The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Abe Cahan and The New America IN THE 60 years of the present century America has become more truly American. When, back in the 19th century, Abe Cahan escaped...
...When Russell caught up with him, Cahan was already a successful American newspaperman with a position on The Commercial Advertiser...
...Hardly anyone in this country understood Communist theory and action better than he did...
...Here was a man...
...He was already on the road to success...
...Just steady progress propelled by the popular will...
...That meant organization...
...One practical improvement after another...
...Only by exercising the greatest vigilance and energy were the clothing workers and their friends able to develop genuinely American, democratically run union organizations to protect their interests...
...Abe Cahan, this stoutly American Socialist, as his great blow for Americanism, led his people to a democratic way of making social progress...
...In this unpromising world that lively Jewish idealist went to work to help create the better, truer, happier and more democratic America of 1960...
...While other radical papers wore their subscribers down with pleas for help, The Forward was giving help...
...Following Abe Cahan's lead, The Jewish Daily Forward has from the start carried on two great struggles...
...Since it belonged to a public association and had a rule against taking profits, it was able to assist all sorts of good causes...
...And how unceasingly, how relentlessly, he worked and fought for it...
...After the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, the theories upon which it was ostensibly based inevitably acquired great popularity and respect in this country...
...Many of its members, including the Forward group, became Roosevelt New Dealers...
...When Cahan and his faithful friends called a meeting in 1897 for the purpose of starting a Yiddish-language radical paper, it was not to make money, to secure fame or to succeed in politics...
...No Marxism...
...But those who pictured such a career for him little knew the inner reaches of his heart...
...No dictatorship...
...and understanding socialism required education, which, in turn, required the right kind of paper to disseminate news and ideas...
...And all the time the Communists would be fighting from the rear...
...Cahan published stories and essays which the people loved...
...No abstract and complicated theory...
...They thought of this paper solely as a means of educating hundreds of thousands of people, of unifying them, of giving them a chance to make new lives...
...They must be organized, educated and given a chance for a decent life...
...During the great struggles which accompanied the creation of the present powerful clothing workers unions, Abe Cahan and his friends were in the thick of the fight...
...The first has been in favor of straightforward American trade unionism of the Samuel Gompers type...
...His deepest interest was centered in the hundreds of thousands of new Americans who had come, as he had, from the ghettos of Eastern Europe...
...they were, rather, fellow human beings with a right to opportunities in the world...
...Within the American Socialist party there was a never-ending struggle against essentially Communist ideas and methods because there were always so-called Socialists who devoutly believed in dictatorship and world conquest by force...
...In the course of time, to every one's surprise, the paper began to make money...
...When, back in the 19th century, Abe Cahan escaped from the Vilna ghetto and landed in the midst of the dirty and poverty-stricken East Side of New York with two dollars in his pocket, what he saw, heard and smelled was hardly calculated to give him a good impression of the land of the free and the home of the brave...
...Cahan and the men who worked with him believed in a socialism anchored tightly to American democracy...
...This meant struggling against employers—and sometimes against the police—for the right to organize...
...It was taken for granted that he would pull out of that malodorous East Side and plan for an assured success as an American man of letters...
...Wages were low, unemployment was rampant, and there were neither effective trade unions nor laws to protect the workers...
...In the end, in 1936-38, this struggle led to the destruction of the Socialist party...
...In the trade unions, in political organizations, in the courts, everywhere men met and talked and chose sides, the great battle went on...
...My picture of Abe Cahan, as he was in his early years, has come to me through Charles Edward Russell's recollections...
...Any less courageous man would have quailed before such a task, which required all sorts of exhausting activity morning, noon and night through the decades up to the very end of his 91 years in 1951...
...Eventually, it meant socialism...
...His place as a novelist was already assured and William Dean Howells had called him "the new star of realism in American literature...
...To them, immigrants were not objects of charity, as they were to settlement workers...
...But Abe Cahan's greatest fight was his second, his fight against Communism...
...That was Abe Cahan's ideal...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 48
