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Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media

Media and Culture

in the U.S. Jewish
Labor Movement
Sweating for Democracy
in the Interwar Era

Brian Dolber
Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media

Series Editors
Professor Bill Bell
Cardiff University
UK

Dr Chandrika Kaul
University of St Andrews
UK

Professor Kenneth Osgood

Colorado School of Mines
USA

Dr Alexander S. Wilkinson
University College Dublin
Ireland
Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media publishes original, high-­
quality research into the cultures of communication from the middle ages
to the present day. The series explores the variety of subjects and disciplin-
ary approaches that characterize this vibrant field of enquiry. The series
will help shape current interpretations not only of the media, in all its
forms, but also of the powerful relationship between the media and poli-
tics, society, and the economy.
Advisory Board: Professor Carlos Barrera (University of Navarra,
Spain), Professor Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Professor
Denis Cryle (Centra Queensland University, Australia), Professor David
Culbert (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge), Professor Nicholas
Cull (Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California),
Professor Tom O’Malley (Centre for Media History, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth), Professor Chester Pach (Ohio University)

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14578
 Brian Dolber

Media and Culture in

the U.S. Jewish Labor
Movement
Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era
Brian Dolber
California State University
San Marcos, California, USA

Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media

ISBN 978-3-319-43547-3    ISBN 978-3-319-43548-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43548-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961249

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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For my parents
 Acknowledgments

Any academic who reads this book knows that there is little support these
days for critical, socially engaged scholarship or, for that matter, any schol-
arship at all. I began research that contributed to this monograph as a
graduate student a decade ago, and I have continued to work on it within
a broader context of the casualization of academic labor, the erosion of
academic freedom, the evisceration of funding, and the bureaucratization
and managerialism that afflict our institutions. That you, the reader, are
actually holding this volume in your hands (or, more likely, reading it on a
screen) is nothing short of a miracle. Or at least it is the product of many
forms of labor, only a fraction of which is my own. As such, I have a lot of
people to thank.
I thank Clare Mence, Emily Russell, and Rowan Milligan at Palgrave
Macmillan for all their assistance with this manuscript. I also thank the edi-
torial board of the series and the reviewers who have undoubtedly made
this book far more readable and far more compelling than it had been in
its dissertation form. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many archivists and
library workers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library;
the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, IL; the Kheel Center at
Cornell University; the Tamiment Library and Wagner Archive at
New York University; the New York Public Library; the National Archives
and Records Administration in College Park, MD; the Wisconsin State
Historical Society in Madison, WI; and the YIVO Archives at the Center
for Jewish History in New York.
My two graduate departments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­
Champaign—the Institute of Communications Research and the

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Department of Communication—both provided me with intellectual and

financial support through my years as a graduate student. In addition, I
thank Matti Bunzl and Harriet Murav of the Program in Jewish Culture
and Society for its generous support of my scholarship.
Robert McChesney, Inger Stole, John Nerone, and James Barrett all
demonstrated their commitment to this project in its roughest stages as
members of my dissertation committee. I have been fortunate to have the
advice and mentorship of top scholars who are not only innovative, rigor-
ous, and insightful, but who also work tirelessly to make the academy and
the world at large a more humane and democratic place. As my disserta-
tion adviser, Bob pushed me to clarify my project and make sure that it
wasn’t just interesting to me but relevant to many. He reviewed drafts of
my work through the writing process and offered criticism where neces-
sary. And perhaps most important, he provided me with a model of how
historical research, pedagogy, and political engagement can be brought
together.
As a graduate student, I was also fortunate to have the advice of Paul
Buhle. Paul wrote several lengthy emails to me as I developed this project,
displaying a lifetime of knowledge around working-class culture. Nathan
Godfried, Tony Michels, and Harry Sapoznik also offered me helpful
advice in the research process.
The Institute for Communications Research provided me with an intel-
lectual community to which I will always feel connected. In seminar rooms
and in pubs, Christina Ceisel, Molly Niesen, John Anderson, Andrew
Kennis, Matt Crain, Desiree Yamtoob, Rich Potter, Victor Pickard,
Andrew O’Baoill, Kevin Healey, Caroline Nappo, and many others help
shape my thinking. They have continued to be sources of professional,
intellectual, and emotional support beyond the prairie. The Graduate
Employees’ Organization Local 6300 helped solidify my commitments
to scholar-activism and provided a space for interdisciplinary engagement
that has marked my scholarship. In our 2009 strike to protect tuition
waivers, I learned more about organizing, strategy, solidarity, and struggle
than I did in all the archives I visited.
This book would also not exist without the support of SUNY College
at Oneonta and its Department of Communication Arts, where I was
faculty between 2011 and 2016. In an austere environment, my depart-
ment chair, Gayane Torosyan, and my deans, Alex Thomas and Susan
Turell, helped me secure time and funding necessary to complete this
work. Colleagues Joshua Frye, Joshua Hammonds, Kristen Blinne,
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Mark Ferrara, Toke Knudsen, Leigh Anne Francis, Alex Jean-Charles,

Melissa Lavin, Michael Brown, and Mike King all showed their solidarity
in meaningful ways on and off campus. While living in upstate New York,
conversations with Cecelia Walsh-Russo were a continual source of
intellectual motivation, and Joe Von Stengel, Hope Von Stengel, Matt
Voorhees, Parker Troischt, and Jenny Williams all helped me maintain
a modicum of sanity while working on this project by helping me think
about myself as part of a creative community.
My colleagues in the Union for Democratic Communications have
been a constant source of collaborative energy and ideas, including
Chenjerai Kumanyika, Thomas Corrigan, Anthony Nadler, and Russell
Newman. Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Todd Wolfson, and Steve Macek
have provided me with essential encouragement as a junior scholar. I am
so grateful for their comradeship. I also thank the American Journalism
Historians Association for awarding me the 2012 Margaret A. Blanchard
Best Dissertation Prize, which gave me the confidence I needed to move
toward publication.
Sarah Banet-Weiser and the USC Annenberg School for Communication
and Journalism also deserve thanks for inviting me to be a visiting scholar
during a moment of transition in my career, as do Daniel Grassian, Vice
President for Academic Affairs at American Jewish University and Michelle
Holling at California State University, San Marcos. While completing this
manuscript, I have been honored to work with the staff and members of
Unite Here Local 11 who truly are at the forefront of today’s labor move-
ment. The experience has helped give this work new meaning as multicul-
tural democracy faces challenges not seen since the moment described in
these pages.
My family’s imprint on this book is deep. I began to investigate Jewish
labor’s culture and media following the death of my great-uncle, Paul
Pincus, during my first semester of graduate school. Paul was a Julliard-­
trained clarinetist who played both klezmer music and in Broadway pit
orchestras and on Station WEVD. My memories of him mostly consist
of him sitting in his chair at my grandmother’s house on holidays, vodka
in hand, yelling at the Mets game on television or repeating his stories
about playing for Ethel Merman. When I came across his obituary on
the Yiddish Radio Project website, while looking for information about
Socialist radio stations, I knew I was on the path toward uncovering an
important chapter of media history. The familial connection to this project
has provided a motivating force through several years of arduous research.
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None of this would be possible without the support of my parents,

Michael and Elaine. They were my first and most important teachers, and
they have given me more support and encouragement than most people
ever receive. I know that seeing this book will make them kvell. I hope
they realize that I realize that I never could have done this without them.
Finally, I am so fortunate to have Christina Ceisel as my best friend, col-
league, and partner. She has moved with me and this project from Illinois
to New York to Los Angeles. Her contributions have been innumerable,
ranging from scholarly insights, to careful edits, to offering comfort and
strength in the toughest moments. Thanks for believing in me. I cannot
wait to see what we do next.

