Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,028

This is the grave of Frank Tannenbaum.

Born in 1893 in Austria to a Jewish family, Tannenbaum came with his family to the United States in 1905, like so many Jews of that time and place. Too bad more didn’t come to the U.S. They were poor., working on a farm near Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He didn’t take to the move very well. He became a difficult kid. He hated his family, dropped out of school, ran away. He took whatever job he could and he found a better way to live–he became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, finding the family of fellow workers that meant much more to so many Wobblies than their biological families.

In 1914, Tannenbaum was working as a waiter in a New York restaurant and was a leader of the Waiter’s Industrial Union, which was the IWW’s attempt to organize that industry. This was an era of economic downturn and these workers decided that what they needed to relieve their unemployment was for the city’s wealthy churches to take care of them. So they decided to start marching into church services and interrupting them. Quite a few churches were cowed actually. Of course the always pro-capitalist and right wing New York Times was horrified by these actions. Imagine the pearl clutching today if this sort of thing happened. Hell, imagine the pearl clutching of such tactics in LGM comment threads. Anyway, one Catholic church refused to comply with their demands. Instead, the church called the cops. Tannenbaum and about 190 workers were arrested. He was charged with incitement to riot and received a one-year prison term, becoming the latest of the IWW’s class war prisoners. A year for demanding churches feed the unemployed is a pretty harsh and severe sentence. It was by far the harshest sentence. The legal system knew who the leader was and it cracked down.

Tannenbaum came out of this a leading IWW. He served his time, got out of jail, and got involved in the Bayonne strike of 1915, which was a movement of mostly Polish workers in the Standard Oil and other oil facilities in that New Jersey port town. Tannenbaum became a spokesperson for the workers. Well, at least for the union, it’s not clear how much the workers himself even knew about him, but he was a known Wobbly and the authorities wanted to arrest him and throw him back in prison. Of course he had committed no crime, but when did that stop the employers and their political hacks? The strike was itself a mild success, though not really for the IWW itself, which didn’t really build on it with those workers. That was a common problem with the IWW though. Anyway, Tannenbaum continued to be a leading Wobbly. In fact, he was a big enough deal that Emma Goldman wrote about him in her memoirs:

We all had loved Frank for his wide-awakeness and his unassuming ways. He had spent much of his free time in our office, reading and helping in the work connected with Mother Earth. His fine qualities held out the hope that Frank would some day play an important part in the labour struggle. None of us had expected however that our studious, quiet friend would so quickly respond to the call of the hour.

Now, usually the story of rank and file workers and even of known Wobblies kind of peters out. The times changed, these were working class people, and they just sort of disappear from the record, more or less, leading pretty normal working class lives. But that was not the case with Tannenbaum. In fact, it’s not even because the IWW that I knew who Tannenbaum was.

Always an intellectual type, Tannenbaum enrolled in Columbia University after all this. He had plenty of supporters in the left-wing New York intellectual world and a lot of these people had money so they helped him pay for it. He ended up not only getting a degree, but getting a PhD and becoming an expert on Mexico. In other words, he had a completely different second career and not even one that was that super political in the end. He was initially interested in rural education and he became something of an advisor to Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas on the issue, the one Mexican president who really did try to push forward something that looked like a revolutionary program. Later, he taught criminology back at Columbia. Then he became a history professor there, teaching about Latin America.

In fact, Tannenbaum moved to the right as he aged as well. Now, the response of old IWW members to the Communist Party was not always positive, so we shouldn’t necessarily see this as surprising. At first, most of these folks flocked to the Communists, but the CP really had no tolerance for their decentralization or emphasis on individual freedom. Goldman broke from the communists before almost anyone else, since she was deported to the Soviet Union and saw it first hand. Tannenbaum followed at some point. By the early 1960s, he was actively involved in anti-Castro activities in New York, including Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba. Some of this was very much about what he decline of the individual in mid 20th century society, which he found distinctly uncomfortable.

This was all a process though. Tannenbaum had been involved in the New Deal as well. With his research on rural life, he became one of the figures behind the creation of the Farm Security Administration, proposing the specifics of the legislation to Senator John Bankhead, who proposed the legislation, back when a senator from Alabama could do something useful from time to time. His continued interest in criminology also led to him contributing to the development of something called symbolic interactionism within sociology, which has something to do with the daily actions of individuals. His contribution was about what he called the “dramatization of evil.” I’ll leave it to people with a better understanding to explore this more.

Tannenbaum published heavily throughout his career, switching back and forth from Latin America to the U.S. After an initial book on the conservatism of the American labor movement in 1921, he published Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons in 1922. His first Mexican book was The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, published in 1930. His book, Osborne of Sing Sing, about the prison reformer, had a foreword by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That was published in 1932, so you know, FDR had some other things to do as well. He also started publishing about race in America in the middle of his academic career, including Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas.

When he died, what his New York Times obituary focused on was his organization of seminars at Columbia that brought the school and community together to gather experts on specific issues, which became quite influential in New York in the 50s and 60s. He stated,

“I had somewhere gathered the belief that when men talked to each other about matters of deepest concern they evoked the inner values of their experience, they were really discovering them for the first time. If it were only possible to contrive a continuing fellowship among people who were trying to resolve some riddle, unravel a mystery, deal with a perennial issue of public concern, then- if conditions were right-we might achieve this long sought for but subtly evasive value, mutual understanding among the professions and between the members of the academy.”

Tannenbaum died in 1969. He was 76 years old.

Frank Tannenbaum is buried in Tompkins Corner Cemetery, Putnam Valley, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in the Farm Security Administration, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Bankhead is in Jasper, Alabama and Roy Stryker is in Grand Junction, Colorado. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.