Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,487

This is the grave of Rose Schneiderman.

Born in 1882 in Sawin, which is today just on the Polish side of the Belarus border, Schneiderman grew up in a sewing family. His parents worked in the garment trades there and they would continue that when they migrated to the United States in 1890. The family had the typical poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side at this time. Her father died in 1892, making it all even worse. In fact, Rose had to go to a Jewish orphanage for awhile because her mother could not make enough money in the horrible conditions of the sweatshops to feed her young daughter. Bad stuff. The family did value education, but Schneiderman had to drop out in 1895, after completing in the sixth grade, in order to work. She went into the garment trades too. The family briefly moved to Montreal, hoping conditions would be better there, but they weren’t, so it was back to New York.

So this was no great era for a lot of working class people. But the Jewish world of the Lower East Side was one of intellectual ferment. A lot of these people had been involved with the Jewish Bund and brought their incipient socialism with them, which was only intensified by their experiences being exploited in America. While I don’t think Schneiderman’s family was initially involved in this back in Poland, they got involved in the U.S. In fact, Rose’s brother Harry would later become a leading communist in the U.S. Rose became deeply involved in trade unionism. In 1903, she and her friend went to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union and asked to start a local in their workplace. The leaders–all men–told them that if they could organize 25 workers they could have one. That took only a few days and it became the first women’s local in the union.

Schneiderman became one of the real textile leaders in New York over the next few years. By 1905, she was leading a capmakers strike in New York. This put her in touch with the Women’s Trade Union League, which was a more middle class Progressive organization working closely with the American Federation of Labor to help build up women’s unions. Schneiderman became close with a lot of these women and it would eventually lead to a change in her career trajectory, but that would take some time. In 1909, she was one of the leaders of the Uprising of the 20,000, the big garment workers strike against the sweatshops. In this case, both the workers and the employers were Jewish, so this was an intra-ethnic dispute as much as a labor dispute. Working alongside other rank and file leaders such as Clara Lemlich and Pauline Newman, Schneiderman was in the headlines for her work on this strike. This also garnered serious attention from rich women, including the daughter of J.P. Morgan, who was out there walking the picket lines with the working class girls, as many of them were since so many were under 18. I mean, by this time, Schneiderman was a seriously experienced labor leader and she was 27 years old.

The strike was a marginal win, but not enough to really change the conditions of the sweatshops. This all hit the public spotlight in a new way with the Triangle Fire in 1911, in which 146 workers died. People such as Schneiderman, who still worked in the garment trade, knew this easily could have been her. In fact, the owners of the Triangle factory were among the most intransigent of the employers during the Uprising of the 20,000. The leaders of the Uprising of the 20,000 were back in the spotlight and Schnedierman perhaps more than anyone. She was furious. She spoke at a mass meeting of workers shortly after the fire and stated:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement

That there is just fire and was directed as much as the moderates of the Women’s Trade Union League, who made up a large part of the audience as anyone else. That said, she continued working with the WTUL and started moving out of working class organizing by the later 1910s and more into women’s suffrage. In fact, of all the major leaders of the Uprising, only Lemlich maintained strong working class roots her whole life. Schneiderman, Newman, and others tended to move toward middle class organizations as they themselves rose in class. She started lecturing for the National Woman Suffrage Association as early as 1912, going on national speaking tours. She tried to connect the middle class suffrage movement to the working class movement, with only mixed success. The problem here was predictable–rich Progressives loved telling working people and especially working women what to do and these working women did not want to listen to the condescension. But she also had to face hostility from male workers, including much of the labor movement, who did not take issues such as suffrage seriously.

Schneiderman also came up with the terms “bread and roses,” or at least supposedly, during a speech at the 1912 Lawrence textile strike. So that’s pretty cool.

She remained active in the Women’s Trade Union League for most of the rest of her life. Her sexuality is unclear. She never married and was in a long-term partnership with a woman named Maud O’Farrell Swartz, another WTUL worker, until the latter died in 1937. But it is entirely unclear whether there is anything romantic about it; in any case, there’s no real evidence of the point. But it’s pretty clear Schneiderman at the very least enjoyed spending her time around women instead of men. Well, whatever, people can speculate if they want I guess, but I don’t see the point of such speculation really. They lived their lives the way they wanted to live them. Good for them, whatever it means in terms of 21st century notions of sexuality.

Schneiderman retired in 1949, occasionally giving speeches for labor unions. In 1967, she published her memoir All for One, which I really should read at some point. She died in 1972, at the age of 90. Nice long retirement there.

In 2011, when that vile asshole Paul LePage was governor of Maine and tried to eliminate labor murals from the state’s Department of Labor office, one of the murals was of Schneiderman. You can see why he would want to eliminate it since he is evil and she was not.

Rose Schneiderman is buried in Maimondes-Elmont Cemetery, Elmont, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American labor leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Cesar Chavez is in Delano, California and William Sylvis is in Fernwood, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.