Note
Yiddish words and phrases are italicized and transliterated using the YIVO
standard, except when they appear within a quotation. In these cases, the
original transliterated spelling is used.
Although the arguments have been significantly reworked and rewrit-
ten, some of the research in this monograph appears in previously pub-
lished articles, including:

“Commodifying Alternative Media Audiences: A Historical Case Study

of the Jewish Daily Forward.” Communication, Culture & Critique
9 (2016): 175–192.
“From Socialism to ‘Sentiment’: Toward a Political Economy of
Communities, Counterpublics and Their Media Through Jewish
Working Class History.” Communication Theory 21 (2011): 90–109.
“Strange Bedfellows: Yiddish Socialist Radio and the Collapse of
Broadcasting Reform in the United States, 1927–1938.” Historical
Journal of Film, Radio & Television 33 (2013): 289–307.
“Unmaking ‘Hegemonic Jewishness’: Anti-Communism, Gender
Politics, and Communication in the ILGWU, 1924–1934.” Race,
Gender & Class 15 (2008): 188–204.
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 “Digging in the Dark”: The Forward’s Advertising

Strategy in the 1920s  13

3 “Cutting the Pathway in the Wilderness of Confusion”:

Worker Education and the Garment Unions, 1919–1932  51

4 Moving Forward on the Air: The Birth of WEVD and the

Rise of Commercial Broadcasting  89

5 “A Song of Social Significance”: Jewish Labor, Mass

Culture, and the New Deal 117

6 “The Most Effective Weapon”: Consumer Activism

and the Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Boycott 155

7 A “Friendly Negotiation”: Jewish Labor, the Newspaper

Guild, and the Limits of the New Deal 187

xi
xii Contents

8 Epilogue 219

Bibliography 237

Index 249
 Abbreviations

AALD American Alliance for Labor and Democracy

ABA American Bar Association
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
ACWA Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
AFHW American Federation of Hosiery Workers
AFL American Federation of Labor
AFLN Association of Foreign Language Newspapers
AJC American Jewish Committee
ALP American Labor Party
ANG American Newspaper Guild
ANPA American Newspaper Publishers Association
CBS Columbia Broadcasting System
CFL Chicago Federation of Labor
CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations
CP Communist Party
CPI Committee on Public Information
CR Consumers Research
CU Consumers Union
FCC Federal Communications Commission
FRC Federal Radio Commission
FTP Federal Theater Project
FPA Free Press Authority
GEB General Executive Board
HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee
IFTU International Federal Trade Union

xiii
xiv Abbreviations

ILGWU International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union

IWO International Workers Order
JAC Joint Action Committee
JLC Jewish Labor Committee
JSF Jewish Socialist Federation
JWU Jewish Writers Union
LWS League of Women Shoppers
LSI Labor and Socialist International
NACRE National Advisory Council on Radio in Education
NBC National Broadcasting Company
NCER National Committee on Education by Radio
NCL National Consumers League
NIRA National Industrial Recovery Act
NGNY Newspaper Guild of New York
NLRB National Labor Relations Board
NRA National Recovery Administration
RCA Radio Corporation of America
SP Socialist Party
SWOC Steel Workers Organizing Committee
TUEL Trade Union Education League
TWOC Textile Workers Organizing Committee
TWU Transit Workers Union
UAW United Auto Workers
UE United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
UHT United Hebrew Trades
UGW United Garment Workers
UMW United Mine Workers
WP Workers Party
WPA Works Progress Administration
WTUL Women’s Trade Union League
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Two months following the United Auto Workers’ victorious sit-down strike
in Flint, Michigan, and two days before the Nazis bombed Guernica, more
than 4,000 people attended a celebration honoring the newspaper Der
forverts, or the Jewish Daily Forward, on its fortieth anniversary in April
1937. The Forward Association, which had founded the paper in the turn-­
of-­the-century tumult of the tenements and sweatshops of New York’s
Lower East Side, was now hosting a banquet and performances uptown at
Carnegie Hall. President Franklin Roosevelt, having just won reelection
with the support of the Yiddish-language, Socialist newspaper and the
community it represented, sent a message of congratulations. He declared
the Forward “an example of the highest ideals of constructive journalism,”
“the utmost champion of truth in the news,” and a “medium for the free
discussion of all the problems which clamor for solution.”1
Such celebrations were not new. Between 1880 and 1920, two million
Eastern European Jews left the repressive Russian Empire for America’s
hopeful shores. Of these, over 400,000 settled in New York City, compris-
ing 10 percent of the city’s population by World War I. Most commonly
finding work in the growing, exploitative garment industry, this genera-
tion of Jewish immigrants quickly began organizing their own institu-
tions—labor unions, political parties, and newspapers—to transform their
new country into a just one. The Forward, the most prominent among
many publications, bolstered a vibrant “newspaper culture” among the
masses of Jewish workers. Despite the harsh conditions of East Side life,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

B. Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43548-0_1
2 B. DOLBER

thousands attended “excursions, balls, literary evenings, and anniversary

celebrations,” often with the purpose of raising money for their press.2
For these immigrant workers and their children, newspapers did not sim-
ply inform readers about the events of the day. Rather, they served as a
resource during political struggles, developed community, and cultivated
an oppositional ethnopolitical identity.
Praise from the U.S. president, however, was not typical. For most of its
forty years, the Forward and its brand of “social democratic yellow journal-
ism” had been a thorn in the side of the political establishment. Twenty
years earlier, another Democratic administration, this time under Woodrow
Wilson, had threatened to shut down the newspaper, accusing its pub-
lishers of sedition during World War I. Sectarianism, the Red Scare, and
immigration quotas plagued the left during the 1920s, and many labor and
foreign-language newspapers folded, unable to meet the challenges of state
repression and the commercialization of news. David Montgomery calls
this period “a remarkable hiatus in the evolution of the labor movement
itself.” The defeat of a massive strike wave in the wake of World War I led
American Federation of Labor officials to present themselves as a bulwark
against Bolshevism, waiting for a more opportune political moment to
make demands on behalf of the working class. Cross-­class alliances devel-
oped as workers put their trust in employers and ethnic leaders, while mass
culture and consumption practices unified workers across the nation.3
One sector where workers were not completely crushed, however, was
the garment industry. Their survival was due largely to the fact that the
predominantly Jewish garment unions and their affiliated ethnic organi-
zations and political parties took an approach quite different from the
broader American labor movement in the 1920s. Described by Daniel
Katz as “social unionism,” this approach “was a radical vision of social
organization, a prescription for the political role of unions as well as an
organizing strategy. Above all, it was an expression of union culture that
intersected with a larger movement for social change.”4
The question of the day during the interwar era was “What is the viabil-
ity of liberal democracy?” Social unionism provided an answer. The First
World War shattered nearly all faith in the Progressive project, as well.
The propaganda campaign of the Wilson administration’s Committee on
Public Information (CPI), carried out by intellectuals and former muck-
rakers, demonstrated the elite’s ability to manage democracy and called
into question the public’s ability to govern itself. Based in his experience
with the CPI, Walter Lippmann warned in his 1922 classic Public Opinion
 INTRODUCTION 3

that the modern world had become too complicated for the average citi-
zen and technocratic experts should govern “the pictures in their heads.”
In Lippmann’s formulation, democracy can work only if there is an “inde-
pendent expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to
those who have to make the decisions.” The new expert class would have
to replace the public in the role of decision makers and would have to
work to “manufacture consent” among the rest of the populous.5
In response, American pragmatist John Dewey argued that education
and participation among the public were necessary in order to maintain the
viability of democracy. Dewey saw the roots of political democracy in the
United States as grounded in the “genuine community life” of agricultural
settings. Given the geographic expansion of the United States, the rise of
the bureaucratic state, and the Industrial Revolution, this posed a prob-
lem. As Dewey phrased it, “we have inherited…local town-meeting prac-
tices and ideas…we live and act and have our being in a continental nation
state.” Thus, it became imperative to transform the “Great Society” into
the “Great Community,” where “the ever-expanding and intricately rami-
fying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense
of the word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being.”6
However, Jewish working-class institutions—the unions of the garment
industry and Jewish segments of the Socialist Party and Communist Party
based chiefly in New York City—traversed the treacherous political terrain
of the 1920s by planting the seeds of a national labor culture that would
blossom in the 1930s. Influenced by the Jewish Labor Bund’s attention
to culture as a political force, leaders within these organizations devel-
oped pragmatic strategies to address this crisis. This pragmatism led to
the reconstitution of radical Yiddish identity as a component of a broader
American liberalism embodied by the New Deal.
Combining traditional communal values, radical political thought,
and modern industrial culture, social unionism brought together work-
ers, families, and communities via cultural and educational activities. This
holistic approach to organizing enabled Jews to become Americans while
transforming U.S. culture and identity in the process. Upon arrival in
the United States, Jewish immigrants consumed commercial culture, cri-
tiqued it, and drew on its structures, forms, and aesthetics to produce
their own media environment. The mix of media products and cultural
activity on the Lower East Side—those for agitation and those for enter-
tainment, those that were mass produced and those that were unmedi-
ated, those that were in English and those that were in Yiddish, those
4 B. DOLBER

