Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,990

This is the grave of Clara Lemlich.

I am going to do something different today. Since I chose Lemlich as one of the people to profile in Organizing America (and if you don’t buy this book, my life will become a living hell of poverty), I thought I would just reprint the chapter here, though in a draft form because it’s much easier to copy and paste that way. Plus footnotes! Enjoy!

Sometimes, our greatest leaders come out of dire poverty, in circumstances that would shock many of us today. The ideal of class struggle centers such workers, but quite often, including in the Russian and Cuban Revolutions, many of the leaders were from bourgeois backgrounds. Theory and reality are not always the same thing. But sometimes, poverty and the circumstances of youth combine to create life-long revolutionary leaders. In the United States, Clara Lemlich, the great textile factory organizer, became one of the greatest. A tiny woman, Lemlich led movements for justice her own life.

Much of American history is an immigrant story. Most of them came to the United States to work. Capitalism created circumstances for cheap labor and poverty and political repression created the pool of cheap labor for it. New York City became the center of immigration in the United States. By far the largest city in the U.S., most immigrants first stopped there at Ellis Island. After 1880, the origin of these immigrants moved from western and northern Europe to southern and eastern Europe. Huge Italian, Jewish, Polish, and many other populations joined the masses of Irish who had joined English, French, and German immigrants earlier in American history.[1]

Unlike the stories Americans often tell about immigrants, past and present, many did not intend to stay. They wanted to make money and then go back to Italy or Croatia or Greece. In some ethnic groups, over half did return. But Jews had a different story. Large-scale Jewish immigration happened in these years for economic reasons too, but the real driver was Russian leaders scapegoating Jews to cover up their own failures, encouraging murderous pogroms against them. Very few Jewish immigrants wanted to return to Russia.[2]

Many Jewish immigrants crowded into New York City’s Lower East Side and took whatever job they could. Thousands found their way into the city’s growing sweatshops, producing clothing in often subhuman conditions. Upwards of ten or fifteen people, usually extended families, squeezed into a tiny New York City apartment at night to sleep and then in the day, moved the furniture into a corner and stitched clothing on contract from middle men who contracted with department stores. The department stores made a deal over the price and it was up to the contractor to produce the goods. Anything between the production cost and the department store payment was the profit. Naturally, sweatshop contractors squeezed the workers as hard as possible. Workers might labor sixteen hours a day for a poverty wage based upon how much they produced. This was the world into which Clara Lemlich immigrated.[3]

Born in 1886 in what is today Ukraine, Lemlich’s childhood reflected a whole generation of Russian Jews fleeing anti-Semitism. Her family emigrated to New York City in 1903. Many of them, including Clara, already had socialist leanings. The Bund was a secular Jewish socialist political party made up of people who had left the ghettos and shtetls of eastern Europe and worked in industrial factories. While there, they became exposed to modern political ideas, especially socialism in its wide variety of forms. But certainly not all eastern European Jews agreed with these ideas. In fact, while Clara became a radical legend, her family largely shunned her for it. Standing up to your family might be part of the personal cost of organizing for you too.[4]

Two weeks after arriving in the neighborhood, Clara Lemlich got her first sweatshop job, making shirtwaists, a popular women’s garment of the period. After 1900, sweatshops mostly left the home and consolidated in larger, more efficient workspaces. She worked a 66-hour week. That was eleven hours a day for six days, with only Sunday off. For all this work, she earned $3 a week. Employers hired young girls instead of experienced Jewish male tailors because they could pay them less and because they believed women less likely to unionize. As the employers soon found out, their stereotypes of women proved less than accurate.[5]

The socialist leanings of many of these Jewish workers meant they would not take the terrible conditions of their lives lying down. They wanted to organize. They saw the United States not as a land that would save them, even if they left Russia to escape murderous oppression. They saw the U.S. as a capitalist nation that might be better than what they had but that still oppressed them through its unequal and exploitative economic system.

That’s how Lemlich thought. She hated these jobs. She and other young women such as Pauline Newman and Rose Schneidermann began organizing their fellow workers into a union. They would get fired, but then would go to a new shop and talk more union. Pretty soon, Lemlich was on the executive board of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILG) Local 25. Despite having “Ladies” in the title, men dominated union leadership and found the complaints of these new workers annoying. Angry about the unwillingness of the male union leaders to take their needs seriously, Lemlich and other women began challenging the men. In one shop, she simply walked in on a union meeting of men, told them they would lose their own planned strike without women on their side, and demanded they help her organize. It worked too![6]

On November 22, 1909, union leadership held a big meeting at Cooper Union in Manhattan. The speakers included American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers. For Gompers, angry immigrant women were a problem, not an opportunity. A Jewish immigrant himself, from England, he saw the American labor movement as one based in skilled white men protecting their relatively elite jobs from both employers and from the masses of immigrants and people of color who sought to improve their lives too. The Eugene Debs chapter explored this problem in depth. Gompers did not think he could build a labor movement on thousands of Jewish and Italian women from New York sweatshops. Gompers, as well as ILG leaders, urged the women not to go on strike. They gave pretty words about solidarity, but they also preached patience. In short, they tried to kill time.

