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David Wyman, Holocaust Scholar

David Wyman was a historian of the Holocaust. He spent his academic career at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst teaching, researching and writing about this horrific chapter of history. A 1985 Berkshire Eagle review of his book Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 deemed him an “unusual historian.” The reviewer pointed out he was a Christian who devoted his entire career to studying the fate of the Jews.

While at Amherst, he chaired the Judaic studies program, and later chaired of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C.

Religious Beliefs of David Wyman

David Sword Wyman was born in Weymouth, Mass., in 1929, the son of Hollis Judson Wyman and Ruth Sword. His family belonged to Centenary Methodist Church in Auburndale, Mass. According to census records, two of his grandfathers were ministers.

Rev. Stephen W. Wyman, born in Nova Scotia, was a Methodist minister in Franklin, who died in Lynn, Mass. Andrew Peter Sword, born in Sweden, moved from New Jersey in 1901 to serve as a minister at First Swedish Baptist Church in Silverhill, Ala., where he died.

Perhaps David acquired his deep religious faith from these family connections, later prompting his curiosity and sympathy to the suffering of the Jewish people during World War II. At lectures, people often asked him why he, a Christian was so interested in Jewish issues. His answer, according to the Jewish News Syndicate, was that “a human being, no matter his or her religious faith, should care, and act, when innocent people are persecuted.” His obituary from Amherst mentions that his parents instilled in him “not just tolerance but a high degree of respect for all different people.”

Spencer Memorial Chapel at William Penn College

Even as a young man, he demonstrated religious integrity. He studied at William Penn College, a Quaker school, in Oskaloosa, Iowa. At some time during his youth he apparently embraced the Quaker faith. In September 1948, the Des Moines Register printed a letter from David stating his resistance to the peacetime draft. Then in January, he received an 18 month jail sentence for draft evasion, along with five other Quaker students. The Berkshire Eagle published the story on Jan. 18, 1948, “Ottumwa, Iowa: 6 Quaker Students Get 18 months for Draft Evasion.“

A month later this Boston Globe article appeared: “Auburndale Draft Opposer Engaged to College Classmate.” David had gotten engaged to Mildred L. Smith, a classmate from William Penn College. They married in 1950.

Career and Writing

After receiving degrees from Boston University and Harvard, David was a professor at Amherst from 1966-1991. He taught History and Judaic Studies and wrote several books on the Holocaust. According to Wikipedia, his book Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 was “one of the most important books on American immigration policy in the Nazi years.”

The Boston Globe quoted David Wyman in a story about the Holocaust on July 4, 1978. Under the headline “Haven for Jewish Refugees Opposed by U.S. Officials,” Wyman said the U.S. State Department felt it was a security risk to rescue Jewish refugees since German agents could slip in with them. He also said that the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and the Unitarian Service Committee worked for rescue and relief.

In addition to Paper Walls and The Abandonment of the Jews, David cowrote, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust. Bergson had led a campaign to rescue Holocaust victims. Wyman also edited The World Reacts to the Holocaust by Charles H. Rosenzveig, and he contributed an essay to Rafael Medoff’s Too Little and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust.

A Prolific Writer

David also wrote articles and letters to the editor of many magazines. A few examples include an article in Commentary in May 1978 discussing why Auschwitz was never bombed although requests had become numerous by the spring of 1944. They also include a letter to the editor of American Jewish History in March 1998, also about the question of bombing Auschwitz.

David also exchanged letters with Jack Conroy^* of Moberly, Mo., author of The Disinherited, 1933. He told Jack that he was using The Disinherited, a book about Missouri life during the Great Depression, in his history classes and that the students enjoyed reading it. A 1977 letter to Jack mentioned that he spent nine months in federal prison in Springfield, Mo., as a conscientious objector, and that he met his wife Midge at William Penn College in Oskaloosa. These letters to Jack also displayed David’s humor. One letter in 1980 began “Dear Sage of Moberly: Ahoy & avast me hearty!” In another letter, dated 1984, he signed off “Dave Wyman The Sage of (now nuclear-free zone, believe it or not) Amherst.”

David Wyman died in Amherst in March 2018. His obituary appeared in the Boston Globe and dozens of papers across the country. He was described as a leading scholar of the U.S. response to the Holocaust. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies was founded by colleagues and named for him in 2003. According to his obituary from Amherst he was “much too humble of a man to ever consider establishing an institution named after himself; and it took considerable effort to persuade him…”.