that were commercial and those that were not—provided Jewish workers
with a wide array of tools to build a collective identity in opposition to
industrial capitalism.
During the interwar years, Yiddish-language publications proliferated
with the assistance of national advertisers while other foreign-language
papers shut down. Immigrant garment workers produced theatrical musi-
cal productions. The airwaves provided a venue for entertainment in
Yiddish and for progressive politics in English. The Jewish labor move-
ment’s emphasis on education, mass media, and participatory activity—on
culture—allowed it to persevere and bridge the radicalism of the turn of
the century with the emergence of the modern labor movement during
the Great Depression.
The survival of this movement culture was neither an inevitable tri-
umph nor a happy accident. Labor leaders, editors, and educators within
the Jewish community’s unions and left-wing political parties made strate-
gic choices that helped grow their organizational power during a moment
of crisis. These “organic intellectuals”—to use Antonio Gramsci’s termi-
nology—helped maintain a robust ethnic, working-class counterpublic, a
space for the circulation of discourses in opposition to the status quo that
lasted through the Depression years. They did this in the face of a dramati-
cally shifting media system that encompassed the growth of advertising,
the development of broadcasting, the professionalization of journalism,
and the solidification of the Hollywood studio system—in essence, the rise
of mass culture.7
The struggle for democracy within this context was never a zero-sum
game. Rather than fully accepting or opposing this new cultural terrain,
Jewish labor leaders negotiated their relationships with the emerging
culture industry and its forms. They debated the role that advertising
should play within their newspapers, the nature of journalism within social
movements, the pros and cons of participatory democracy within cultural
production, and the position of media labor within working-class orga-
nizations. This variety of approaches to media and cultural production
helped sustain Jewish labor into the Great Depression.
As millions of workers in the nation’s industrial centers asserted them-
selves as political subjects through the organizing drives and strikes led
by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the values of Jewish
social unionism became incorporated into the New Deal. Although most
commonly embodied by President Roosevelt in the popular imagina-
tion, the New Deal was not a coherent ideological project but (to invoke
 INTRODUCTION 5

Gramsci again) a “historical bloc”—both “an alliance of social forces and

a specific social formation” that reflect the contradictions embedded in
capitalist modes of production—a “complex, contradictory and discor-
dant ensemble of the superstructures.”8
In other words, the New Deal was not a stable consensus but a messy
amalgamation of conflicting interests and perspectives. Although at its
most basic level, it represented a commitment to salvaging liberal democ-
racy, it contained both radical and reactionary shadings. The New Deal’s
state apparatus, according to Ira Katznelson, had both “a procedural and
a crusading face.” The procedural face looked toward scientific manage-
ment and bureaucratic structures, as “the federal government was defined
less by objectives than by rules, less by purpose than by process, less by
assertiveness than by access,” while the crusading face advocated for the
public interest and “actively organized the defense and advancement of
freedom” on the domestic and global stage. These faces masked the diver-
sity of influences on the New Deal—not just labor, but liberal and illiberal
elements including fascism, populism, and Jim Crow racism.9
The elements that form a historical bloc do not morph into each other
seamlessly. Rather, they retain their distinctiveness even as they compose
a new totality, much like the individual fragments in Picasso’s depiction
of the Francoist massacre against the Popular Front itself. Even as Jewish
working-class culture shed much of its radicalism through a two-decade
dialectical process following World War I, Jewish labor never fully surren-
dered its particular cultural or institutional distinctiveness. Instead, Jewish
labor leaders opted at critical points to sustain their own media projects
through advertising and collaboration with the bureaucratic state rather
than challenge the emerging commercial system as a whole alongside
other Progressive forces or labor organizations. As a result, they became a
key component of the New Deal.
The acceptance of commercialization had several important conse-
quences. Undoubtedly, it both represented and facilitated a move away
from the radical Socialism of the prewar era. More broadly, it would curtail
criticism of capitalism within the public sphere for the balance of the cen-
tury. But the commercialization of media within the Jewish labor move-
ment also produced ethnicity as a commodity that could be mobilized
toward political ends. In constructing a broad coalition through mass cul-
ture, New Dealers linked together the working class to the middle class,
radicals to liberals and populists, the foreign born to the native born,
the urban Northeast to the Midwest and the South. The relationships
6 B. DOLBER

between these various constituencies created a new framework for U.S.

politics, expressed and experienced through mass culture.
Pondering the varieties of cultural expression during the Depression,
Morris Dickstein writes, “How can one era have produced both Woody
Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at Radio City
Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek towards the pastures of
plenty in California?” The making of this “national popular” happened
through the interaction between an emerging set of media institutions and
practices and the formation of a modern U.S. labor movement. Although
Gramsci argued that the history of immigration presented a problem for the
development of a national popular in the United States, the combination of
commercial media and political activity produced ethnic identities that could
“fuse together in a single national crucible with a unitary culture the differ-
ent forms of culture imported by immigrants of differing national origins.”10
The Jewish labor movement and its culture both contained and helped
to produce these contradictions. However, via a multiplicity of approaches
to cultural production, Jewish working-class organizations on balance
helped ensure that the New Deal they got was a better one than if they
had succumbed to the reactionary threats of the 1920s. Although the
end product was a liberalism severely limited by whiteness, consumption,
and militarism, the strategies employed by Jewish labor’s organic intel-
lectuals placed U.S. workers in a stronger position during the Depression
than they otherwise may have been. Although at times they damaged the
success of broader movements for consumer rights and noncommercial
broadcasting, they helped make ethnicity visible where it may have oth-
erwise faded into homogeneity. As European fascism, Protestant elitism,
and Jim Crow racism all threatened American liberalism, Jewish labor’s
organic intellectuals helped make the New Deal’s blind spots visible and
preserve the possibility for multicultural democracy.
Among the most important of these organic intellectuals was the busi-
ness manager of the Forward, Baruch Charney Vladeck. As I explain in
Chapter 2, Vladeck had been a political prisoner in Russia and arrived
in the United States in 1908 on Thanksgiving Day as Yiddish Socialism
neared its zenith. He was described as “the most typical representative
of the second period [of immigrants].” Unlike the older generation,
Vladeck’s Socialism “was a much wider, profounder, and more refined
Socialism” including “literature, poetry, a longing for the beautiful, a
search for religio-philosophic truths and an esthetic refinement which the
older Socialists who confined themselves to economic and social problems
 INTRODUCTION 7

did not know.”11 Enamored with the American experiment and a great
admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Vladeck was also a deeply pragmatic man. As
the business manager, Vladeck strategized not only to keep the Forward
afloat but to see it expand and become a profit center that could provide
resources to the rest of the Jewish labor movement by attracting revenue
from national advertisers.
This strategy, however, did not go uncontested. Other immigrant intel-
lectuals of the Bundist generation, as discussed in Chapter 3, were quite
critical of the Forward, its commercial orientation, and its rightward drift.
The emerging CP and the garment unions counterbalanced the Forward.
Chapter 3 explores how, against the backdrop of a broader intellectual
debate about the viability of democracy following World War I, J. B.
S. Hardman and Fannia Cohn worked toward a vision for a press that
would engage readers in a democratic conversation in order to strengthen
labor. Hardman, born Jacob Salutsky, was a fierce critic of the Forward
who helped to found the newspaper Di frayhayt, or Freedom, before it
wound up under the auspices of the Comintern. As the education director
at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Hardman committed
to the development of a democratic labor press that reflected the growing
ethnic and linguistic diversity of the garment industry, paving the way for
the interethnic alliances of the CIO era.
Similarly, Fannia Cohn, the executive secretary of the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers Union’s Department of Education, developed
education programs and activities at the local level, bringing Socialist poli-
tics into the workers’ unmediated everyday lives. These activities played a
key role in combating the bureaucratizing tendencies within the garment
unions during the 1920s and the commodifying tendencies of the Forward.
They provided space for critical discussion of labor issues while encourag-
ing the development of art, literature, and music as part of a culturally
distinct working-class movement—for bread as well as roses. Cohn’s indus-
trial feminism helped to keep such programs alive during the 1920s as male
union leaders worked to cut costs and combat Communist allegiances.
As Chapter 4 explains, the emerging medium of broadcasting offered
new possibilities for strengthening democracy in wake of the war. The
Jewish labor movement sought to utilize this new medium in the tradition
of social unionism, bringing educational programming to the air and fus-
ing the Bundist tradition with Progressive notions of “the public interest”
enforced by federal regulators and shared by corporate leaders. Favoring
top-down approaches, Vladeck worked within the emerging commercial
8 B. DOLBER