Finally, Lemlich had enough. She demanded to speak. She gave an impassioned speech in Yiddish, saying in part, “I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.” Now this is what the workers wanted to hear! Reflecting the largely Jewish nature of the workforce, they modified an ancient Jewish oath to Israel as their pledge to strike, saying “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” The strike was on.[7]

Out of the 32,000 shirtwaist workers in New York, 20,000 went on strike. The media called it “The Uprising of the 20,000” and it stuck. Lemlich gave speech after speech, leading rallies, convincing scared workers to walk off the job. The sweatshop owners saw Lemlich as an enemy. The owners paid prostitutes to start fights with the strikers. The cops could then use the ruckus to bust some heads. Lemlich suffered in this way. A cop beat her up and broke her ribs. She had to spend time in the hospital recovering from her injuries. This did not break her spirit.

These young strikers grabbed the attention of the New York media. They wanted Lemlich’s story. She told them in an Evening Journal article. She told readers that the bosses “swear at us and sometimes they do worse—they call us names that are not pretty to hear.” For a woman in the early twentieth century, this was an upfront discussion of sexual harassment on the job in an era decades before anyone spoke that term. She also defended the women from the demeaning stories of the papers about them being frivolous or silly. When they attacked the workers for spending money on new clothing, Lemlich noted “We like new hats as well as any other young women. Why shouldn’t we?” Thus, the strikers also demanded dressing rooms to preserve their hard-won clothing and to have privacy from prying male bosses.[8] 

Lemlich and her fellow workers tapped into the growing feminist movement. Even rich women came out to help, including Anne Morgan, the daughter of the arch-capitalist J.P. Morgan, and the extraordinarily rich suffragist Alva Belmont. The brutality these rich women saw opened their eyes. In the end, the workers won some minor victories, but the owners still controlled the conditions of work. Lemlich and her comrades organized to fight another day.[9]

Lemlich continued speaking out, even though she was blacklisted from the garment factories and had to use false names to get work. By 1911, Lemlich worked as a full-time union organizer. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle shirtwaist factory caught on fire. Thanks to the terrible working conditions, the unsafe factory, and the locked door, 146 workers died that day. Some burned, others jumped to their death from the ninth floor of the building in front of horrified onlookers. The owners of this factory had led employers in fighting the 1909 strike. Lemlich had worked there for a time herself. Outrage over all the deaths led to fire and safety reforms, but did not lead to workers’ rights. Those still required the workers’ struggle.[10]

Lemlich and many of her fellow grassroots activists in the sweatshops also became major supporters of women’s suffrage. It’s hard to imagine a world in which women could not vote, but even many women did not support the idea of suffrage, believing politics a man’s game that would sully women. Even the legendary labor organizer Mother Jones opposed women’s suffrage.[11] The male leadership of the ILGWU did as well. But for young working class women organizers, how could the workers have a voice to change their lives if they could not participate in political processes? They could not. As Lemlich stated, “The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote. When she asks to have a building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen. When she asks not to work such long hours, they do not have to listen.”[12]

Lemlich and her fellow garment union leaders did not want to be junior members of the rich women’s organizations that dominated the women’s suffrage fight. They also felt anger at Socialist Party leaders who did not take women’s suffrage seriously as a major issue. The upper class suffragists did not like Lemlich’s class struggle language.[13] Meanwhile, the Socialist Party largely thought suffrage a bourgeois issue and did not like making alliances with wealthy women, thus isolating these women within their core political organization.[14]

So Lemlich and her supporters started their own organization. The Wage Earners’ Suffrage League began in 1911. Lemlich became the paid organizer. It only lasted a year—many organizations do fall apart quickly—but Lemlich and her friends made women’s suffrage a specifically working class issue among the women they organized around it. The League organized in New York’s immigrant neighborhoods and at the sweatshops where they worked. They specifically connected the sweatshops with the lack of a vote, posting one pamphlet that read, “Why are you paid less than a man? Why do you work in a firetrap? Why are your hours so long? Because you are a woman and have no vote. Votes make the law. Votes enforce the law. The law controls conditions. Women who want better conditions must vote.”[15]