As mentioned in the 1985 Berkshire Eagle article (mentioned above), “It is his humanity even more than his scholarship that impresses the reader.”

End Notes

Rebecca Rector of Troy, N.Y., is a history and genealogy researcher, and retired librarian from Siena College. She has been transcribing letters and diaries for Newberry Library and National Archives for the past three years.

Source: *Jack Conroy Letters are at Newberry Library, Chicago.

Images: Des Moines Register, September 5, 1948, pg. 43; Berkshire Eagle, January 18, 1949, pg. 15; Boston Globe, February 11, 1949, pg. 37; Boston Globe obituary & photo, March 16, 2018, pg. B9. David Wyman By Image: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust StudiesImmediate source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/obituaries/david-wyman-scholar-of-americas-holocaust-response-dies-at-89.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70537604. Spencer Memorial Chapel By Boscophotos – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48323417.

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The Working Girls Vacation Society: Keeping the ‘Sin’ Out of ‘Single’

During the Gilded Age, hundreds of thousands of young women worked long hours for low pay in sweat shops and factories. Some couldn’t get enough to eat, and some contracted tuberculosis in the crowded, dirty workplaces. Upper-class women came up with a way to help them: The Working Girls Vacation Society. It gave certain girls a two-week, supervised vacation in the country.

Unchaperoned co-ed bathing at Coney Island, 1897. Not the kind of vacation sanctioned by the Working Girls Vacation Society.

The rich ladies were as concerned about the morality of the working girls as much as their health. They worried the girls, once outside the home, would succumb to the blandishments of men or, worse, turn to prostitution. Getting them away from the temptations of the city and into the wholesome countryside seemed like a good way to prevent that.

And so in Boston and New York they started working girls vacation societies or clubs. They then sent the girls for two weeks to one of more than a dozen country homes — in rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. There they got three square meals a day, fresh air and in some cases medical attention.

They could read and knit and learn how to make paper flowers. On Sunday they went to church. They helped with the housework, a nod to the rich ladies’ preference that they find a morally safer line of work as domestic servants.

Doubtful Attractions

Led by copper heiress Grace Dodge, wealthy women philanthropists after the Civil War started the YWCA and a network of working girls clubs. The reformers then saw a need to to keep the girls from going unchaperoned to vaudeville shows, amusement parks, dance halls and sporting events. In 1894, Edith A. Sawyer described in The Churchman the horrors of a such a places, “where crowds congregate, and where there are electric lights, cheap music, pink lemonade and ‘merry-go-rounds’.”

The horror!

In such public places, they believed, the working girls could succumb to sinful temptations presented by men.

“There being so few week-end resources, the public amusement places with their doubtful attractions are all that is left,” reported Far and Near, the journal of the national coalition of working girls’ clubs, in 1890.

The Working Girls Vacation Society

Katharine W.D. Herbert, wife of a wealthy stockbroker, founded the Working Girls Vacation Society in 1883 as an offshoot of the New York Working Girls Club. She was a philanthropist known for donating thousands of pieces of carved jade to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Herbert was “struck with the monotony of their ceaseless toil year in and out.”

To start the vacation club, she and her wealthy friends held a bazaar and raised nearly $1,000. She set up an advisory board that consisted of prominent men and half a dozen ministers.

The Society then found homes. In East Haddam, Conn., three houses and three barns once owned by the Working Girls Vacation Society is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1890, the Society’s social worker, Annie White Strathern, furnished one of the farmhouses as a vacation home for young working women.

Phebe Howell House 1834 aka Rose Cottage of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society

The Getaway Spots

Other vacation clubs and houses formed in Boston and New York during the Gilded Age, offshoots of the YWCA, the Working Girls Club in New York and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

The New York Working Girls Vacation Society eventually had 10 houses. Uplands and Hillcrest in the Adirondacks, for example, were gifts of George Dodge, Grace Dodge’s uncle.

Girls could go to Connecticut, to Farmington Lodge in Farmington, Breezy Cottage at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, and to two in Westport, including Green Cottage in Green’s Farms. Or they could stay at lodgings in New York: at Elmcote in Chester or Neversink Manse in Huguenot.

New York’s Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society had two vacation houses, one in Bellport, Long Island, and one at Big Indian in the Catskills.