radio system to get Socialist messages on the air rather than working with
a broad-based coalition aimed at protecting noncommercial radio. At the
same time, the Socialist Party’s radio station WEVD—named for Eugene
V. Debs—struggled to stay afloat. Ultimately, Vladeck’s business savvy
enabled the Forward Association to gain control of the station and helped
stabilize it in 1931 with advertising revenue.
Within an increasingly commercial media environment, Chapter 5
describes how Vladeck rationalized the use of advertising as the commercial-
ism became subject to more intense critique during the Great Depression
and as the Forward’s national advertising plan could no longer gener-
ate sufficient revenue. By the time of the New Deal, the Forward’s and
WEVD’s relationship to the Socialist Party had weakened, and the garment
unions became central players building the CIO through social unionism.
Although Fannia Cohn remained marginalized within her organization,
her ideas proved central to the growth of the CIO and a broader national
labor culture. Labor educator Morris Novik at WEVD and Mark Starr at
the Garment Workers Union helped produce a social unionism compat-
ible with the demands of commercial radio and mass politics, developing
programs such as University of the Air and plays such as Pins and Needles.
Jews did not assimilate into a homogenous whiteness. The need to com-
modify ethnicity in order to attract advertising revenue produced Jewish
workers as consumers, while growing concerns around anti-Semitism in
Europe marked Jewish labor as a distinct set of institutions with particular
concerns. As Chapter 6 discusses, Vladeck founded of the Jewish Labor
Committee to challenge the rise of fascism by organizing an anti-Nazi
boycott. By suggesting that the best way for Jewish workers to protect
themselves against the potential onslaught of fascism was through con-
sumer activism, Vladeck and the committee brought Bundist multicultural
anti-capitalism into the New Deal era.
By the time of World War II, however, the mass politics of the New
Deal and the CIO rendered the local, ethnic radicalism of the prewar era
obsolete. As the Forward and other Yiddish papers became beholden to
commercial business models, the American Newspaper Guild—a product
of the CIO culture the Jewish labor movement had helped to build—
attempted to organize their workers. Chapter 7 shows how this conflict
signaled the decline of the Jewish working-class culture as a radicalizing
force within U.S. politics. In Chapter 8, the epilogue, I argue that under-
standing the debates within the Jewish left sheds light on challenges activ-
ists face today in a transforming media environment.
 INTRODUCTION 9

In his description of the turn-of-the-century sweating system of piece-

work and contractors in the garment industry, John R. Commons wrote,
“One reason why piecework and high speed have become the framework
of the contractors’ shops is probably because the Jewish people are pecu-
liarly eager to earn a big day’s wages regardless of sacrifice. The Jewish
workman is willing to work very hard for this, and does not wish to have
it said that there is a limit to his earning capacity…It is not for love of
hard work nor because of lack of other enjoyment that the Jew is will-
ing to work so hard, but for the sake of getting rid of work.”12 Racial
essentialism aside, Commons’s analysis demonstrates that garment work-
ers and their organizations aspired to higher aims. For them, the “big
day’s wages” were not the ultimate goal. Rather, through drudgery, they
sought emancipation.
This struggle did not confine itself to the shop floor. During the inter-
war years, as citizenship became redefined in relation to an emerging
consumer society and as racism and fascism threatened the liberal cause,
Jewish labor sweated for democracy. Like all labor under capitalism, this
was a contradictory process. Some organic intellectuals used the master’s
tools—advertising—and aligned themselves with state-corporate elites,
but others aimed to retain the more radical elements of the earlier Yiddish
socialist culture. Together, these efforts helped to build and reflect the
New Deal with all its imperfections.
The purpose of this study is not to pass judgment on the actions taken
nearly a century ago, nor is it to universalize historically specific lessons
to determine contemporary best practices. Rather, I examine the conflicts
and debates of the 1920s and 1930s to illuminate the many tensions we
face in political and cultural struggles today. The interwar period was an
era of enormous contradiction and compromise in the face of national
and global challenges and a dramatically shifting media landscape. In the
digital age, as a multicultural labor force charts the rough waters between
neoliberal governance and nationalist, right-wing backlash, perhaps this
history will help progressives navigate an alternative path forward.

Notes
1. “Jewish Newspaper Marks 40th Year,” New York Times, April 25,
1937, 20.
2. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 69–124.
10 B. DOLBER

3. Ibid, 105; Frank Grubbs, Jr., The Struggle for Labor Loyalty:
Gompers, the A.F. of L., and the Pacifists, 1917–1920 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1968), 71–73; 82; Jonathan Bekken,
“Working-­ Class Newspapers, Community and Consciousness,
1880–1930,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, 1992), 24; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House
of Labor, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 7; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers
in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
4. Ibid, 12; Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists,
Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New
York: NYU Press, 2011), 4.
5. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1997), 19.
6. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press,
1954), 111–112; 184.
7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and
ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York:
International Publishers, 1971), 9. For further discussion of
organic intellectuals, see George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle:
Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1995) and Nathan Godfried’s description of
Edward Nockels in WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor 1926–1978.
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 22. For a discus-
sion of counterpublics, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public
Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Michael Warner, Publics and
Counterpublics. (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Brian Dolber,
“From Socialism to ‘Sentiment’: Toward a Political Economy of
Communities, Counterpublics and Their Media Through Jewish
Working Class History,” Communication Theory 21 (2011). Some
important works in this area that have informed my thinking here
include: Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes,
Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisitison in
Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Champaign,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Michael Denning, The
 INTRODUCTION 11

Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997); Morris Dickstein,

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Steven Carr, Hollywood and
Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Susan Douglas, Inventing
American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989); Stuart Ewen, Captains of
Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 2001); Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History
of Spin. (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Neal Gabler, An Empire
of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor,
1989); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream:
Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate
Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in
American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001); Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media
and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Charles F. McGovern, Sold American (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise:
Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996); Ben Scott, “Labor’s New
Deal for Journalism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, 2010); Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of
the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996); Inger Stole, Advertising on
Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the
1930s (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
8. Gramsci, Selections, 366; Denning, The Cultural Front, 6.
9. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our
Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 34; 18; 19.
10. Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 10; Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s
Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of
Communication Inquiry 10 (1986).
11. William Zukerman. “Vladeck’s Generation,” May 1939, 317.
Vladeck Papers. Box Add. 6, Folder 1.
12. John R. Commons, “The Sweating System in the Clothing Trade,”
in Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, ed. John R. Commons
(Boston: Ginn and Company, 1905), 327.
 CHAPTER 2

“Digging in the Dark”: The Forward’s

Advertising Strategy in the 1920s

As the United States entered the ongoing war in Europe in April 1917,
Yiddish-speaking radicals on New York’s Lower East Side presented an
obstacle for U.S. elites seeking to unify the country behind the Allied
effort. Many Jewish immigrants had fled the Pale of Settlement in order to
avoid conscription in the czar’s army and would resist a draft in the United
States that would force them to fight alongside Russia. Further, unions
populated by Jewish workers in the garment industry operated outside
of U.S. labor’s dominant structure, the pro-war American Federation of
Labor (AFL). Many of these unions and their members had ties to the
Socialist Party (SP), which had declared the war “capitalistic” upon its
outbreak three years prior. Jewish leaders, such as Rabbis Stephen Wise
and Judah Magnes, organized the community under the auspices of
the Emergency Peace Federation, and Jewish anarchist-feminist Emma
Goldman formed the No Conscription League to rally against the draft.1
George Creel’s Committee on Public Information —the federal pro-
paganda agency—hoped to curtail the influence of Yiddish Socialism
and its popular and vibrant press. Some newspapers, such as Der tog (The
Day) supported the war effort and collaborated with the AFL’s American
Alliance for Labor and Democracy, but the Forward—the center of grav-
ity in the Yiddish Socialist universe—was far more resistant. Calling Russia
an “Asiatic barbarian,” Abraham Cahan, the editor of the paper and a
luminary within Jewish left circles, believed a German victory might bring
a revolt against the czar. At its iconic East Broadway headquarters, which

