Adam Hochschild. Rebel Cinderella: From rags to riches to radical, the epic journey of rose pastor stokes. Mariner Books, 2021. 303 pages.
Rose Pastor Stokes was never on my radar until I happened upon this biography. I really only picked up this book because I’d read Spain in Our Hearts, (Hochschild’s recounting of Americans who fought in or reported on the Spanish Civil War) and found him to be an engaging storyteller. But I have a soft heart for a good socialist love story, so here I am.
A Russian Jew, Rose Pastor was born into poverty in Russia, 1879, moved to London as a toddler, then to Cleveland with a dream-chasing stepfather. Dreams didn’t work out ever, and from age 11, Rose worked in a cigar factory to support her mother and siblings, now abandoned by both father and stepfather. She made about 45 cents a week, and was taken advantage of by her boss, who used her speed to set the piece rate for the slower workers — and hid her from inspectors because she was too young to work. Even as a child, she recognized and resented the exploitation. She also often went hungry.
A dozen years later, a letter she wrote to a newspaper, written on break from cigar-rolling, led to an invitation to move to New York City, where she became a regular columnist in the Jewish newspapers. In her mid-20s, living among immigrants crammed in Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements, she grew ever more aware of the poverty that suffocated workers everywhere, and became an activist for improvements in labor and family conditions. In social activist circles, she met and married a scion of New York wealth, Graham Phelps Stokes, himself drawn charitably to the plight of the lower classes. She and he became a story, in part because of their cross-class marriage, in part because they became leaders of the early 20th century worker movement in the US, friends of intellectuals, socialists and anarchists including Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Mabel Dodge, Dorothy Day, Upton Sinclair, WEB DuBois, Mother Jones, John dos Passos. (His family ties also meant they moved in capitalist circles: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Roosevelt.
So, the “socialist love story” I found wasn’t hers and Graham’s, but hers and the working class.
Graham’s family humored her at best, but family money allowed them to travel, speak, write, and organize strikes, including strikes against companies owned by his family, and provided them the means to host and house such a variety of comrades for short and long periods of time — in their Greenwich Village townhome or at the compound they built on the small island they owned in Long Island Sound. (Rose named it Caritas Island, which doesn’t align with any current info available on google, FYI.) Rose never reconciled her identification among the poor working class with her access to money, but she used it to be an ally in every way possible.
A long fascination in US history for me has been the labor movement of the last gilded age; this work adds detail and perspective to other books and films I’ve read and seen. But a blur in history for me has been the socialist/communist/anarchist movements and how Russia became the Soviet Union — revered by American leftists and an arch-enemy of the US in a half-century Cold War. This work helps put some of those pieces together. (I’m confident a great many other works do, as well, but this is one I happened upon.) The Bolshevik revolution was a success right up until the moment it wasn’t, and I’m reminded how very often and very quickly Israel becomes Egypt when it is free to choose.
The exciting rise of the workers’ left and then the role of World War I in dampening and demoralizing that movement become more clear here also, as leftists are jailed, harassed, deported or killed for their failure of patriotism, in one case beaten up for failing to stand for the national anthem (which I quit doing decades ago, but the most I ever got was a sneer from a military family member). Rose strengthens her leftist ties during the war, while Graham renounces his and searches for military standing. Rose herself is convicted of felonies related to her obstruction of the US war effort, and saying bad things about America. She never goes to jail, which disappoints her deeply.
There’s even a bit part for Donald Trump — the heir and real estate mogul, William Earl Dodge Stokes, an embarrassment to the family, who traffics in paranoia and xenophobia, constantly writing letters to political leaders, even President Wilson, reporting rumors and conspiracy theories and suspicions, and turning in his nephew’s wife when the opportunity arises, leading to Rose’s arrest and trial on sedition charges. Rose maintains throughout that “the war being fought to make the world safe for democracy… is being fought to make the world safe for capital.”
The love affair eventually ended, Rose and Graham part, each disgusted by the other’s affiliations and political viewpoints driven to extremes.
Of course, different historians tell different perspectives. I had just finished reading the bio of Frances Perkins, FDR’s visionary labor secretary (The Woman Behind the New Deal), and I find these two writers competing over which woman was most pivotal in winning an 8-hour day, unemployment insurance and an end to child labor, among other things. No doubt both played their parts. Rose was definitely more radical; Frances was more politically astute. They were about the same age, both affected by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, both active in the Settlement House movement in New York, both rubbing elbows with New York money; I cannot imagine they did not know each other, though neither author mentions the other. I would be curious to know more about any interactions between them. It’s not too much to think that two powerful women contributed to the worker gains of the early 20th century, one working outside the system and one working within.
Hochschild, like Sunkara, reminds us that, like so many things, political winds are cyclical. We’re in a bad spot now, but it doesn’t have to stay this way. Fascists are getting loud and bold, but Progressives are also gaining strength. There is hope. And there is work.
Anyway, in between social theory tomes, it is good to have a history that reads like a novel. Sort of cleanses your palate. I recommend this work.