Boston’s working girls went to Fernside in Princeton, Mass., Good Rest in Lancaster, Mass., The Homestead Inn in the Temple Hills of New Hampshire and one in Methuen, Mass., called The Girls Boarding House.

Churches and settlement houses also maintained vacation homes for working girls; so did Bloomingdale’s, which had a vacation house in Long Branch, N.J., for its employees.

The Working Girls Vacation Society Vacation

The wealthy ladies realized some working girls didn’t like to accept charity, so they charged a nominal fee – about $3 – for a two weeks’ vacation. They’d lend money to those who couldn’t afford it. Some got a free ride.

But you couldn’t go if you had a reputation as a floozy. Harriet Comstock in the Christian Observer in 1907 made it clear that girls with loose morals weren’t welcome. The society sent “the better class of working girls to beautiful country homes for pure fun,” she wrote. [Emphasis added.]

How much fun? Certainly not too much.

In East Haddam, the girls’ supervisor carefully noted their weight gains and the amount of milk they drank as measures of their health improvement. The responsibilities of the trained resident social worker included “instruction in crafts such as making paper flowers and tooled leather purses, and leading hikes and motoring excursions to local sites.”

Every Friday evening the girls came up with their own entertainment, and they went to dances held in the recreation center.

At Fernside in western Massachusetts they could read, sew, walk, take a drive in a wagon or do nothing. At least the old mansion had a theater where they could put on amateur theatricals.

In 1890, Far and Near described a typical vacation, perhaps overselling the “fun” part.

How the girls enjoy the complete change from work and worry to good country air, the tramping to the mountains and the places of interest, or, if at the seaside, the bathing; the dances in the barn, the games and the music. On rainy days fancywork, crocheting, knitting, and reading make the time fly as if on wings.

Prayers Twice a Day

In 1913, Hugh Thompson reported the working girls chafed at the restrictions during their getaways. Thompson wrote in “The Vacation Savings Movement,” in Munsey’s Magazine:

[T]hey were unpopular because of the restrictions imposed on the inmates. In most of them the girls had to live by rigid rule; there was no freedom of action. The situation was summed up by a saleswoman who told an investigator: “Why, you can’t even look at a man if you go there! I do not want to be bound to go to prayers twice a day.

The general feeling, Thompson wrote, was that the self-supporting women who worked so hard wanted absolute freedom to rest or seek innocent amusement.

A U.S. sweatshop, around 1890.

They also may have resented their benefactress’ condescension. Harriet Comstock, who promoted the Working Girls Vacation Society in her writing for church magazines, described a missive from the society’s secretary. The secretary had written to a vacation home supervisor about a working woman:

“I am sending you a little forlornity; try to make her think she is in heaven.”

2-1/2 Percent

The 1900 census reported 261,081 unmarried working women between the ages of 10 and 35 living in the state of New York. By 1909, the New York vacation societies hosted about 1400 working girls a year, according to Amy E. Spingarn. “A trifle over 2-1/2 percent are provided for,” she wrote.

Springarn had conducted a survey on vacation resources for working girls and reported her findings in “Summer Vacations for Working Girls” in the The Survey.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Their income, she wrote, ranged from $1 a week to $16 a week, and their average age about 20. The vacation societies charged a few dollars, but most come free. The girls are factory workers, sales clerks, teachers, dressmakers and stenographers. Sometimes the girls didn’t have clothes, and sometimes the Society repaid the family for lost wages.

Tuberculosis

“Do the people of New York City realize how many working girls have tubercular and cardiac trouble?” the New York Vacation Club Society asked the editor of the New York Times in 1923.

Some of the girls with symptoms of tuberculosis went to the Adirondacks for treatment. They could stay at Hillcrest year-round for treatment.

Article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1907

Anna Buchanan, the assistant treasurer of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society, in 1891 gave an example of a working girl helped by a visit to Santa Clara in a letter to The Christian Union.

One of these was a young dressmaker, who was very feeble and had a bad cough. She was sent to the mountains, where she not only gained strength, but her cough disappeared, and she came home comparatively well, and ready for her winter’s work.

Dining room at “Uplands,” Santa Clara. The caption read, “The good fellowship among the girls here makes it seem more like a school than a sanitarium.”
The Circle, volume VIII, No. 1, July-August, 1910, p. 9

In 1945, the Working Girls Vacation Society of New York shut down. Katharine Herbert died that same year.

