Busy days began for Isadore Braun. Pickets were arrested on all sides. At first he seemed to get the better of the legal battle in the dingy Essex Market Courthouse. He had the law on his side, and a forceful way of expressing it. The early batches of pickets were discharged with a warning. But in a few days the police got the hang of the kind of testimony which was expected of them. The court began to impose fines, which of course meant imprisonment, as the girls had no money.
It is an educational maxim of Froebel that we learn by doing. Like most concise sayings, it is not entirely true. Yetta, for instance, had been making vests for four years, but she learned more about vest-making in the first four weeks of the strike than she had in her years of labor.
She began to realize that her "trade" was more than a routine of flying fingers. Braun at one of the meetings had traced out the complicated process of industry. Outside of her shop there had been men who were "cutters," men who prepared the pieces of cloth on which she worked. Back of them were the people who wove the cloth and spun the yarn, and further back still were the shepherds who grew the sheep and clipped the wool. And when the vests had left her shop, they had gone to "finishers." From them to dealers who were buying coats and trousers of the same cloth, and at last the complete suits were sold to wearers by the retailer. And all these thousands of people, who were her co-workers, had to eat. Some one had to bake their bread. The bakers were really part of the vest trade. And so were the cobblers who made shoes for the workers, and the coal miners who tore fuel for them from the bowels of the earth, and the steel workers who made their machines and their needles. It was hard to think of any worker who did not in some way contribute to the making of vests.
Braun had said that all the people of the process were equally exploited by the same unjust system. They were all "wage-slaves." And in her daily intercourse with the strikers, sometimes on picket duty, sometimes at meetings, sometimes at headquarters attending to the clerical work of distributing "benefits," she came to realize as she never could have done from her own experience alone, what "wage-slavery" means. The tragedy of Mrs. Cohen's life was being repeated on every side.
She had never made the acquaintance of hunger—the great Slave Driver—before. And even now, she only saw it. She at least got a good breakfast at Mabel's flat. And sometimes she got a lunch or supper. Mabel, in her immense preoccupation with the details of the strike, did not realize how often Yetta went through the day on the one meal. But the flat was twenty minutes' walk from the strike headquarters. Yetta had no money for car fare and could rarely spend the time to walk there for lunch or dinner. When there were meetings in the evening and she walked home with Mabel and Longman, they generally had a cold supper. But she was of course earning no wages and had taken nothing from the Goldstein flat which she could pawn. The need of the other strikers was so much more appalling than her own that she could not find heart to ask for "strike benefits."
Mabel, having at once realized Yetta's remarkable power of appeal, was carefully engineering the limelight. With disconcerting frequency Yetta found herself in its glare. The half-dozen newspaper men who had tried to get a story out of this sweat-shop revolt had been steered up to Yetta. And they had all sent around their staff photographers to get her picture. The papers with a large circulation among the working classes had made her face familiar to millions. One of them had the enterprise to get a snapshot of her, arguing with a scab, before the Sure-fit Vest Company. Even the man who signed himself "The Amused Onlooker" in the Evening Standard, wrote a psychological sketch of this East Side firebrand. His tone was railing as usual, but he tried to be complimentary towards the close by comparing her to Jeanne D'Arc.
Whenever there was a chance, Mabel pushed Yetta on to the platform. The various women of the Advisory Council arranged afternoon teas for her to address. To Yetta such begging speeches were much more unpleasant work than picketing. But it was not hard for her to talk to these small gatherings. She spoke to them very simply. She did not again tell her own story—in the rush of events she had almost forgotten it. Every day brought to her notice new and more bitter tragedies. On the whole the money raised was not much—ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-five dollars. But every cent was needed. Mabel, from much experience of her own in similar circumstances, knew that Yetta was surprisingly successful. But there was hardly ever a woman present at these uptown teas whose cheapest ring was not worth many times the amount collected. Yetta, seeing the jewels and knowing the intense need of her people, counted over the few dollars and thought herself a failure.
But if these excursions into polite society did not bring the monetary returns for which she wished, they at least made Yetta's face, her great sad eyes, and gentle voice, familiar to many women of social prominence—a result which was to bear fruit in the future.
It also cured her of the envy which had cast a shadow of bitterness over her first morning in Mabel's apartment. She came to realize even more clearly the gulf which separated her people from the world of luxury. She no longer wanted to cross the gulf. The strange country into which she got these occasional glimpses seemed a very hard-hearted place. It was always a shock to her to see such laughing, light-hearted indifference. Sometimes she went on a similar errand to the headquarters of other unions. There she found her own people and sure sympathy. She spoke one evening in a barren, ill-lit room, where the "pastry cooks" held their meetings. They were most of them foreigners, French and German, just coming out of a disastrous strike, and were very poor. They had no money in their treasury, but some of them went down in their pockets, and she got a handful of nickels and dimes. It was not as much as she had secured from some "ladies" in the afternoon, but it was more inspiring. She felt very keenly that in some mystic way their gift, which they could so ill afford, would be of greater use to the Cause than the dollars from uptown.
The well-dressed women she met seemed to her of small worth compared to her trade-mates. She was proud of her share in the wonderful heroism of the women who went hungry. The memory of her father was the most brilliant of her mental treasures. If she had been brought up by a more practical man, if her father had taught her to consider elegance, or social success, or wealth, or culture of more virtue than loving kindness—as most of us are taught—her verdict would, of course, have been less severe. But she could not feel that the Golden Rule was taken seriously by the Christian women uptown. She doubted if they loved their neighbors as themselves. Certainly their definition of the word did not reach downtown. The diamonds of their useless ornaments threw a cruel light on the misery of her people.