A key drama at the heart of all our personal origin stories is the saga of how our parents met. I’ve known the basics of this piece of my family history as long as I can remember. My mom and dad met, so the story went, when they were paired as dance partners performing in a pageant at a labor election rally for Franklin D. Roosevelt at Madison Square Garden, something they were both quite proud of. Over the years, thanks to a bit of google sleuthing and conversations with each of my folks, I’ve been able to piece together some details about this event, and about the personal and family dramas that brought my parents together.
The rally took place on October 6, 1940. Dad would have been 19 years old, at the start of his senior year at CCNY (the City College of New York). Mom was 16, a junior at Walton High School in the Bronx, at the time an all-girls school. The pageant in which they danced was inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing”. It was an ensemble performance of song, dance and spoken word, with a cast of over 1,000, presented by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. It was produced by Dad’s uncle, Louis Schaffer, who was cultural director of the ILGWU. The show was incubated at Labor Stage on West 39th Street in Manhattan, a location abutting the city’s Theater and Garment districts. After acquiring the space, formerly the Princess Theater, the union renovated it to serve as home for its cultural performances
In form and content, “I Hear America Singing” embodied the spirit of 1930’s Popular Front culture, grounded in working class realities and embracing an often uneasy and fraught melding of socialist, communist and liberal New Deal sensibilities and politics. Popular Front culture and politics infused the social soil in which both my parents came of age, their backgrounds reflecting some of the tension-producing and unifying strands within the Popular Front universe, at least in its New York City, labor, and Jewish incarnations.
Mom and Dad were both Bronx kids, born and raised in New York City’s northernmost borough. All four of their parents were born between 1893 and 1902 in what is now Ukraine but was then part of the Russian Empire. Dad’s parents both came to the U.S. as children, with their families. They spent their childhoods in Manhattan’s heavily Jewish Lower East Side, moving to the Bronx as newlyweds in 1918. In doing so, they joined a wave of families who were abandoning the crowded tenements of Manhattan and heading northward, drawn to the fresh air and open spaces of the Bronx. At the turn of the 20th century, the Bronx remained, for the most part, an area of farms, meadows and small villages. But as New York’s subway and elevated train lines expanded northward in the early 1900s, providing cheap, convenient travel to and from Manhattan, the Bronx became an increasingly attractive location for young couples like dad’s parents to find a home. By the time my father was born, in 1921, the borough was well on its way to becoming fully urbanized, if less frenzied and densely packed than Manhattan. Dad grew up as an only child in a comfortably middle-class family. His father Martin was a pharmacist.
My mother’s parents, recently married, arrived in New York by boat in 1921, settling initially in the East Bronx, where some of my grandfather’s family had already nested. Mom’s family struggled financially. Her father, Eli Newmark, Pops Eli to us grandkids, worked at a series of factory and other low wage jobs throughout the 1920s and 1930s, He often struggled to find work during the Depression, an especially challenging undertaking because he was periodically blacklisted as a result of his labor organizing activities. In 1930, the Newmark family moved to the Sholem Aleichem Houses, one of several predominantly Jewish cooperative housing projects that took root in the northwest Bronx in the 1920s. Born in 1924, my mom was the middle child of three kids.
Though Dad’s parents were not particularly active politically, the family’s political sensibilities were shaped by his Uncle Louis’s involvement in the Socialist Party, a potent force on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s with widespread support in the Jewish community. Dad did have childhood memories of joining his mother leafleting for one of Norman Thomas’s presidential campaigns. Thomas was the Socialist Party’s candidate in every presidential election from 1928 – 1948. Mom’s parents were fervent communists. Her father had fought with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War that swept all corners of the fallen Russian Empire in the wake of the 1918 Russian Revolution. Her mother Lucy was also an active Bolshevik when the young couple made the difficult decision to leave the fledgling Soviet Union to join Eli’s family in New York.
My father had spent the summer of 1940 working for his Uncle Louis in the ILGWU’s Cultural Department office, mostly answering phones. A gig he clearly landed thanks to family connections. Uncle Louis, by all accounts, was a gruff, domineering, hard-driving character whose work with the ILGWU cultural wing produced some of the hallmark cultural creations of the Popular Front era.
Most famous was “Pins and Needles”, a topical musical review with a cast consisting almost entirely of active garment workers and union members. The show debuted at Labor Stage in 1937 and was so successful that it eventually moved to Broadway, where it became the longest running musical in New York City history until it was surpassed by “Oklahoma” in 1947. “Pins and Needles” embarked on a national tour in 1939, culminating with a performance at the White House where the cast was enthusiastically received by President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who reportedly had already seen the show several times). The ILGWU, Uncle Louis and Labor Stage were basking in the afterglow of “Pins and Needles’” success and popularity as they embarked on rehearsing for their next extravaganza – “I Hear America Singing”.
I once asked Dad about his time working at the ILGWU office. His most vivid memory, aside from meeting my mom, was of the time his mother (Louis’s younger sister, my Grandma Beadie) goaded him into asking her brother Louis for a raise. Somewhat hesitant at first, Dad, always the obedient child, finally worked up the courage to gently ask his uncle for a salary boost. Louis instantly exploded, shouting something like: “You ungrateful little snot. Do you realize how much more money I’m paying you than people with way more experience than you are getting at other offices?” Then, after a momentary hesitation, Louis continued. “Wait a minute. I bet your mother put you up to this.” Which of course she had. My father, cowed by Louis’s outburst, meekly apologized. He never got the raise.
