Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,516

This is the grave of Belle Moskowitz.

Born in 1877 to German Jewish immigrants in Harlem, Belle Lindner grew up reasonably well off. Her father was a watchmaker. She attended the Horace Mann School, which was an experimental school run by the Columbia University Teachers College and in fact that is where she would go to college herself. She was an interesting young woman. She had a ton of different interests and she engaged in all of them. Education was one of them, but so was acting. She worked as an actress for a time too and evidently had at least some minor success at it. She would combine these interests as well and taught acting to children.

But Lindner also was super interested in political change too. The nation was entering its great age of Jewish led reform. Often, this led to tensions within the Jewish community, with the more established German Jews really uncomfortable with all these radical and/or super Orthodox Jews coming in from Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. Many of these German Jews had worked hard to be seen as respectable and not that different from the Christian majority and a lot of them were also well off. So they looked upon the massive migration of Jews with great suspicion. Moreover, given how much of the Jewish political movement in New York revolved around the sweatshops, with young radical female Jews such as Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman leading the movement, this increased the intra-Jewish tensions. After all, the employers at the Triangle Fire were also Jews killing fellow Jews through their hostility to workplace safety.

All this meant that Lindner was not that common when she entered into the reform world as a fairly well off young German-Jewish woman. She worked with United Hebrew Charities even as a young girl, but in her 20s, she started working for Educational Alliance, which was an organization that worked for cultural assimilation for the new Jewish immigrants. She rose in that organization and eventually became its director of the entertainment division, which I assume was at least in part holding dances that held up to “moral” standards, which was common for New York reform organizations at this time. In 1903, she married Charles Israels, an architect. But then he killed himself in 1911.

By 1911, the same year as Triangle, the woman who was now Belle Israels had turned heavily toward labor reform in combination with her general moral reform. It doesn’t seem that the suicide got too much in the way of her work. She worked in the early 1910s to push for new laws in New York that created dance halls that banned alcohol and has emergency exits in case of fire. She published an article titled “Social Work Among Young Women” that pushed these ideas as the key to moral reform. Now, historians have looked at the response among these young woman to reformers who thought they knew better than the girls what was right. It gets pretty interesting. Here I am thinking of Kathy Peiss’ superb 1982 book Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, which explored this in detail. Basically, these young girls were not much interested in what women like Belle Israels had to say to them. If these women tried to make the dances too clean (no touching!) the girls simply wouldn’t show up. So the reformers had to change their ways a lot more than the girls did. The extent to which Israels herself was engaged in this particular kind of exchange is not something I can explore in a brief essay like this, but the context is important.

Israels founded The Lakeview Home for Girls in 1911, the same year as her husband died. Then she wrote for  United Hebrew Charities and Charities, a reform journal. This got her more in touch with labor activists. She also joined the Council of Jewish Women, where she did a lot of work with orphans and girls in reformatories. She also remarried. Henry Moskowitz was a Romanian Jewish immigrant, settlement house worker, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Later, he was the Executive Director of the League of New York Theatres, which is what founded the Tony Awards. He’s not buried here, as she was buried with her first husband. They met during their reform work and married in 1914.

Belle Moskowitz, as she would be known for the rest of her life, started working mostly on labor reform issues about this time. She became a mediator within the garment industry. She was well-placed for this, as she was on both sides of the Jewish divide in New York. She did this working for the Dress Makers and Manufacturers Association until 1916, when she started her own business as a mediator. She appealed directly to employers to let her help them set up factories that would be satisfactory for workers and stop industrial disputes before they started. This is a very Progressive Era move, when rich people thought they could preempt worker power before workers gained actual power. But I can’t hold this against Moskowitz really, who was doing the best they could. When you are dealing with Progressives, they tend to come off better today if you focus on their labor politics than if you focus on their gender politics and that is very much the case with Moskowitz.

All of this made Moskowitz a well-known person in political circles. She became close to Al Smith. In fact, she became one of his closest advisors when he was governor, spending a lot of time in Albany with him. She was in the office when he made major decisions and little legislation got his signature without her approval. When Smith became governor, Frances Perkins suggested he create what became known as the Reconstruction Committee to push reform in New York. He agreed and put Moskowitz in charge. She hired Robert Moses as its chief of staff. Among the ideas she pushed was the 48-hour work week for women, housing programs, better hospitals, a parkway system, and better salaries for teachers. Most of this became law. In the two years between terms when Smith lost his 1920 bid to retake the office, she worked with him closely to create the idea for the Port Authority, which became a thing after he returned to office after the 1922 election. Smith hired her as his campaign manager when he ran for president in 1928. She was working for him in his failed 1932 attempt to become president again. But when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won instead. She was not close to FDR, largely because he had Eleanor and so didn’t feel he needed another strong woman in his inner circle. Smith became deeply bitter, unfortunately. It’s likely Moskowitz would have come around.

However, Moskowitz died before FDR ever took office. That was in January 1933 and she was only 55 years old. She had a fall at her home and I guess probably hit her head. Sad stuff. Her New York Times obituary noted, probably correctly, that she “wielded more political power than any woman in the United States.” Had she lived, she almost certainly would have been there with Perkins, Eleanor, and Josephine Roche as leading women in the New Deal.

Belle Moskowitz is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other critically important women in the early 20th century reform movements, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Molly Dewson is in Castine, Maine and Grace Abbott is in Grand Island, Nebraska. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.