When the state of New York refused to pass a women’s suffrage bill in 1912, the Suffrage League held a rally at Cooper Union in New York with Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, and other organizers giving speeches noting that the same rich men who refused to protect them from dying at work refused to give them the vote. It was hard going. Union men threw tomatoes at Lemlich when she organized women workers in front of their factories. Then, Mary Beard, the wealthy historian who funded it, fired Lemlich a year later, leading her to turn from working with the rich ever again. The League disappeared without its worker organizer.[16]

When the New York senate held hearings about working women’s agitation, one senator noted that he wanted men to relieve women of the burdens of working. Lemlich testified, tearing into him with enormous ferocity, noting not only that women worked because of poverty wages, but asking him what he was doing about the many men who got women pregnant and then left them to fend for themselves and their babies. She concluded that women were here to stay in the workforce and they would fight for themselves to get recalcitrant politicians like this to pass the laws they needed to survive.[17]

In 1913, Lemlich married a printer and fellow socialist named Joe Shavelson. The family moved into a small home in Brooklyn, away from the Lower East Side where she had become such a famed organizer. Many of her old allies such as Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman continued involvement in increasingly mainstream reform politics, playing important roles for the rest of their lives too. But Lemlich moved in two directions that isolated her from them. First, she spent a great deal of time raising her three children, whereas many of her comrades chose to not have children. Second, she became a devout member of the Communist Party in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s establishment in 1917. While a decade earlier, the radicalism of the Lower East Side working class did not have to attach itself to a party, after 1917, the choice to become a communist was a deeply important one that often split older political alliances. Lemlich did not look back. For her, communism was the future.[18]

Lemlich was not an orthodox communist anymore than she was an orthodox anything else. She remained a fiery organizer. But her new life brought her radical critique into the home, where men often did not want it. She loved her family, but also chafed at the contradictions in being a radical with her history and choosing a traditional marriage that kept her home. She simply refused to choose between organizing and marriage and found a new path. She turned to another form of women’s activism—housewife organizing. For a man of the time, Shavelson was reasonably supportive of his wife, but it definitely caused tensions in the marriage. For Lemlich, this was worth it.

While the Communist Party generally thought consumer organizing was a bourgeois distraction from a worker revolution, Lemlich and her co-organizers knew the power it could have. Housewives had boycotted butchers they felt ripped them off going back to early twentieth century New York. She wanted to organize the housewives over consumer prices but also for housing and education. She once again took to the street corners and workplaces, except this time it was Brownsville in Brooklyn instead of the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Lemlich jumped into new fights, becoming actively involved in the battles between tenants and landlords in New York in 1918. She helped lead a rent strike that began that year; by the middle of 1919, 4,000 households refused to pay rent until landlords rolled back rent increases. These women were committed; some even poured boiling water on those engaged in evictions.[19]

While in our popular imagination, the 1920s were a period of wealth followed by the Great Depression, in fact, capitalists took most of the money for themselves. They spent that decade crushing the unions that had made so much progress in the 1910s. Twelve years of Republican presidents helped corporate America stay in charge. Wages stagnated or declined in many jobs and purchasing power declined with it. The answer for radical women such as Lemlich was to adapt the union organizing strategies of their youth to the consumer needs of their middle age.[20]

A member of the Communist Party by at least 1926, Lemlich created the United Council of Working Class Housewives. While not officially affiliated with the Communist Party, it had many communist ties. Most its members were not communists, but women struggling with both poverty and sexism. Lemlich’s new outfit became the major organ of women’s organizing in the New York left in the 1930s. In 1935, working with both Jewish and Black women, it led a boycott against 4,000 New York butcher shops that shut them down and won significant concessions. Similar movements developed in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities. It was Lemlich’s biggest organizing struggle since the sweatshops and she knew how to win attention for the cause. By the end of the summer, the boycotts had driven down the price of meat. This built a new cadre of activists who took these lessons and applied them to local struggles in their own cities around the nation. By the late 1930s, housewife organizing was a major activist force in America and Lemlich deserves a good bit of responsibility for it.[21]

In 1938, the Communist Party undercut women-specific organizing and withdrew support from Lemlich’s group. The communists refused to take gender-based politics seriously, despite the clear evidence of its effectiveness. For these male leaders, women’s organizing was at best a distraction from what they considered the real work of revolution. They ignored the fact that housewives knew more about the realities of modern consumption than anyone else. But Lemlich remained committed to her movement for years. In the 1940s, it became part of the International Worker’s Order and she continued to organize within it.

Lemlich passed her radicalism down to her children. Her son Irving Shavelson was at her side organizing when he was a child and by the time he was a teen, he organized children’s brigades within the United Council of Working Class Housewives, mobilizing pickets. Her children sometimes hated their use as political props by their mother, but for Lemlich, presenting herself as a mother protecting her children from exploitation served as great political fodder, and no doubt she felt this deeply as well. Her son, who changed his name to Charles Velson to hide his Jewish name and make American workers less suspicious of him, became a long-time longshoremen’s union activist and Soviet spy in the 1930s and during World War II, including in the Panama Canal Zone.[22]

Lemlich remained a Communist for the rest of her life. Some commenters have redbaited people such as Lemlich for refusing to confront the crimes of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. That’s unfair. For them, communism was the road to working class liberation. To give that up meant a betrayal of a life’s work. Moreover, it’s not as if a capitalist nation treated its dissenters any better in the 1950s than it had in the 1910s. When the American government executed Joseph and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets, Lemlich helped in the fight for their freedom.[23]

Lemlich continued organizing housewives, including a new meat boycott in 1948, this time reaching 150,000 participating households and forcing cattlemen and the Office of Price Stabilization to lower beef prices by 10 percent. In 1951, Lemlich traveled to the Soviet Union. The government got her in their redbaiting web of the McCarthy era and it revoked her passport. She continued to work periodically in the garment industry until 1954. She even had to fight current ILGWU leadership to get a pension since she had not worked that many years in the industry due to her union activism. ILG leadership in the 1950s had not evolved much from 1909 and they still found Lemlich a pain.[24]

By the 1960s, both of her husbands had died. Her children lived in California. She moved out there. The suburbs of postwar California were a long way from the sweatshops of 1900s New York. Such was the experience of so many in that generation who saw their struggles and fights lead to material gains for the working class, even if capitalism remained as entrenched as ever. But the fire and passion for change in Lemlich’s heart never faded. She spent several years in the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Even with failing health, she continued to organize. She berated the management of the home to support the United Farm Workers boycott on grapes, finally hectoring them into joining it. Then, she set about to helping the nursing home workers to form a union, seeing them succeed before her death in 1986, at the age of 98.[25]

Lemlich has slowly become part of a broader historical consciousness. There’s a children’s book about her and the Uprising of the 20,000, for example, published in 2013.[26] Still, the average American has no idea who she is. We should remember her as an uncompromising voice for change, someone who maintained an intensity in her politics that might make even her comrades uncomfortable, but also inspire us to fight for change today. Her connections between radical organizing and consumer organizing have so much potential for the present and we now have a long history of consumer organizing. Consumer movements often have middle class tendencies, but that is not a requirement; as Lemlich shows us, the fight for basic rights for the poor has a consumer aspect to it in a nation dominated by consumer capitalism.

Clara Lemlich is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other people I profiled in Organizing America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Oakes is in Stewarts Point, California and Yuri Kochiyama is in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

[1] John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Indiana University Press, 1985).

[2] Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015).

[3] Daniel E. Bender and Richard Greenwald, eds., Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (Routledge, 2003).

[4] Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 18, 219.

[5] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 25.

[6] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 48-49.

[7] Alison J. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor, Democracy’s Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency (Oxford University Press, 2022), 156-57.

[8] Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1999), 140-42, 146-48.

[9] Steven H. Jaffe, Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics (New York University Press, 2018), 124-35.

[10] David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

[11] Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (Hill and Wang, 2001), 228-35.

[12] Quoted in Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 91.

[13] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 92.

[14] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 95-96.

[15] Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (Routledge, 1983), 12-24, 156-57.

[16] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 95-99.

[17] “Miss Clara Lemlich, Shirt-Waist Maker, Replies to New York Senator on Relieving Working Women of the Burdens and Responsibility of Life” (Wage Earners Suffrage League, 1912?).

[18] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 118.

[19] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 220-23.

[20] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 217; Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[21] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 231-40; Emily E. LB. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017); Denise Lynn, “United We Spend: Communist Women and the 1935 Meat Boycott,” American Communist History 10, no. 1 (April 2011): 35-52.

[22] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 223-28, 246-47, 274.

[23] Lori Clune, Executing the Rosenbergs: Death & Diplomacy in a Cold War World (Oxford University Press, 2016); Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 273.

[24] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 275-76.

[25] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 271-309.

[26] Michelle Markel and Melissa Sweet, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909 (Balzer + Bray, 2013).