His parents had fled Ukraine, and sailed for the United States. “My mother,” Harry later wrote, “who was not financially illiterate, was soon calling America ‘America, Gonef’ (America, the thief.)” 130/152 

I was part of a once-large family, but only six of us were left – four boys and two girls, all born on the Lower East Side. In the Ukraine, before the turn of the industrializing and ravaging century, eight others had been borne by my stolid mother. They had died in infancy in those times of easy dying. But we, Americans all, were tougher, burlier, heartier, and better fed. We were another set of health statistics. We had more possibilities, if less of God; though my father tried to give us both with the bread my mother baked, the wine he made, and the guided spiritualism of a man who was as Old Testament as Moses with his stern, fatherly hand. 130/154

 

    “And every letter to my father, written in Russian, Polish, or Hebrew, from some relative in our Ukrainian town ... usually ended with the question when will you send money for a shifskart?” 

    When the newest arrival was picked up at the huge immigration terminus, he or she was soon bedded down in my father’s house. Cots were pulled out. Children’s sleeping arrangements were doubled up. The kitchen became a bedroom. The living room was a room for everything, especially for mass meetings of relatives.  

    How was everybody [back home]? Who was the rabbi? Had shul gone under? Was Uncle David still on his farm? How many cows did he have? What, a new wife? His fifth? Such strength! How many children does he have now? An army full! 

 

    Life in the New World was harder than expected, “For all of us soon learned that the green dollar did not grow on green trees. It came via Ellis Island, heartbreak, bad health, and pain.” 130/157 

    Accidents were always with us. When I was six my mother was run over by the ice truck. She had crawled beneath it to pick up some fallen pieces of ice – a habit of poverty to keep the food we had from spoiling. The truck ran over her right shoulder. Her right arm was amputated …and we were amputated, with permanent grief. She was fifty-one then, and went on selling newspapers and taking care of us. 

    Horses kicked you as you patted them. We were clumsy with horses, though they were then on the way out, as electric cars purred with increasing frequency along the dirty streets. Horses, dirt, mobs of kids – everything and everybody took to the middle of the street and accidents where the natural result. The sidewalks were for stands selling fruit, newspapers, shirts, and old clothes. The gutters, where dead horses lay for days or until a special truck came along the haul them off, where most of our playgrounds.

  

    “I used to insist that horses and animals were like human beings,” he wrote, “but somewhat dumb. Many of my friends were just as dumb though they talked forever about everything and nothing.”

 

    A newcomer was a griner, or a griner tukes, a “green ass.” When one new arrival reached New York, “my father told me to take him to the baths on Rutgers Street for two hours, ‘So he does not bring Russian lice and the ship’s lice into the house.’”

 

    Life in a city in that era could be dangerous. “Gas explosions occurred regularly in the tenements. People fell down open elevator shafts. The wooden floors of the tenements fell in. Fire escapes broke, flinging sleepers into the streets. They were terrible fires.” 130/162-165

 

    Roskolenko also remembered: 

    Schooling in my time, at PS31, was very stern. The teacher, though not a cop, was nevertheless a ruler-wielding teacher. We knew the ruler because it was often applied to our asses by both teacher and principal. We would get slapped, and they were right. I was never right at any time – said my parents, who were immediately told of each incident by a note from the teachers or the principal. They sided with the teachers, and my report card proved that I was sleeping when I should have been studying. I was left back – a phrase that became quite familiar around our house. 130/166 

    By 1908, when my father had been in New York for thirteen years and was attending Socialist mass meetings, the Socialist Party in the United States had doubled its membership. It had twenty-five hundred locals in the country. It flooded through the East Side, from synagogues to unions. It had its great proselytizers, men like Abraham Cahan, the novelist-editor of The Forward. My father liked the gradualism of Abraham Cahan and the social ideas of Morris Hillquit, the party’s theoretician, who said in 1910, when my father walked the picket line during the great Cloakmakers’ strike, “Our principal efforts must be directed towards the propaganda of Socialism among the workers. But they should by no means be limited to that class alone. … The ultimate aims of the movement far transcend the interests of any one class in society, and its social ideal is so lofty that it may well attract large numbers of men and women from other classes. … The workers are by no means the only class which has a direct economic motive for favoring a change of the existing order. …” 

    Under these all-inclusive words, my father, good Jew that he was, hard working every day, was a Socialist. 

    I remember my father telling me, a few years later, on a Sunday, of a meeting he had gone to in 1910 to hear Debs at the Hippodrome. 

    “Debs spoke. What did I understand in English? Almost gornisht (nothing). But there must have been ten thousand people there. It smelled like my old barn used to smell – from animal drek.” 130/169-170 

 

    His Uncle David had a farm in Accord, New York, and used to send plenty of apples. “He died at the age of ninety-seven, an oak of a Jew.” 130/176