The New York Working Girls’ Vacation Society mission continues as a successor organization, the Stony Wold-Herbert Fund, which provides grants for study and research in pulmonary diseases.

In East Haddam, the owner of the Phebe Howell House is undertaking a historically accurate restoration of the Phebe Howell House, aka Rose Cottage. You can see pictures at Facebook.com/WorkingGirlsVacationSociety.

Images: Coney Island bathers Campbell, Alfred S. On the beach, Coney Island. New York, ca. 1897. Elizabeth, N.J.: Alfred S. Campbell, Publisher, April 20. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005677854/. Fernside By Izzysanime – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21538381. Merry go round Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. The carousel, or merry-go-round, at Richland Carrousel Park opened inin downtown Mansfield, Ohio. United States Ohio Richland County Mansfield, 2016. -10-07. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632407/. Sweatshop By Unknown – http://americansformorality.com/civilrights/civilrights.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27485325.

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Eight Fun Facts About the Insanely Talented John Singer Sargent

How did the paintings of John Singer Sargent ever fall out of favor? He created stunning watercolor landscapes and oil portraits that reveal a virtuosity described as “insolent.” Sargent, it was said, could quickly sketch a likeness the way most people sign their names.

John Singer Sargent

As a boy, all he ever wanted to be was an artist. His parents, Americans who roamed around Europe, encouraged him. He showed up at the Carolus Duran studio in Paris and presented his work, hoping for acceptance as a student. He astonished his future classmates, who viewed him as a prodigy.

During his lifetime he created about 3,000 paintings, including 900 in oil and 2,000 in watercolor. They made him rich and they made him famous. But by the time he died in 1925, critics didn’t consider him “modern” enough. He went from prodigy to Gilded Age antique.

Here, then, are eight fun facts about the flamboyantly talented John Singer Sargent.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

1. Roger Fry was his bete noire.

Art critic Roger Fry had no use for John Singer Sargent. That mattered – a lot. Fry had enormous influence over popular taste in art during the early 20^th century. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,” wrote art historian Kenneth Clark. Fry promoted the Parisian avant-garde, painters like Cezanne, Matisse and Van Gogh.

Roger Fry Self Portrait

In 1910, Fry organized an exhibit in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Critics savaged the show, and so Fry responded by listing artists who supported that school of painting. He included John Singer Sargent, whose work he had already criticized. Sargent replied with two letters to the editor of The Nation making it clear he had no use for post-Impressionism. From then on, the two men feuded.

Unfortunately for Sargent, Fry outlived him. The year after Sargent died, the Royal Academy in London held a memorial retrospective of his work. Fry viciously criticized the show, destroying Sargent’s reputation for a good 50 years.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent. Maybe Fry was just jealous.

2. Sargent was not born in the USA.

He considered himself an American, though he didn’t set foot in America until his 20^th year. His parents wandered around Europe for decades. They always sought a better climate or cheaper places to live.

Sargent was born in Florence on Jan. 12, 1856, to Fitzwilliam Sargent, a Philadelphia physician, and Mary Newbold Singer, an heiress. By the time he turned 18 he had lived in London, Paris, Pau, Biarritz, Salzburg, Nice, St. Moritz, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Dresden and various cities in Spain. He spoke English, French, German and Italian, all fluently.

His mother loved Europe and the nomadic life. His father hated it. But she had the money, and they could live inexpensively in Europe. So they did.

El Jaleo, courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Sargent considered Boston his American home. He had his first solo show at the St. Botolph Club in 1888, and won several major mural commissions in the city. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a friend, collected his work (you can see El Jaleo at the Gardner Museum). The Museum of Fine Arts Boston claims to hold the most complete collection of Sargent’s work, as well as his archives. When he died, the Boston Globe ran a front page story, Boston Claims Sargent, Great Master, As Her Own.

3. He preferred painting landscapes.

Sargent painted and drew landscapes since childhood. But making a living as an artist required critical acclaim for work shown at the Paris Salon, then the most important art event in the western world.

An Out of Doors Study, watercolor, by John Singer Sargent

Thousands of people visited the exhibition, and the international press covered it. But the French Academie, which ran the Salon, held landscape painting in low regard. And so portrait paintings defined Sargent from the days of his early success.