© The Author(s) 2017 13

B. Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43548-0_2
14 B. DOLBER

then dominated the Lower Manhattan skyline, the Forward Association—

the journal’s publisher—housed the antiwar People’s Council, seeking to
collaborate with other Socialist newspapers, such as the English-language
Call and German-language Volkzeitung, and promote a pacifist movement.2
Such efforts were highly suspect in the emerging militaristic and xeno-
phobic environment. The U.S. Postmaster-General, Albert S. Burleson,
called Cahan and a dozen other radicals before him to defend their news-
papers against charges of sedition. Coercion proved successful. Afraid that
the post office would shut down the Socialist press, Cahan pled loyalty to
the United States.3
Cahan explained to Burleson that although his paper had initially
opposed U.S. entry into the war, it was “anti-Kaiser and anti-junker more
vehemently than anyone else.” In fact, the paper served a noble patri-
otic purpose, as “the great Americanizing influence on the East Side.”
Shutting down the Forward, Cahan proclaimed, would be a “great his-
torical error.” Ultimately agreeing to refrain from offering opinion on the
war, Cahan pledged to “just print war news without comment” as “think-
ing and having your own opinion without expressing it has not yet been
considered unlawful.”4
While under this intense scrutiny, the Forward Association elected
Baruch Charney Vladeck its new business manager in 1918. A member of
the New York City Board of Aldermen, he was promoted from being the
paper’s city editor and awarded a relatively high salary of $65 per week.
Having already broken ranks with left orthodoxy, Vladeck alienated Leon
Trotsky by arguing that “every citizen and every resident of the United
States” should “fight to protect the great American Republic against an
alliance of European and Asiatic monarchists and their associates.”5
By the time the war ended that November, the Forward had changed
its official position on the war. “It is no longer a capitalist war, neither
is it imperialistic or nationalistic,” stated the Forward. “It is a war for
humanity.”6
The Forward’s about-face on the war marked the beginning of a pro-
cess of compromise in the name of self-preservation. Although Cahan
remained the editor and the face of the publication, Vladeck devel-
oped the pragmatic strategies that would bolster the newspaper—and,
by extension, the Jewish labor movement—over the course of the next
decade. Relying on advertising not only as a way to generate revenue for
the newspaper but to demonstrate its loyalty to American values, Vladeck
developed a ­top-­down strategy to expand the Forward into local markets
 “DIGGING IN THE DARK”: THE FORWARD’S ADVERTISING STRATEGY... 15

and professionalize its marketing services. Mirrored by other leaders,

including David Dubinsky and Mark Starr of the International Ladies’
Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Morris Novik of radio station
WEVD, and, to a certain extent, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), this approach helped position the
Jewish labor movement in contradictory alliances with state and business
interests.
During the 1920s, Vladeck aimed to preserve the paper by arguing that
Forward readers were good Americans worthy of advertisers’ attention
just as other labor and foreign-language journals were going extinct. He
addressed his readers as members of a cosmopolitan proletariat, interpo-
lating them into the matrices of an evolving consumer society. The pro-
duction of this cosmopolitan proletarian subject, particularly as it became
aligned with Zionism, signaled a shift in Yiddish Socialism while preparing
Forward readers to become members of a reconstituted national public
under the New Deal.

Baruch Charney: The Early Years

Baruch Charney was born in 1886 to a religious family in the provincial
town of Dukor, Lithuania, thirty miles southeast of the growing industrial
city of Minsk. It was a dynamic period in the shtetls, or villages, of the Pale
of Settlement. The czar’s anti-Semitic policies combined with an expand-
ing industrial economy to wreak havoc on the livelihoods of Eastern
Europe’s Jews. Baruch’s father died young, and his mother raised Baruch
and his brothers to adhere strictly to a fading religious tradition, waiting
to be saved from the misery of shtetl life by the coming of the Messiah.
Although Baruch later noted that his village had been barely touched by
the modernization of the nineteenth century, many young Jews coming of
age in this environment began to question traditional ways of life, aban-
doning religious practice for political engagement in both Marxist and
Zionist incarnations.7
Charney joined the fray after leaving Dukor for Minsk to study at
yeshiva, or a religious school. By his third year, he was far more excited
by modern Russian literature than rabbinical texts. “God was dying in my
heart,” he wrote, “and the masters of Russian literature were taking the
place of the Holy Books.” Turning his interest toward the likes of Pushkin,
Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, Charney came to understand the Jewish experi-
ence in a political context. “I was barely fifteen,” he wrote, “and I faced a
16 B. DOLBER

new world without anything else but youth and a dim feeling that hence-
forth I would sail larger seas.”8
Full of intellectual curiosity, Charney was swept up in the revolution-
ary fervor that emerged following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Vicious,
bloody attacks on Jewish communities during Passover on Easter Sunday
coincided with a growing animosity toward Czar Nicholas II.
“Radicalism was in the air then,” Vladeck said of the period late in his
life. “You felt that a tide was rising. I joined the movement as casually as
a boy on the West Side in New York might join the Democratic party—
the alternatives for us were to emigrate or fight.” He had come to attain
“a clear knowledge of universal oppression in which the persecution of
the Jews was a bloody incident, perhaps the bloodiest.” At the age of
16, Charney was working as an assistant librarian and leading discussion
groups about radical economics. After returning home from one of these
discussions, the police greeted Charney and arrested him for his dissident
activities.9
Because the cell for political prisoners was already full, young Charney
was placed with 28 men who had been convicted of murder and sentenced
to hard labor for life. As “a political,” he gained the respect of his cellmates
and quickly began to communicate with other radical prisoners—conduct-
ing classes and leading reading groups—after he discovered that, during
the day, the cells weren’t locked. Intellectual conversation flourished, as
“the days passed in endless discussions of party programs and platforms.”10
“Jail was something like a vacation,” he said. “It was an opportunity
to study. Each time we were sentenced we brought in a book to build up
the prison library. And when I came out—well, I was a full-­fledged revo-
lutionary. It’s like sending your kids to a reformatory—they learn all the
tricks.”11
Charney left prison in 1904, undeterred from revolutionary activity. He
traveled undercover with a bodyguard throughout the Pale as an organizer
with the needle trades circuit of the Minsk Revolutionary Committee and
began editing an underground trade publication, The Bristle Worker. Soon
he had landed back in prison after organizing Russia’s first strike for an
eight-hour day in Vilna.12
During this second prison term, Charney became enamored with
American political figures, particularly Abraham Lincoln, more so than
Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. Upon reading the Gettysburg Address,
Charney “felt as if some unknown friend had taken me by the hand on
a dark, uncertain road, saying gently: ‘Don’t doubt and don’t despair.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 "At all events," she pursued, "now that your excuse is no longer a good
one, you will come this week to dinner, will you not?"

He would, of course, and watched the yellow motor drive away in the
autumn sunlight, wishing rather less for the order from the minister of war
to change his quarters than he had before.

CHAPTER VI

ORDERED AWAY

He had received his letter from the minister of war. Like many things
we wish for, set our hopes upon, when they come we find that we do not
want them at any price. The order was unwelcome. Sabron was to go to
Algiers.

Winter is never very ugly around Tarascon. Like a lovely bunch of fruit
in the brightest corner of a happy vineyard, the Midi is sheltered from the
rude experiences that the seasons know farther north. Nevertheless, rains
and winds, sea-born and vigorous, had swept in and upon the little town.
The mistral came whistling and Sabron, from his window, looked down on
his little garden from which summer had entirely flown. Pitchouné, by his
side, looked down as well, but his expression, different from his master's,
was ecstatic, for he saw, sliding along the brick wall, a cat with which he
was on the most excited terms. His body tense, his ears forward, he gave a
sharp series of barks and little soft growls, while his master tapped the
window-pane to the tune of Miss Redmond's song.

Although Sabron had heard it several times, he did not know the words
or that they were of a semi-religious, extremely sentimental character which
would have been difficult to translate into French. He did not know that
they ran something like this:
 "God keep you safe, my love,
All through the night;
Rest close in His encircling arms
Until the light."

And there was more of it. He only knew that there was a pathos in the
tune which spoke to his warm heart; which caressed and captivated him and
which made him long deeply for a happiness he thought it most unlikely he
would ever know.

