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…וואַרנונג! וואַרנונג! ברידער! קלאק מאכער־אַרבייטער Attention! To All Cloakmakers!

New York: Union Printing[;] “Morgenstern” Printing 67 Ludlow Street, [1890]. Handbill, 8.875” x 5.875”, in Yiddish and English [with] partial leaf, 2.5” x 8”, with contemporary ink inscription: “A relic of the Cloakmakers’ strike New York 1890.” Manuscript calculations in pencil on verso. CONDITION: Very good, document tape repair at verso of 2” horizontal tear at lower left edge.

A rare bilingual Yiddish-English handbill urging solidarity among New York City cloakmakers, published during the first great year of strikes by the recently-founded United Hebrew Trades association.

This handbill, beginning in Yiddish (“Varnung! Varnung! Brider! Klak Makher-Arbeyter…”) with English below, urges cloakmakers to support their fellow laborers on strike against reduced wages from the firm “Schutz Bros & Blatt”: “Don’t ask for work at the above named place, fight together with us: our downfall is your misfortune, our Victory is also yours.”

Schutz Bros. and Blatt (also Blath) was the company of Aaron Henry Schutz, Julius Schutz, and Henry Blath—probably brothers-in-law through Blath’s 1867 marriage to Fanny Schutz. The business formed in 1881 and manufactured ladies’ suits and cloaks, initially operating at 372 Broadway before moving to 354 and, as indicated here, ultimately expanding to 424–426 Broadway. The families were likely of German-Jewish extraction, a higher-class demographic of immigrants whose members often employed—and looked down upon—their eastern European fellows.

The 1890 cloakmakers’ strike was the first great strike of Jewish workmen in New York City, which had become a center of ready-made clothing manufacture, as well as, of course, Jewish immigration from both western and eastern Europe. It began fomenting on May Day, 1890, when 7,000 New York cloakmakers marched in the New York demonstration, and their employers, alarmed, “organized a lock-out…By May 10 the union began to counter with strikes and by May 19 there were 4,000 workers involved, the great majority Jewish but including also Poles, Italians, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Irish and some native Americans” (Schappes).

“Some of the big business press expressed sympathy for these strikers, whose conditions of work were notoriously bad. The cutters too, the aristocracy of the trade, for the first time joined the other crafts in a strike. The American Federation of Labor, the United Hebrew Trades and the New York unions supported the strike…After two months of struggle, the leadership accepted a compromise agreement which failed, among other points, to provide for the dismissal of scabs. It was here that the hungry workers…voted down the agreement. The commercial press promptly turned against the strikers and the police denounced them as socialists and anarchists. But the strikers…held on and won on July 23, 1890,” and were praised by the Workmen’s Advocate as “an example of courage and valor…which many a labor organization of American born workers would do well to follow” (Schappes).

No holdings in OCLC.

A rare Yiddish-English artifact from the early heyday of Jewish labor organizing in New York City.

REFERENCES: Schappes, Morris. “Jewish Workers’ Victory—1890,” Jewish Life, September 1954; Jacobs, Joseph; J. de Haas, Cyrus Alder, Isaac A. Hourwich. “Trade Unionism” at JewishEncylopedia online; Weinstein, Bernard; Maurice Wolfthal, trans. “The Jewish Unions in America,” In Geveb A Journal of Yiddish Studies, June 29, 2017; Marriage certificate of Henry Blath and Fanny Schutz at NYC Historical Vital Records online; “Copartnership Notices,” The New York Times, June 7, 1881, p. 6; “Life in the Metropolis,” New York Herald, July 28, 1883, p. 1.

Item #10428

Price: $1,250.00

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