He began to exhibit his bold and experimental watercolor landscapes after the turn of the century. They “caused a sensation in Britain and great excitement in America,” according to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His watercolors still draw a crowd.

4. He had an illustrious family.

He came from an elite New England family. His ancestor Epes Sargent was one of the largest landowners in Gloucester, Mass., before the American Revolution.

Epes Sargent by John Singleton Copley

His well-known relatives include the “merchant prince” Daniel Sargent, author Lucius Manley Sargent, artist Henry Sargent, horticulturist Henry Winthrop Sargent and Mississippi Territory Governor Winthrop Sargent.

The Gloucester home of another ancestor, essayist and women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, is now a house museum.

5. Was Sargent gay or straight?

No one knows for sure. He had several romances with women, though he never married. And his many sketches of male nudes suggest he was gay. In London, he was friends with his neighbor Oscar Wilde.

But he kept his sexuality to himself. However, one of his clients said that when in Venice, he was only interested in the gondoliers. After he died, one of his former sitters said, “Sargent’s sex life was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”

Gondoliers’ Siesta by John Singer Sargent

Richard Ormond, Sargent scholar and the painter’s great-grandnephew, argued that no one would ever know. “If [Sargent] had sexual relationships they must have been of a brief and transient nature and they have left no trace,” he wrote. “We simply do not know, and decoding messages from his work is no substitute for evidence.”

6. Sargent was Mr. Popularity.

Everybody liked him (except maybe Roger Fry). He was handsome, well mannered, well dressed and good at conversation, music and dancing. People sought him out to paint their portraits partly because sitting for him was so enjoyable.

He would visit the sitter’s home to see where the portrait would hang, and often went through the subject’s closet to pick out the right outfit. The frame he picked out himself. He earned about $5,000 per painting, or about $130,000. He used no assistants. In the 1890s he averaged about 14 portrait commissions a year.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

While painting, he would stand back from the canvas, look at his subject, walk to the canvas, paint a few strokes, and then walk back, talking all the while. He estimated he covered four miles a day while painting portraits.

Sometimes he played the piano for his sitter. Eventually, he got tired of shucking and jiving for his wealthy patrons. “Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working…What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched,” he wrote.

In 1907, he vowed not to do any more portraits. “It is to me positive bliss to think that I shall soon be a free man,” he wrote, describing life after portrait painting. He closed his studio, but he did make a few exceptions for friends like Henry James.

7. Madame X was lazy and unpaintable.

His portrait of Mme. Emilie Gautreau, or Madame X, was the talk of the 1884 Paris Salon and not in a good way. A mob of Parisians flocked to the painting to make fun of it. The New York Times called it “absurd and atrocious.” Mme. Gautreau’s mother begged him to take the painting down, something Sargent couldn’t do. “All Paris mocks my daughter,” she cried.

The ridicule came as a shock. For a decade, nobody had said anything bad about Sargent’s work. But Madame X was different.

Madame X

Sargent, usually so deft with the brush, struggled with Virginie Amelie Gautreau. An American married to a French banker, she had a reputation for taking on lovers. Sargent had a hard time getting her just right, and she didn’t like to sit still for long. In a letter, Sargent complained to a friend about “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau.” When he finished it, he exhibited it only reluctantly at the Salon.

What was so odd, so shocking about a painting of a woman with a heavily powdered face in a low-cut gown? After all, Parisians were used to seeing paintings of nudes.

It was her arrogance, her theatricality, her “come hither” look – something well-bred women did not do. Madame X (for X-rated?) seems about to pop out of her gown into the arms of a man not her husband.

Some people liked it. A French critic, Louis de Fourcaud, called it a masterpiece, as it eventually came to be recognized. Sargent later called it the best thing he’d ever done.

John Singer Sargent in his London studio.

8. His Boston Public Library Murals caused trouble.

He painted many Jewish people, but his mural The Church and the Synagogue got him into trouble with them. In the 1890s, he had a reputation as “the painter of the Jews.” He painted a number of upper-class Jewish subjects, including the family of Asher Wertheimer, the magisterial Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children and Joseph Pulitzer.

Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children

He started working on one of his masterpieces, the Boston Public Library murals, in 1890. He didn’t finish them by the time of his death in 1925. (See them here.) The Church and the Synagogue belong to The Triumph of Religion series on the third floor of the McKim Building in Copley Square. Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a grim, austere hag and Christianity and the church as a lovely young woman.

