A woman of valor — and audacity

When I first heard the story of Clara Lemlich, in Kevin Baker’s wonderful 1999 novel Dreamland, I assumed she was a fictional character, a composite of the farbrente maydlach — the “fiery women” — who agitated among exploited garment workers in turn-of-the-20th-century New York.

Here was the daughter of pious Jews, born in Ukraine, who immigrates to the United States and becomes a skilled seamstress. Defying her father by reading Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gorky, she becomes a thorn in the side of Lower East Side factory owners, organizing three strikes between 1906 and 1909. Her savage beating at the hands of hired strikebreakers would make her a hero and near martyr to the workers’ cause, but it was her role in the famous Cooper Union meeting on Nov. 22, 1909, that earned her a place in the history books. The meeting of Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union — a local that Lemlich and her fellow workers helped organize — was called to discuss the pros and cons of a general strike by “shirtwaist,” or blouse, makers.

As (male) speaker after speaker took the stage and urged the workers to move slowly in their push for higher wages and fewer hours, Lemlich became increasingly agitated. Even Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor, cautioned Local 25 not to enter into a general strike “too hastily.” Finally, Lemlich, then in her 20s, demanded the podium — and got it. “I have listened to all the speakers,” she said. “I have no further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.”

In the ensuing pandemonium, those gathered did vote for a strike, which eventually grew to 20,000 workers, mostly women.

Of course, Lemlich was a real person, and her story is told beautifully in David von Drehle’s new book, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (Atlantic Monthly Press). Von Drehle, a Washington Post reporter, links the general strike of 1909 to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire less than two years later. The two events, he writes, led to “a complete rethinking of the place of women in society” and “a new model for worker safety in American mills and workshops.” The strike and the fire also helped push American politics to the left while simultaneously “dooming socialism to failure.” Writes von Drehle: “In the time-honored style of American politics, an established party [the Democrats] smothered a rising third party [the Socialists] by adapting some of its core issues.”

Von Drehle does not flinch from revealing some of the less savory aspects of the labor-management battles of the era, on both sides. He limns the Jew vs. Jew character of those battles, where “maybe a little more drive or a few less scruples” separated the Jewish owners, like Max Blanck and Isaac Harris of the Triangle factory, from workers like Lemlich. And he reminds readers that the 1909 strike was a failure in the short run. “Poisoned by resentment, envy and ideology,” the uncomfortable coalition of workers, radicals, and uptown society women fell apart, and the workers caved on their demand that the shirtwaist shops be closed to non-union workers.

Still, the spirit of Lemlich and her fellow farbrente maydlach shines through the book and provides a redemptive counterweight to the stories of the 146 victims of the Triangle fire. It’s a pity, however, that Lemlich’s story, kept alive in labor circles and histories of the Lower East Side, is seldom heard in Jewish classrooms or children’s literature.

Lemlich’s memory was recently invoked in a news release from Jewish Women Watching, the anonymous group of feminist activists, announcing their demonstration last week in front of United Jewish Communities headquarters in New York. Once a single-issue organization — protesting the relative absence of women in top executive positions in the Jewish communal world — the group recently expanded its agenda to take on the Christian Right, Jewish groups it considers to have drifted too far to the right, and philanthropists who favor birthright israel trips over social action projects.

It’s their business that they treat feminism as synonymous with left-wing politics — perhaps that’s Lemlich’s legacy as well. But theirs is a mixed tribute to Lemlich, however, in that it combines her fiery rhetoric with a decidedly un-Clara-like anonymity. Jewish Women Watching activists hand out their leaflets while wearing owl masks, while Lemlich walked the picket lines, head held high, even after she was targeted by thugs.

Still, it’s a good thing that some people — whoever they are — are remembering Clara Lemlich. Three and four generations removed from the struggles of the immigrant era, it has become increasingly difficult for Jews to identify with the challenges of the poor and disenfranchised. Some even go so far as to deny comparisons between their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle for a leg up with the struggles of new waves of immigrants to America. And it’s not that the sweatshops have disappeared. They’ve just gone overseas, where a Clara Lemlich is no doubt organizing among workers in Burma or Nicaragua.

As for Lemlich, she later married Joe Shavelson, a printer, and had three children, but her radical spirit never dimmed. According to von Drehle, she “spent the Roosevelt years as a communist, organizing protests against the high cost of food.” Until she died, in 1982 at the age of 97, she remained active in a host of causes, from public housing to farm workers’ rights. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive in Boston, even as she lay dying in a Los Angeles nursing home, she helped to organize the orderlies.

“What did I know about trade unionism?” she recalled in 1954. “Audacity — that’s all I had. Audacity!”