There had been many pictures added to his collection: Miss Redmond at
dinner, Miss Julia Redmond—he knew her first name now—before the
piano; Miss Redmond in a smart coat, walking with him down the alley,
while Pitchouné chased flying leaves and apparitions of rabbits hither and
thither.

The Count de Sabron had always dreaded just what happened to him.
He had fallen in love with a woman beyond his reach, for he had no fortune
whatsoever, nothing but his captain's pay and his hard soldier's life, a
wanderer's life and one which he hesitated to ask a woman to share. In spite
of the fact that Madame d'Esclignac was agreeable to him, she was not
cordial, and he understood that she did not consider him a parti for her
niece. Other guests, as well as he, had shared her hospitality. He had been
jealous of them, though he could not help seeing Miss Redmond's
preference for himself. Not that he wanted to help it. He recalled that she
had really sung to him, decidedly walked by his side when there had been
more than the quartette, and he felt, in short, her sympathy.

"Pitchouné," he said to his companion, "we are better off in Algiers,

mon vieux. The desert is the place for us. We shall get rid of fancies there
and do some hard fighting one way or another."

Pitchouné, whose eyes had followed the cat out of sight, sprang upon
his master and seemed quite ready for the new departure.
 "I shall at least have you," Sabron said. "It will be your first campaign.
We shall have some famous runs and I shall introduce you to a camel and
make you acquainted with several donkeys, not to speak of the historic
Arab steeds. You will see, my friend, that there are other animals besides
yourself in creation."

"A telegram for mon capitaine." Brunet came in with the blue envelope
which Sabron tore open.

"You will take with you neither horses nor dogs."

It was an order from the minister of war, just such a one as was sent to
some half-dozen other young officers, all of whom, no doubt, felt more or
less discomfited.

Sabron twisted the telegram, put it in the fireplace and lighted his
cigarette with it, watching Pitchouné who, finding himself a comfortable
corner in the armchair, had settled down for a nap.

"So," nodded the young man aloud, "I shall not even have Pitchouné."

He smoked, musing. In the rigid discipline of his soldier's life he was

used to obedience. His softened eyes, however, and his nervous fingers as
they pulled at his mustache, showed that the command had touched him.

"What shall I do with you, old fellow?"

Sabron and Pitchouné
 Although Sabron's voice was low, the dog, whose head was down upon
his paws, turned his bright brown eyes on his master with so much
confidence and affection that it completed the work. Sabron walked across
the floor, smoking, the spurs on his heels clanking, the light shining on his
brilliant boots and on his form. He was a splendid-looking man with race
and breeding, and he combined with his masculine force the gentleness of a
woman.

"They want me to be lonely," he thought. "All that the chiefs consider is

the soldier—not the man—even the companionship of my dog is denied
me. What do they think I am going to do out there in the long eastern
evenings?" He reflected. "What does the world expect an uncompanioned
wanderer to do?" There are many things and the less thought about them,
the better.

"A letter for Monsieur le Capitaine." Brunet returned with a note which
he presented stiffly, and Pitchouné, who chose in his little brain to imagine
Brunet an intruder, sprang from the chair like lightning, rushed at the
servant, seized the leg of his pantaloons and began to worry them, growling,
Brunet regarding him with adoration. Sabron had not thought aloud the last
words of the telegram, which he had used to light his cigarette.

"... Nor will it be necessary to take a personal servant. The

indigenes are capable ordonnances."

As he took the letter from Brunet's salver he said curtly:

"I am ordered to Algiers and I shall not take horses nor Pitchouné."

The dog, at the mention of his name, set Brunet's leg free and stood
quiet, his head lifted.

"Nor you either, mon brave Brunet." Sabron put his hand on his
servant's shoulder, the first familiarity he had ever shown a man who served
him with devotion, and who would have given his life to save his master's.
"Those," said the officer curtly, "are the orders from headquarters, and the
least said about them the better."

The ruddy cheek of the servant turned pale. He mechanically touched

his forehead.

"Bien, mon Capitaine," he murmured, with a little catch in his voice. He

stood at attention, then wheeled and without being dismissed, stalked out of
the room.

Pitchouné did not follow. He remained immovable like a little dog cut
from bronze; he understood—who shall say—how much of the
conversation? Sabron threw away his cigarette, then read his letter by the
mantelpiece, leaning his arm upon it. He read slowly. He had broken the
seal slowly. It was the first letter he had ever seen in this handwriting. It
was written in French and ran thus:

"Monsieur:—My aunt wishes me to ask you if you will come to

us for a little musicale to-morrow afternoon. We hope you will be
free, and I hope," she added, "that you will bring Pitchouné. Not that
I think he will care for the music, but afterward perhaps he will run
with us as we walk to the gate. My aunt wishes me to say that she
has learned from the colonel that you have been ordered to Algiers.
In this way she says that we shall have an opportunity of wishing
you bon voyage, and I say I hope Pitchouné will be a comfort to
you."

The letter ended in the usual formal French fashion. Sabron, turning the
letter and rereading it, found that it completed the work that had been going
on in his lonely heart. He stood long, musing.

Pitchouné laid himself down on the rug, his bright little head between
his paws, his affectionate eyes on his master. The firelight shone on them
both, the musing young officer and the almost human-hearted little beast.
So Brunet found them when he came in with the lamp shortly, and as he set
it down on the table and its light shone on him, Sabron, glancing at the
ordonnance, saw that his eyes were red, and liked him none the less for it.

CHAPTER VII

A SOLDIER'S DOG

"It is just as I thought," he told Pitchouné. "I took you into my life, you
little rascal, against my will, and now, although it's not your fault, you are
making me regret it. I shall end, Pitchouné, by being a cynic and
misogynist, and learn to make idols of my career and my troops alone. After
all, they may be tiresome, but they don't hurt as you do, and some other
things as well."

Pitchouné, being invited to the musicale at the Château d'Esclignac,

went along with his master, running behind the captain's horse. It was a
heavenly January day, soft and mild, full of sunlight and delicious odors,
and over the towers of King René's castle the sky banners were made of
celestial blue.

The officer found the house full of people. He thought it hard that he
might not have had one more intimate picture to add to his collection. When
he entered the room a young man was playing a violoncello. There was a
group at the piano, and among the people the only ones he clearly saw were
the hostess, Madame d'Esclignac in a gorgeous velvet frock, then Miss
Redmond, who stood by the window, listening to the music. She saw him
come in and smiled to him, and from that moment his eyes hardly left her.

What the music was that afternoon the Count de Sabron could not have
told very intelligently. Much of it was sweet, all of it was touching, but
when Miss Redmond stood to sing and chose the little song of which he had
made a lullaby, and sang it divinely, Sabron, his hands clasped behind his
back and his head a little bent, still looking at her, thought that his heart
would break. It was horrible to go away and not tell her. It was cowardly to
feel so much and not be able to speak of it. And he felt that he might be
equal to some wild deed, such as crossing the room violently, putting his
hand over her slender one and saying:

"I am a soldier; I have nothing but a soldier's life. I am going to Africa

to-morrow. Come with me; I want you. Come!"

All of which, slightly impossible and quite out of the question,

nevertheless charmed and soothed him. The words of her English song,
almost barbaric to him because incomprehensible, fell on his ears. Its
melody was already part of him.

"Monsieur de Sabron," said Madame d'Esclignac, "you are going away

to-morrow?"

"Yes, Madame."

"I expect you will be engaged in some awful native skirmishes. Perhaps
you will even be able to send back a tiger skin."

"There are no tigers in that part of Africa, Madame."

The young soldier's dark eyes rested almost hostilely on the gorgeous
marquise in her red gown. He felt that she was glad to have him go. He
wanted to say: "I shall come back, however; I shall come back and when I
return" ... but he knew that such a boast, or even such a hope was fruitless.

His colonel had told him only the day before that Miss Redmond was
one of the richest American heiresses, and there was a question of a duke or
a prince and heaven only knew what in the way of titles. As the marquise
moved away her progress was something like the rolling of an elegant
velvet chair, and while his feelings were still disturbed Miss Redmond
crossed the room to him. Before Sabron quite knew how they had been able
to escape the others or leave the room, he was standing with her in the
winter garden where the sunlight came in through trellises and the perfume
of the warmed plants was heavy and sweet. Below them flowed the Rhone,
golden in the winter's light. The blue river swept its waves around old
Tarascon and the battlements of King René's towers.