Dr. Israel Abraham wrote that “no Jewish artist would do the Church the artistic wrong which Sargent has done to the Synagogue.” Sargent was hurt and confused by charges of anti-Semitism. He explained that he drew on medieval iconography for his inspiration.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Emma Goldman Opens An Anarchist Ice Cream Shop in Worcester, Mass.

Emma Goldman could have made a fortune from her ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass.

It was 1892, and she was a Russian Jewish immigrant who’d discovered the anarchist movement. She believed all forms of government are wrong, harmful and unnecessary because they rest on violence.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman wanted to inspire the laboring masses to rise up and throw off the chains of capitalism. Ironically, she was quite good at her own little capitalist venture.

She served ice cream, fried pancakes and made tea for a steady stream of customers. But one day she suddenly stopped because a newspaper headline caught her eye.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kovno in Russia, now the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, on June 27, 1869. She immigrated to the United States in 1885 to escape poverty and anti-Semitism. At first she lived with her older half-sister in Rochester, N.Y. She worked in a factory, married and then divorced.

After three years she moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On her first day in the city, she met Alexander Berkman in a café frequented by radicals. Berkman had fallen under the influence of Johann Most, anarchist speaker and publisher of Die Freiheit newspaper – and grandfather of longtime Celtics radio announcer, Johnny Most.

Berkman took her to hear Most speak that night. At first he revolted her because of his twisted face, the result of a childhood disease. But then he captivated her.

Johann Most

Emma Goldman ended up following Most and falling in love with Berkman. Most encouraged her to speak publicly. The first time she took the speaker’s platform, she wrote, her mind went blank. Then, she wrote,

…something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime…I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman around 1918.

Worcester

By 1891, Most was in prison. Emma Goldman supported herself sewing boys’ jumpers, but she worked 18 hour days. She and her lover’s cousin, Modest Stein, got jobs with a photographer in Springfield, Mass. They did so well they decided to go out on their own. So Goldman and Stein invited Berkman to join them, and they moved to Worcester, fixed up a studio and put out a sign. However, no customers came.

Their landlord advised them to open an ice cream parlor.

They had $50 in savings, and their landlord loaned them $150. The threesome fitted out a derelict shop and served sandwiches and coffee. Soon they paid back their landlord and bought a soda fountain.

Events 500 miles away would soon overtake them.

The site of an ice cream shop run by Emma Goldman.

Homestead

Andrew Carnegie owned the Homestead Steel Works in western Pennsylvania, and put Henry Clay Frick in charge of the company’s operations. The two men wanted to break the union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Frick locked the union workers out of their jobs on June 28, 1892. The Knights of Labor, which represented mechanics and transportation workers, voted to strike in sympathy. So did workers at other plants. They set up pickets to prevent the company from bringing in strikebreakers.

Frick hired 300 armed Pinkerton detectives to get into the plant. A battle broke out in which nine workers – including a young boy – were killed. The conflict didn’t end until 8,000 state militiamen put it down. Seven Pinkertons also died in the violence.

Obsessed

For entire nights, Emma Goldman wrote, the three ice cream entrepreneurs would sit up discussing the Homestead strike.

One afternoon a customer came in for ice cream while Emma was alone in the store. She served him his ice cream while he read the newspaper, and saw the headline about Homestead.

The newspaper reported that Frick evicted the families of strikers from company houses while sheriffs’ deputies carried pregnant women out into the street. Frick told the workers he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands.

State militia heading toward Homestead strikers.

Emma Goldman described what happened next in her autobiography. The customer said, “Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for you?” She told him he could give her the newspaper in exchange for the ice cream and then closed the store.

She ran home, and she, Stein and Berkman decided they had to join the workers. Their landlord told them they were crazy because their ice cream parlor would bring them a fortune. They turned the store over to the landlord and took the morning train to New York.

Assassination Attempt

Ultimately, Frick prevailed over the workers.

“Frick was the symbol of wealth and power, of the injustice and wrong of the capitalistic class, as well as personally responsible for the shedding of the workers’ blood,” Emma Goldman later wrote.

So the anarchists decided to kill Henry Frick. They thought his assassination would inspire the working masses to revolt against the capitalist system.