One day that summer of 1940, my mom Della showed up at Labor Stage, hoping to be selected to perform in the upcoming pageant. Neither of Mom’s parents were ILGWU members. But she had heard from a friend that the union was auditioning dancers for the show. Since early childhood, my mother had dreams of becoming a professional dancer. Most days after school, she headed down to Manhattan from the Bronx to take dance lessons. Dance was her passion, her life focus. She naturally jumped at the opportunity to audition at the legendary Labor Stage.
Mom also remembered Louis as a tough, overbearing guy, with, she felt, an eye for the ladies. But she was thrilled when she passed the audition and was accepted to participate in the upcoming pageant. During one of my google searches for “I Hear America Singing”, up popped a photo of a dance line of women, dressed in matching outfits, each wearing high heels and a top hat and kicking her left leg into the air. There, fourth from the left, was a young woman who I was sure was my mother. Mom was in a nursing home in California at the time of my discovery, her mind beclouded by a deepening dementia. But when I showed her the photo on my next West Coast visit, she immediately recognized the scene. “Yeah. That’s me, ‘The Shrimp’”, as she was lovingly labeled by the crew of taller, older women.
One scene in the “I Hear America Singing” pageant called for a group of couples dancing together. Louis had recruited a sizable troupe of women dancers for the pageant, but there were hardly any male dancers. He desperately needed some guys to partner up with the young ladies in the troupe. During a rehearsal at Labor Stage that Dad was present for, Louis asked him if he’d be willing to dance in the pageant. Dancing had not been a major part of Dad’s life until that moment. But he was an athletic young man, a crackerjack tennis player with a lithe, trim figure. Louis felt confident his nephew would do fine as a dancer. “Only if I can dance with her,” Dad replied to his uncle’s request, pointing to my mom. Perhaps Dad had noticed perky little Della before that fateful moment. Perhaps Uncle Louis had been playing a bit of a matchmaker for his nephew. Perhaps Dad’s gesture was totally spontaneous. Whatever the backstory, Al Wasserman and Della Newmark became dance partners – the middle-class college boy from a socialist family and the high school gal from a working-class communist family paired up to perform for the iconic maestro of New Deal liberalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A true Popular Front coming together moment that sowed the seeds for my arrival into the world five years later.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was in the audience that October evening, along with FDR. She provided an eyewitness account of the pageant the following morning in her daily column “My Day”, which ran from 1935 – 1962, the year of her death. At its peak her column was syndicated in 90 newspapers across the U.S. During the 17 years of her life after FDR’s death, Mrs. Roosevelt maintained an influential presence in the U.S. and internationally, perennially recognized as the most admired woman in the world. She served as the first U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission, and was an adored figure for people like my parents who gravitated to the progressive flank of the Democratic Party in the post-war years.
The Roosevelts had driven down (or, more accurately, I assume, were driven down) to the rally at the Garden from their stately home in Hyde Park, NY, some 100 miles north of Manhattan. They returned home after the performance, arriving at 1:30 AM, “tired but with a feeling of inspiration,” as Mrs. Roosevelt reported in her October 7, 1940 My Day column. For her, the highlight of the rally was “a pageant on the nation’s growth based on Walt Whitman’s poetry.” In the column, she shared with readers some reflections about the event.
“With rare foresight this union has put the arts to work. They have recognized the need which human beings have for bread and for dignity in labor, but they have also proved the need for inspiration and idealism. The arts answer this need . . . .
“With labor’s growth, the country has grown, for, after all, labor is the country. It is a curious distinction that we have made for ourselves between capital, as represented by people who handle money, and labor, as represented by people who do the actual work. We are all people and we must work to fulfill our destiny. If only we would all recognize this fact and work together and make money work for all without division and as one great group of working people . . . .”
A curious passage coming from the First Lady of the United States, don’t you think? Mrs. Roosevelt could not have been unaware that her juxtaposition of labor and capital within the work process echoed socialist analyses and critiques of the capitalist system. But contrary to the Marxist hope and expectation that the underlying contradictions within the labor-capital relationship would sow the seeds of revolt among workers against that system, the First Lady yearned for a kumbaya moment when labor and capital, workers and bosses, would overcome their division and join together as “one great group of working people.”
Here, perhaps unconsciously, Mrs. Roosevelt was giving voice to one of the underlying missions of her husband’s New Deal project. By acknowledging the suffering working people had endured during the capitalist system’s meltdown known as the Great Depression, by embracing labor unions, by implementing an ambitious series of government programs and actions to improve workers’ lives and put some restraints on the power of capital, an all-out revolt from below would be avoided, the capitalist system preserved, the rebellious passions of the working class tamped down, and the labor movement wooed to embrace the Democratic Party as its political home. It may be a bit of a stretch, but it has occurred to me that “I Hear America Singing”, the Popular Front pageant and political rally for FDR that brought my parents together, can be seen as a kind of swan song for the radical impulses that had bubbled up among masses of working people over the past turbulent decade. That system-challenging turbulence shaped the atmosphere within which my parents had come of age. But with World War II ravaging Europe and the most desperate impacts of the Depression easing, a shifting of mood was in the air that October evening as my folks danced for the President and began their journey together toward a post-Depression, wartime-framed courtship and early adulthood.