"You are going to Algiers to-morrow, Monsieur de Sabron?" Miss

Redmond smiled, and how was Sabron to realize that she could not very
well have wept there and then, had she wished to do so?

"Yes," he said. "I adore my regiment. I love my work. I have always

wanted to see colonial service."

"Have you? It is delightful to find one's ambitions and desires satisfied,"

said Miss Redmond. "I have always longed to see the desert. It must be
beautiful. Of course you are going to take Pitchouné?"

"Ah!" exclaimed Sabron, "that is just what I am not going to do."

"What!" she cried. "You are never going to leave that darling dog
behind you?"

"I must, unfortunately. My superior officers do not allow me to take

horses or dogs, or even my servant."

"Heavens!" she exclaimed. "What brutes they are! Why, Pitchouné will
die of a broken heart." Then she said: "You are leaving him with your man
servant?"

Sabron shook his head.

"Brunet would not be able to keep him."

"Ah!" she breathed. "He is looking for a home? Is he? If so, would you
... might I take care of Pitchouné?"

The Frenchman impulsively put out his hand, and she laid her own in it.

"You are too good," he murmured. "Thank you. Pitchouné will thank
you."
 He kissed her hand. That was all.

From within the salon came the noise of voices, and the bow of the
violoncellist was beginning a new concerto. They stood looking at each
other. No condition could have prevented it although the Marquise
d'Esclignac was rolling toward them across the polished floor of the music-
room. As though Sabron realized that he might never see this lovely young
woman again, probably never would see her, and wanted before he left to
have something made clear, he asked quickly:

"Could you, Mademoiselle, in a word or two tell me the meaning of the

English song you sang?"

She flushed and laughed slightly.

"Well, it is not very easy to put it in prose," she hesitated. "Things sound
so differently in music and poetry; but it means," she said in French,
bravely, "why, it is a sort of prayer that some one you love very much
should be kept safe night and day. That's about all. There is a little sadness
in it, as though," and her cheeks glowed, "as if there was a sort of
separation. It means..."

"Ah!" breathed the officer deeply, "I understand. Thank you."

And just then Madame d'Esclignac rolled up between them and with an
unmistakable satisfaction presented to her niece the gentleman she had
secured.

"My dear Julia, my godson, the Duc de Tremont." And Sabron bowed to
both the ladies, to the duke, and went away.

This was the picture he might add to his collection: the older woman in
her vivid dress, Julia in her simpler gown, and the titled Frenchman bowing
over her hand.

When he went out to the front terrace Brunet was there with his horse,
and Pitchouné was there as well, stiffly waiting at attention.
 "Brunet," said the officer to his man, "will you take Pitchouné around to
the servants' quarters and give him to Miss Redmond's maid? I am going to
leave him here."

"Good, mon Capitaine," said the ordonnance, and whistled to the dog.

Pitchouné sprang toward his master with a short sharp bark. What he
understood would be hard to say, but all that he wanted to do was to remain
with Sabron. Sabron bent down and stroked him.

"Go, my friend, with Brunet. Go, mon vieux, go," he commanded

sternly, and the little dog, trained to obedience as a soldier's dog should be,
trotted reluctantly at the heels of the ordonnance, and the soldier threw his
leg over the saddle and rode away. He rode regardless of anything but the
fact that he was going.

CHAPTER VIII

HOMESICK

Pitchouné was a soldier's dog, born in a stable, of a mother who had

been dear to the canteen. Michette had been une vrai vivandière, a real
daughter of the regiment.

Pitchouné was a worthy son. He adored the drums and trumpets. He

adored the fife. He adored the drills which he was accustomed to watch
from a respectable distance. He liked Brunet, and the word had not yet been
discovered which would express how he felt toward Monsieur le Capitaine,
his master. His muscular little form expressed it in every fiber. His brown
eyes looked it until their pathos might have melted a heart of iron.

There was nothing picturesque to Pitchouné in the Château d'Esclignac

or in the charming room to which he was brought. The little dog took a
flying tour around it, over sofas and chairs, landing on the window-seat,
where he crouched. He was not wicked, but he was perfectly miserable, and
the lovely wiles of Julia Redmond and her endearments left him unmoved.
He refused meat and drink, was indifferent to the views from the window,
to the beautiful view of King René's castle, to the tantalizing cat sunning
herself against the wall. He flew about like mad, leaving destruction in his
wake, tugged at the leash when they took him out for exercise. In short,
Pitchouné was a homesick, lovesick little dog, and thereby endeared
himself more than ever to his new mistress. She tied a ribbon around his
neck, which he promptly chewed and scratched off. She tried to feed him
with her own fair hands; he held his head high, looked bored and grew thin
in the flanks.

"I think Captain de Sabron's little dog is going to die, ma tante," she
told her aunt.

"Fiddlesticks, my dear Julia! Keep him tied up until he is accustomed to

the place. It won't hurt him to fast; he will eat when he is hungry. I have a
note from Robert. He has not gone to Monte Carlo."

"Ah!" breathed Miss Redmond indifferently.

She slowly went over to her piano and played a few measures of music
that were a torture to Pitchouné, who found these ladylike performances in
strong contrast to drums and trumpets. He felt himself as a soldier degraded
and could not understand why he should be relegated to a salon and to the
mild society of two ladies who did not even know how to pull his ears or
roll him over on the rug with their riding boots and spurs. He sat against the
window as was his habit, looking, watching, yearning.

"Vous avez tort, ma chère," said her aunt, who was working something
less than a thousand flowers on her tapestry. "The chance to be a princess
and a Tremont does not come twice in a young girl's life, and you know you
have only to be reasonable, Julia."

Miss Redmond's fingers wandered, magnetically drawn by her thoughts,

into a song which she played softly through. Pitchouné heard and turned his
beautiful head and his soft eyes to her. He knew that tune. Neither drums
nor trumpets had played it but there was no doubt about its being fit for
soldiers. He had heard his master sing it, hum it, many times. It had soothed
his nerves when he was a sick puppy and it went with many things of the
intimate life with his master. He remembered it when he had dozed by the
fire and dreamed of chasing cats and barking at Brunet and being a faithful
dog all around; he heard again a beloved voice hum it to him. Pitchouné
whined and softly jumped down from his seat. He put his forepaws on Miss
Redmond's lap. She stopped and caressed him, and he licked her hand.

"That is the first time I have seen that dog show a spark of human
gratitude, Julia, He is probably begging you to open the door and let him
take a run."

Indeed Pitchouné did go to the door and waited appealingly.

"I think you might trust him out. I think he is tamed," said the Marquise
d'Esclignac. "He is a real little savage."

Miss Redmond opened the door and Pitchouné shot out. She watched
him tear like mad across the terrace, and scuttle into the woods, as she
thought, after a rabbit. He was the color of the fallen leaves and she lost
sight of him in the brown and golden brush.

CHAPTER IX

THE FORTUNES OF WAR

Sabron's departure had been delayed on account of a strike at the

dockyards of Marseilles. He left Tarascon one lovely day toward the end of
January and the old town with its sweetness and its sorrow, fell behind, as
he rolled away to brighter suns. A friend from Paris took him to the port in
his motor and there Sabron waited some forty-eight hours before he set sail.
His boat lay out on the azure water, the brown rocks of the coast behind it.
There was not a ripple on the sea. There was not a breeze to stir as he took
the tug which was to convey him. He was inclined to dip his fingers in the
indigo ocean, sure that he would find them blue. He climbed up the ladder
alongside of the vessel, was welcomed by the captain, who knew him, and
turned to go below, for he had been suffering from an attack of fever which
now and then laid hold of him, ever since his campaign in Morocco.

Therefore, as he went into his cabin, which he did not leave until the
steamer touched Algiers, he failed to see the baggage tender pull up and
failed to see a sailor climb to the deck with a wet bedraggled thing in his
hand that looked like an old fur cap except that it wriggled and was alive.

"This, mon commandant," said the sailor to the captain, "is the pluckiest
little beast I ever saw."

He dropped a small terrier on the deck, who proceeded to shake himself

vigorously and bark with apparent delight.

"No sooner had we pushed out from the quay than this little beggar
sprang from the pier and began to swim after us. He was so funny that we
let him swim for a bit and then we hauled him in. It is evidently a mascot,
mon commandant, evidently a sailor dog who has run away to sea."

