The 'Forward' at Seventy

...Nor is it going too far to say that the very ethical basis of American trade unionism is derived from those moral values the Forward promoted in the needle trades...

...A test of the paper's trade union loyalties and democratic principles came in the '20s and '30s during the battle to save the apparel unions and the Jewish community from Communist domination...

...Procedures that are now standard in all labor-management relations in this country were originally sponsored by the Forward in the apparel trade unions...

...When the Forward began publication three months later, its founders did not give any thought to whether their paper might succeed or even turn a profit...

...the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance...

...The Forward had a great handicap to overcome in reaching its readers that is rarely realized...

...With the exception of the dailies that printers published during newspaper strikes in various communities, for many years the Forward was the lone accredited labor daily in the United States...

...The decade that preceded the Forward's founding was one of great intellectual ferment in the United States...

...Agitation and training in trade union loyalties, of course, were a primary concern of the Forward...

...The New Deal, J. C. Rich, a long time contributor to The New Leader, is the editor of the Hat Worker and a member of the Forward's editorial staff...

...Jewish immigrants with memories of the hateful Tsarist tyranny were for a time also favorably disposed to a regime in Russia that claimed to be Socialist, Communist or Populist...

...Many had attended religious schools?cheder or yeshiva????as boys, but there the curriculum was confined to religious lore...

...He next moved to capture the remnant holdings of the Knights of Labor, only to be rebuffed there too...

...The final break came on January 7, 1897: Fifty-two delegates at a meeting of the slp Press Federation, dominated by De Leon, walked out vowing to establish a daily of their own in competition with the Yiddish party organs that had begun publishing some three years earlier...

...For while Jews pridefully call themselves the People of the Book, the fact is that most of the immigrants who surged to these shores in great waves at the turn of the century and during the following decade lacked an elementary education...

...Eventually, the number of Jewish Socialists in New York grew to the point where they were able to organize their own branch of the Socialist Labor party...

...The intellectuals and radical sectarians, though, spoke a language that was rarely understood by their Yiddish audience...

...The Forward suffered grievous wounds in that struggle, but was completely vindicated in its stand and emerged morally and spiritually stronger for its ordeal...

...In his memoirs he describes the speech as a wild and puerile diatribe on the accursed capitalists, but it went over big with the Jewish audience because it was spoken in their native tongue...

...In terms of actual cash, however, the amount raised for funding capital was pitifully small????no more than several hundred dollars...

...Then it occurred to him that it was absurd to recite daily devotions to the coming revolution when the people already had the vote and could adopt any manner of government or social order they desired...

...At present I. J.'s brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elie Weisel, both of whom have won wide acclaim for the English translations of their works, are staff members...

...It was the Forward that set up the first serious opposition to Communist claims and incursions into the unions and the Jewish community at large...

...Its involvement with labor's cause was direct and intensive, and without doubt it was the major force that brought the garment unions into existence...

...The German colony by that time did have a flourishing radical movement in New York in the Socialist Labor party, and the German language was close enough to Yiddish to be comprehensible to most of the Jewish immigrants...

...Cahan blue-pencilled the deutschmerish (Germanic) locution and the Hebrew phrases, but accepted the Anglicized words that had become familiar elements of American Yiddish such as "boy," "boyele," "boy-chick" and even "boychickle" (but never "girl" or its diminutives...

...These dedicated idealists had no notion of the realities of the publishing business anyway, and the earnings of most of them were as precarious and inconstant as the funds of the new paper were to be...

...The recent arrivals from Russia were particularly attracted to the radical groupings of the time, where opposition to the existing order seemed a continuum, an extrapolation of their fervent opposition to the despicable Tsarist autocracy...

...But the critical advantage the Forward had over all the other publications of the Right or Left was the competence and genius of its first editor, Abraham Cahan...

...secular literature, geography, history, mathematics, the sciences or anything else not directly related to piety and theo-logic devotion were excluded...

...It still abides by the American principle of the good of the many and the welfare of all that it was so instrumental in establishing...

...Moreover, the increasing number of Jewish immigrants streaming into New York had little rapport with the Socialist Labor party...

...But the Socialist organization was frustrating and self-defeating in its peverse and capricious fiailings...

...The capital they raised to finance the new daily came from nickel and dime collections at meetings of Jewish groups...

...Nothing, however, was so homelike as the Russian they heard from compatriot Anarchists and Socialist speakers embroiled in endless disputes over the proper road to salvation...

...It is something of a revelation to observe that for more than a third of this country's existence, a newspaper of relatively few resources has had such a profound impact on the thinking and feeling of the nation...

...All the others have been sold, combined, confounded, merged and submerged in a series of counting-house convulsions...

...In New York, Henry George captured the imagination of many people with his Single Tax theories...

...The issue on which a number of the immigrant Socialists broke with De Leon was trade union solidarity...

...Instead, all its zeal went into the causes it championed...

...The fledgling unions that existed in "Jewish" trades adhered to the Alliance, but they rebelled when De Leon sent in strikebreakers to violate afl picket lines...

...the Fair Deal, the Great Society, indeed all the programs of public concern for the common welfare trace many of their roots to the soil plowed by the Forward...

...Others were to come in slow progression...

...That they did learn to read and developed a need and attachment for it is testimony to the cultural impact of the Forward on the Jewish immigrant populace...

...They plunged into the enterprise knowing only that it would involve endless travail and sacrifice...

...In addition, Cahan set extraordinarily high standards for the literature he published...

...An attempt to negotiate a "united front" with the Anarchists for the purpose of launching a joint publishing venture broke down in much the same way that subsequent "united front" maneuvers with the Communists were to fail...

...Consequently, many of the Forward's, potential audience had no established reading habit in their native tongue, Yiddish, or in any other language for that matter...

...Cahan reached out to these disadvantaged, desperately deprived and disoriented immigrants and gave them a paper that was inviting, stimulating and instructive...

...Flocking to meetings, they listened to intellectuals commenting on the current scene and condemning the evils of capitalism...

...But since its founding 70 years ago, on April 22, 1897, the Forward has not only been responsible for acculturating most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants in this country...

...It did not matter...

...Until then, the Yiddish of the theater and of competing publications was Germanized, affected and flossy, laced with Hebrew verbiage that was over the heads of most readers...

...Thus he insisted on clear, lucid exposition in good, sound Yiddish, the language spoken by the immigrant people...

...Some of them graduated to more complicated philosophies of society, becoming Anarchists, Socialists, embryonic Communists and Utopians of various shadings and confusions of mind...

...To the intellectuals Yiddish was nothing but a patois, too vulgar for high-minded emancipators of mankind to use in expounding the niceties of the brotherhood of men...

...It brought them knowledge of the surrounding world and an awareness of their dignity as workers and human beings...

...He knew that to reach readers with a Socialist or any other message, he must first succeed in attracting them to his publication...

...INSTRUMENT OF INNOVATION AND CHANGE The 'Forward' at Seventy By J. C. Rich Of the many papers published in New York City at the turn of the century, only two survive today under their original ownership and general editorial direction????the New York Times and the Jewish Daily Forward...

...Daily it continues to give vigor and impetus to those cultural and social values which brought it into existence, and which it has cherished and advanced over the past 70 years as tribune of the Jewish community in the American democracy...

...Since a visual familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet was required to read Yiddish, young women in particular were unable to read the paper...

...Cahan was the first of the immigrants to deliver a Socialist lecture in Yiddish...

...Meanwhile, dissension within the Socialist Labor party itself festered until it virtually overshadowed the party's conflicts with its now sworn opponents, the Anarchists...

...The young Jewish immigrants—uprooted, insecure, desperately lonely for their families and old associations?found these movements enormously stimulating and enthralling...

...De Leon tried to invade the then burgeoning American Federation of Labor but was sidetracked by Samuel Gompers...

...His pedagogic instinct was as strong as his editorial impulse...

...The girls were deprived of even the limited education their brothers obtained, there being no requirements that women read prayers and participate in synagogue devotions...

...At the outset, in fact, nobody deigned to speak to these newly arrived Jews in their language...

...They had been deprived of schooling by anti-Semitic restrictions and governmental regulations...

...Cahan has been the victim of so much derogation, scoffing and vituperation that it is difficult to present him in true perspective to an audi ence unacquainted with his pioneering deeds and unique achievements as editor and educator...

...Much of the liberal intelligentsia in the United States succumbed and was absorbed in Red fronts...

...So great was the indignation of most of the immigrant community against De Leon's domineering tactics, and so strong was the desire to articulate the point of view of the moderate Democratic Socialists and trade unionists, that the early Forward group found many enthusiastic supporters for the venture...

...Practically every master of modern Yiddish????including Sholem Asch and I. J. Singer????found a welcome in the Forward, and a substantial number produced their work as salaried members of the paper's editorial staff...

...Abraham Cahan, who was to become the editor of the Forward and have an enormous influence on the Jewish community, recalls in his autobiography that in the early days he favored the Anarchists against the Socialists...

...The opposition ended in a cathartic struggle that saved the unions and brought to Jews and non-Jews an awareness of what the Russian dictatorship meant in terms of human enslavement and degradation...

...The spirit of the founding group was the Forward's tangible asset...

...These social, economic, political and cultural commitments were so compelling and so pervasive that they affected the life and soul of the entire Jewish immigrant community in the United States and Canada...

...Today it still abides by the principles of Democratic Socialism...

...The discord stemmed largely from differences between the members and party leader Daniel De Leon, a man of considerable charm and erudition who unfortunately was intolerant of any opinion contrary to his own...

...This led him to establish a labor federation of his own...

...He disdained polemics and instead concentrated on subjects relating to the daily life of his readers????the harsh realities of work in the sweatshops, the poor housing and extortionate rents in the tenements, the corruption of police and magistrates rampant under Tammany domination, the vice and moral filth of the red-light district of the East Side where Jewish immigrants had settled...

...Clear, lucid, mamme-loshen (mother-tongue) Yiddish was a startling innovation when Cahan introduced it...

...The Forward has survived and prospered because it had little talent for money-making and was not sophisticated enough to bow to the compulsions of profit...

...it has also been an instrument of change, innovation and accommodation in American society as a whole...