Berkman went to Pennsylvania and, wearing a black suit and a derby hat, entered Frick’s office. He shot at him twice and missed, but managed to stab him three times. Berkman ended up in prison for 14 years for the attempted assassination.

Artiists conception of the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick.

Aftermath

The working masses did not rise up and revolt as a result of Berkman’s assassination attempt.

When prison authorities released Berkman, Emma Goldman met him with a bouquet of roses. Their affair eventually foundered, but they remained friends.

Emma Goldman went to prison several times over the next few decades for inciting to riot, for conspiring to induce men to resist the draft, for planning President McKinley’s assassination (she didn’t) and for illegally distributing information about birth control. She also founded the journal Mother Earth.

Emma Goldman 1901 mug shot

The United States deported her to Russia in 1919 because of her anarchist beliefs. She witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, but eventually denounced the Communist regime. For the rest of her life she supported anarchist causes in Europe. She defined anarchism as the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, the liberation of the body from the dominion of property and liberation of everybody from the restraints of government.

She died in 1940 in Toronto, Canada.

The ice cream parlor at 86 Winter St. is now a tapas bar next to the highway.

Images: Site of the anarchist ice cream shop, By Victor Grigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67893771. This story was updated in 2023.

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The First Hebrew Thanksgiving in America

Isaac Touro delivered a Hebrew Thanksgiving sermon on Nov. 28, 1765, praising King George III for protecting Newport’s Jews.

Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

His sermon took place before worshippers in the new Touro Synagogue. Since 1658, Newport had been a haven for Jews who escaped the Portuguese and Spanish inquisitions, which wouldn’t end until well into the 19^th century. Rhode Island, after all, had been founded on the principle of religious tolerance.

Touro was only 27, but he had already moved from his native Amsterdam to Jamaica to New York to Newport. He was a hazzan, or minister, perhaps not educated enough to be a rabbi. He taught Hebrew to a Puritan minister in Newport, Ezra Stiles, who became president of Yale College.

Samuel Ward

Like so many transatlantic Jews, Isaac Touro had learned to adapt to different cultures. So when Gov. Samuel Ward declared a day of Thanksgiving for the colony of Rhode Island, Touro decided to combine Jewish tradition with contemporary culture.

His Hebrew sermon made news, as the local newspaper printed it in full and in English.

Hebrew Thanksgiving

Touro’s sermon is one of the first Jewish prayers recorded in America. It’s also the first recorded official act of Jewish affiliation with New England tradition.

Interior of the Touro Synagogue.

Before they built the synagogue in 1763, Newport’s small Jewish population met for worship in private homes. Many of the Jewish community were merchants who prospered in the sea trade. What is now Bellevue Avenue was lined with Jewish shops. By 1758 the population had so grown in size and prominence a permanent house of worship was needed.

The building has a trap door under the bimah, the platform used for Torah readings. It’s a reminder of the need to flee from soldiers during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal.

In his sermon, Touro asked God for peace in the land and a peace among all states and potentates. He asked for God’s compassion and mercy, and to ‘prosper’ ‘our most gracious Sovereign, King George the third, and all the Royal family.’ He also prayed for God to preserve ‘the whole British Empire.’

Touro would later pay a price for his loyalty to the British. Grateful for their protection, he stayed in Newport when the British captured the town in 1776. Three years later he moved with the British to New York, where he had to depend on charity. In 1782 he moved to Kingston, Jamaica and died a year later.

Two of his sons became rich. Judah moved to New Orleans and became a great philanthropist, donating the last $10,000 to build the Bunker Hill Monument. Abraham donated funds to maintain the Touro Synagogue.

With thanks to New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America By Michael Hoberman.

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Leonard Nimoy Gets a Hand Up From JFK and EPP

In 1956, a 24-year-old taxicab driver named Leonard Nimoy got a call to pick up a Mr. Kennedy at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles.

Leonad Nimoy, mid-1960s

It was Sen. John F. Kennedy, who needed a ride to the Beverly Hilton. He was speaking for Adlai Stevenson, then running for president. Kennedy had yet to achieve national prominence but Nimoy, who came from Boston, recognized him. They struck up a conversation. Kennedy asked him what he was doing in Los Angeles. Nimoy explained he wanted to be an actor. Kennedy gave him some advice he never forgot.

There was something else Leonard Nimoy never forgot: The Elizabeth Peabody House. Both Kennedy and the West End settlement house played important roles in Leonard Nimoy’s journey to become the famous fictional character, Mr. Spock.

Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse

Leonard Nimoy was born March 26, 1931 in Boston’s West End. His Jewish parents had immigrated from Iziaslav, Soviet Union, now Ukraine. Max, his father, owned a barbershop in the Mattapan section of Boston. His mother, Dora, was a homemaker. Living in the same apartment were his grandfather and grandmother, who only spoke Yiddish.

He grew up in a crowded tenement in the West End among Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. He and his older brother Melvin spent a lot of time at the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse in the neighborhood.

1911 proposal for the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse

The settlement house, now a community center in Somerville, was named after Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement. She was an educator and the sister-in-law of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. The settlement house once stood on the spot where for years a sign read, ‘If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.’

Elizabeth Peabody

The Elizabeth Peabody House had a mission to help immigrants integrate into America’s democratic society. It offered classes on kitchen sanitation, personal hygiene, language, dental care and how to apply for a job. It had a gym, sports program and a science lab.

Melvin Nimoy hung out in the science lab. He subsequently graduated from MIT and became a chemical engineer.

Leonard preferred the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse, a 375-seat legitimate theater he once described as ‘a gem.’

Leonard Nimoy, Actor

At eight years old he was hanging around the playhouse when someone asked him to sing. He did, and the next thing he knew he had the part of Hansel in a children’s production of Hansel and Gretel.

Leonard Nimoy continued acting in children’s theater until he was 17, when he auditioned for Clifford Odets’ play, Awake and Sing. It was a story about a Jewish Immigrant family very much like his own – three generations living in an apartment. One character was even a barber, like Max Nimoy.

Leonard got the part. It changed his life. He recalled, “That Awake and Sing production was a major, major event for me. It was the first time that I was playing in an adult piece of theater for an adult audience, and I was portraying the juvenile in a family much like my own.

“I related totally to this character… I was playing this kid who was struggling with the same issues I was struggling with: How do you discover who your are? How do you figure out how to get a decent job? How do you find the right girl? And how do you work your way through the dynamics of these family issues and dramas and tensions, which were very much like my own?”

Blessing

He then decided it would be a blessing to work in the theater, and a blessing soon came his way. He received a half-scholarship to the summer theater program at Boston College. The other half of the scholarship came from the director of another settlement house called the West End House.

His parents objected. They wanted him to attend college and pursue a career. Or they wanted him to learn to play the accordion, because he could always make a living that way. His grandfather encouraged him to act. He did.

Richard Rober and Leonard Nimoy in Kid Monk Baroni, 1952

Always Room

Leonard Nimoy got a job selling vacuum cleaners that summer. He then saved enough money to pay for tuition to the Pasadena Playhouse. He took a train west and began studying theater.

His acting career, though, was interrupted by a stint in the Army, marriage and the birth of his first child. He started to drive a taxicab to make ends meet. Which is when he got the advice from Kennedy during their conversation on the way to the Beverly Hilton:

…we chatted a bit about acting and politics. At one point he said, “Your business is the same as mine. There’s a lot of competition.” And we laughed about that, and then he said, “But keep in mind, there’s always room for one more good one.”

“And I took those words very much to heart.”

Leonard Nimoy Day

Nimoy first played Spock in a television pilot for Star Trek in 1964 and then for another 50 years on the big and small screens. He made his final performance as Spock in 2013. He had another career as a film director, performed on stage, recorded record albums, exhibited photographs and wrote two autobiographies.

Nimoy died Feb. 27, 2015.

In 2021, outgoing Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a first-generation American, declared Leonard Nimoy Day on March 26. It would have been his 90th birthday. The purpose, read Walsh’s proclamation, was “to honor the West End native’s contribution to the arts in roles like Mr. Spock on Star Trek, as well as his dedication to the community.”

“Leonard Nimoy brought honor upon his native city with his accomplishments as an actor, writer, producer, director, poet, photographer, and philanthropist,” the proclamation read. “Leonard Nimoy, through his fictional character, Mr. Spock — half human, half Vulcan — gave the immigrant, the refugee, and the oppressed, a hero for ‘the Outsider.’”

With thanks to A Hand To Guide Me by Denzel Washington. This story about Leonard Nimoy was updated in 2022.

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