The captain looked with interest at Pitchouné, who engaged himself in

making his toilet and biting after a flea or two which had not been drowned.

"We sailors," said the man saluting, "would like to keep him for luck,
mon commandant."

"Take him down then," his superior officer ordered, "and don't let him
up among the passengers."

* * * * * *
*

It was a rough voyage. Sabron passed his time saying good-by to France
and trying to keep his mind away from the Château d'Esclignac, which
persisted in haunting his uneasy slumber. In a blaze of sunlight, Algiers, the
white city, shone upon them on the morning of the third day and Sabron
tried to take a more cheerful view of a soldier's life and fortunes.

He was a soldierly figure and a handsome one as he walked down the

gangplank to the shore to be welcomed by fellow officers who were eager
to see him, and presently was lost in the little crowd that streamed away
from the docks into the white city.

CHAPTER X

TOGETHER AGAIN

That night after dinner and a cigarette, he strode into the streets to
distract his mind with the sight of the oriental city and to fill his ears with
the eager cries of the crowd. The lamps flickered. The sky overhead was as
blue nearly as in daytime. He walked leisurely toward the native quarter,
jostled, as he passed, by men in their brilliant costumes and by a veiled
woman or two.

He stopped indifferently before a little café, his eyes on a Turkish

bazaar where velvets and scarfs were being sold at double their worth under
the light of a flaming yellow lamp. As he stood so, his back to the café
where a number of the ship's crew were drinking, he heard a short sharp
sound that had a sweet familiarity about it and whose individuality made
him start with surprise. He could not believe his ears. He heard the bark
again and then he was sprung upon by a little body that ran out from
between the legs of a sailor who sat drinking his coffee and liquor.

"Gracious heavens!" exclaimed Sabron, thinking that he must be the

victim of a hashish dream. "Pitchouné!"
 The dog fawned on him and whined, crouched at his feet whining—like
a child. Sabron bent and fondled him. The sailor from the table called the
dog imperatively, but Pitchouné would have died at his master's feet rather
than return. If his throat could have uttered words he would have spoken,
but his eyes spoke. They looked as though they were tearful.

"Pitchouné, mon vieux! No, it can't be Pitchouné. But it is Pitchouné!"

And Sabron took him up in his arms. The dog tried to lick his face.

"Voyons," said the officer to the marine, who came rolling over to them,
"where did you get this dog?"

The young man's voice was imperative and he fixed stern eyes on the
sailor, who pulled his forelock and explained.

"He was following me," said Sabron, not without a slight catch in his
voice. The body of Pitchouné quivered under his arm. "He is my dog. I
think his manner proves it. If you have grown fond of him I am sorry for
you, but I think you will have to give him up."

Sabron put his hand in his pocket and turned a little away to be free of
the native crowd that, chattering and grinning, amused and curious and
eager to participate in any distribution of coin, was gathering around him.
He found two gold pieces which he put into the hand of the sailor.

"Thank you for taking care of him. I am at the Royal Hotel." He

nodded, and with Pitchouné under his arm pushed his way through the
crowd and out of the bazaar.

He could not interview the dog himself, although he listened, amused,

to Pitchouné's own manner of speech. He spent the latter part of the evening
composing a letter to the minister of war, and although it was short, it must
have possessed certain evident and telling qualities, for before he left
Algiers proper for the desert, Sabron received a telegram much to the point:
 "You may keep your dog. I congratulate you on such a faithful
companion."

CHAPTER XI

A SACRED TRUST

His eyes had grown accustomed to the glare of the beautiful sands, but
his sense of beauty was never satisfied with looking at the desert picture
and drinking in the glory and the loveliness of the melancholy waste.
Standing in the door of his tent in fatigue uniform, he said to Pitchouné:

"I could be perfectly happy here if I were not alone."

Pitchouné barked. He had not grown accustomed to the desert. He hated

it. It slipped away from under his little feet; he could not run on it with any
comfort. He spent his days idly in his master's tent or royally perched on a
camel, crouching close to Sabron's man servant when they went on caravan
explorations.

"Yes," said Sabron, "if I were not alone. I don't mean you, mon vieux.
You are a great deal, but you really don't count, you know."

Before his eyes the sands were as pink as countless rose leaves. To
Sabron they were as fragrant as flowers. The peculiar incense-like odor that
hovers above the desert when the sun declines was to him the most
delicious thing he had ever inhaled. All the west was as red as fire. The day
had been hot and there came up the cool breeze that would give them a
delicious night. Overhead, one by one, he watched the blossoming out of
the great stars; each one hung above his lonely tent like a bridal flower in a
veil of blue. On all sides, like white petals on the desert face, were the tents
of his men and his officers, and from the encampment came the hum of
military life, yet the silence to him was profound. He had only to order his
stallion saddled and to ride away for a little distance in order to be alone
with the absolute stillness.

This he often did and took his thoughts with him and came back to his
tent more conscious of his solitude every night of his life.

There had been much looting of caravans in the region by brigands, and
his business was that of sentinel for the commerce of the plains. Thieving
and rapacious tribes were under his eye and his care. To-night, as he stood
looking toward the west into the glow, shading his eyes with his hand, he
saw coming toward them what he knew to be a caravan from Algiers. His
ordonnance was a native soldier, one of the desert tribes, black as ink, and
scarcely more child-like than Brunet and presumably as devoted.

"Mustapha," Sabron ordered, "fetch me out a lounge chair." He spoke in

French and pointed, for the man understood imperfectly and Sabron did not
yet speak Arabic.

He threw himself down, lighted a fresh cigarette, dragged Pitchouné by

the nape of his neck up to his lap, and the two sat watching the caravan
slowly grow into individuals of camels and riders and finally mass itself in
shadow within some four or five hundred yards of the encampment.

The sentinels and the soldiers began to gather and Sabron saw a single
footman making his way toward the camp.

"Go," he said to Mustapha, "and see what message the fellow brings to
the regiment."

Mustapha went, and after a little returned, followed by the man himself,
a black-bearded, half-naked Bedouin, swathed in dust-colored burnoose and
carrying a bag.

He bowed to Captain de Sabron and extended the leather bag. On the

outside of the leather there was a ticket pasted, which read:

"The Post for the —— Squadron of Cavalry—"

 Sabron added mentally:

"—wherever it may happen to be!"

He ordered bakshish given to the man and sent him off. Then he opened
the French mail. He was not more than three hundred miles from Algiers. It
had taken him a long time to work down to Dirbal, however, and they had
had some hardships. He felt a million miles away. The look of the primitive
mail-bag and the knowledge of how far it had traveled to find the people to
whom these letters were addressed made his hands reverent as he
unfastened the sealed labels. He looked the letters through, returned the bag
to Mustapha and sent him off to distribute the post.

Then, for the light was bad, brilliant though the night might be, he went
into his tent with his own mail. On his dressing-table was a small
illumination consisting of a fat candle set in a glass case. The mosquitoes
and flies were thick around it. Pitchouné followed him and lay down on a
rush mat by the side of Sabron's military bed, while the soldier read his
letter.

"Monsieur:—

"I regret more than ever that I can not write your language
perfectly. But even in my own I could not find any word to express
how badly I feel over something which has happened.

"I took the best of care of Pitchouné. I thought I did, but I could
not make him happy. He mourned terribly. He refused to eat, and
one day I was so careless as to open the door for him and we have
never seen him since. As far as I know he has not been found. Your
man, Brunet, comes sometimes to see my maid, and he thinks he has
been hurt and died in the woods."
 Sabron glanced over to the mat where Pitchouné, stretched on his side,
his forelegs wide, was breathing tranquilly in the heat.

"We have heard rumors of a little dog who was seen running
along the highway, miles from Tarascon, but of course that could
not have been Pitchouné."

Sabron nodded. "It was, however, mon brave," he said to the terrier.

"Not but what I think his little heart was brave enough and
valiant enough to have followed you, but no dog could go so far
without a better scent."

Sabron said: "It is one of the regrets of my life that you can not tell us
about it. How did you get the scent? How did you follow me?" Pitchouné
did not stir, and Sabron's eyes returned to the page.

"I do not think you will ever forgive us. You left us a trust and
we did not guard it."

He put the letter down a moment, brushed some of the flies away from
the candle and made the wick brighter. Mustapha came in, black as ebony,
his woolly head bare. He stood as stiff as a ramrod and as black. In his
child-like French he said: