Stanley Rosebud Rosen, This Tumult that Teaches Us

New Mexico Jewish Link, Fall, 2018

I found Stanley Rosen sitting in the lunch room talking with Reuben Hersh, 90, the famous mathematician. The two of them together, both with slightly unkempt hair, looked like brothers—clutching their walkers, they were rocking uproariously with laughter at some reminiscence of history that they shared.

Stan and I went into the library and his partner Sandra Herzon arrived shortly thereafter with an entire box of books, articles, papers and photographs. A valiant effort on her part—at the Pittsburgh University Library there are 140 linear feet of papers, not including 500 books, and another Stanley R. Rosen labor archive at the University of Illinois, Chicago Special Collections.

Sandy explained to me that, as his memory wanes, Stan urgently wants to convey his concern that labor history and the history of unions is not being taught in schools. But she wasn’t sure how much Stan would remember. He proceeded to talk non-stop for the next two hours.

As we listened in the darkening room to his progressive philosophy and the drama of a labor organizer of the 20th century, every name and date cried out to speak its own story, and it became clear why it is critically important to understand this history now.

First, a short bio: Stanley Rosebud Rosen was born on March 2, 1934, in the Bronx, New York City. His grandfather Reuben was an anarchist. He was raised near New Brunswick, New Jersey with the remnants of the Ferrer Colony, an anarchist community founded by supporters of Francisco Ferrer, a noted European anarchist. His desire to be a social activist shaped his career choices.
Rosen received a BA in history at Rutgers University, took a position within the Rutgers University Labor Education department to train union leaders, and then earned a MA in economics there.  After two years in the US Army he took a position as education director for the Textile Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO in New York and conducted training programs throughout the country. After that, Rosen taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, training labor leaders as a professor of labor and industrial relations. Rosen retired as a full professor in 1995 and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He also created the “Chicago Radical Jewish Elders Video Project,” now housed at the Spertus Institute in Chicago, which, in 100 oral histories, explored the relationships between political and social consciousness.

Link: If you were giving an oral history today, what would you say?
Stanley Rosebud Rosen: “I was always an independent thinker. Even though I grew up in a highly politicized environment, I always had my individual point of view.”  Sandy added that his mother later scratched out the words “Daily Worker” from one copy of a photo of him as a child holding the paper, during a time when they feared a political witch hunt.
Stan continued, “The thing that impressed me about my father was that he was a unionist, he was a member of the labor movement, he ran against Big Bill Hutcheson, the AFL labor leader. Hutcheson was a  conservative AFL leader who was the old-type—not very tolerant of people with different points of view. And since my father identified himself as some point as a Communist, he was kicked out of the Carpenters Union.

“My father wrote “An Appeal” to the executive board of the carpenter’s union. The only thing in his program that had to do with communism, and this was during the 20’s, was to recognize the Soviet Union, but the rest of the program was: To elect business agents, to let the members vote on contracts, to teach them how to be active in a union, things that a good union should do. Under Hutcheson, the building trades unions, they were pretty much: join the union, come to the meeting, and we’re going to run the union (for you). The essential thing that I earned from my father was democratic unionism.

“My grandfather was an anarchist. The anarchists were a different breed of cat. There were communists living in the Stelton community, and there were anarchists who had moved there from the Francisco Ferrar community. The anarchists didn’t like the communists, and the communists didn’t like the anarchists.”

        This was understandably so, since the ideals of anarchism were in polar opposition to the ideology of communism. As I read in one of the books that Sandy had, with great dedication, lugged to the meeting, “Recollections from the Modern School Ferrer Colony,” it explained that the anarchist belief was “in the basic goodness of human beings. Pervasive at the Ferrer Center was the conviction that, if provided the nurturing environment and education, individuals would be free to develop maturity and self-reliance so advanced there would be no need for the restrictions of government.”
Those ideas would plant the seeds for many important societal changes in this country. From those heady discussions,  “. . . Margaret Sanger’s crusade to free women from constant birthing grew, and that drove her forward in her efforts to give women more choice in their family’s size. It was also within these concentric circles of humanitarian and political strivings that the trade union movement gained momentum. And it was also on this scene that increased efforts were mounted to provide children with a more humanitarian kind of schooling,” wrote Victor Sacharoff in the book’s introduction, published by the Friends of the Modern School.

Stan continued, “When I was a kid I was just hanging around with these people. One of these guys, Finkelberg, he would always invite me into his house, because they always wanted to convert the younger generation to their point of view. He’d always give me cookies and hot chocolate, and then he’d try to politicize me.
“I always argued with them. But I learned from these people. They would support civil rights, they would support the good causes. I knew them as as individuals, not as stalwarts of a particular party. They were all progressives.

“There were different kinds of communists. My father was more of a labor type. Some were hard-core, ideologically stricter, people that were attracted to the possibilities of Communism in the Soviet Union.”

Link: It’s so ironic that today Trump is embracing a totalitarian Russia, and totally missing the point (of any progressive thinking). It must be almost like science fiction for you to see today what’s going on.

“I’ve always been in some way or another, anti-capitalistic. In American history—the way the capitalists treated the workers, exploited the workers, child labor, they were very anti-worker and anti-labor. There were different groups, the Workman’s Circle, the Socialist Party. People were progressives, they weren’t necessarily ‘communists.’ They fought for workers’ rights, for free speech, fought against all the events that happened in American labor where workers were persecuted, prosecuted, jailed.

Link: I think it’s really important for people to understand what you have been fighting for.

“If you have a radical sensibility, it brings you in a certain direction. It brings you in the direction of civil rights, in the direction of singers like Paul Robeson. They were giving a message about what the world should be like.

  “I just read a book on capitalism. I could see it accomplished things in American society. But, the fact that you had socialist and communist movements that pressed capitalism, that criticized them, that sang about them, that presented an alternative—it had an important impact on American political values and society, and on the movements that came along later, like the civil rights movement. It was a set of values: That people should be treated well, people shouldn’t be discriminated against, people shouldn’t be jailed for their political views.
“We have a constitution, and an economy, that should not be dominated by conservative self-serving political forces. The alternate points of view varied. All these political factions in American society fought each other over strategy and tactics, but still, they were all on the right side of social issues, working on behalf of a better society and a more just society, that was not discriminatory, a society that gave people rights.

   “I worked for unions all over the country, conservative, radical, women’s groups. And each of those groups had their strengths and their weaknesses.

“In order to be effective as a trade unionist, by modeling a behavior which leaves room for others’ points of view, I got along with everybody. I managed to survive in highly political environments. Learn, internalize the good parts, and at the same time, be effective.

If you’re in a room with someone who’s ranting and raving, it’s very easy to jump out and say, ‘You’re wrong, why you talkin’ that way.’ I always argued with everybody. But I also listened to them and learned from them.

“Two qualities I had that made me effective were a sense of social justice, and a sense of activism—to go to meetings, rallies, read, think about things. And I was able to gain acceptability for some ideas that other people couldn’t.

“We taught good solid trade union practices. Someone would say to me, ‘How can you stand that guy, he’s such a right-winger.’ I established credibility, and they let me teach them how to be good trade unionists. I had access and acceptability. They’d said, ‘you ole Communist.’ It was done half-and-half (joking)—I don’t know what they said behind my back.

Link: Were the textile unions in New York dominated by Jews?

“No, but a lot were. Amalgamated Clothing Workers was led by Sidney Hellman, I would describe him today as a Democratic socialist. The ILGWU, The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was Jewish.

Link: What do you see in your crystal ball, what’s happening in this country?

“I’m depressed reading the paper. All these good ideas, like the New Deal, integrated radical ideals. In American society you can have a fairly tame idea and always, the great insult, “You’re a Communist.” That’s American society, there’s a built-in antagonism to ideals and ideologies in this country, it’s deep.

Link: Where does that come from?

“There is a conservative tradition in American society, some of it’s from religion, some from conservative politics, some of it’s personal conservatism. Our society is very complex, and full of contradictions, and our society is rife with prejudicial thinking.

“The one thing I have to say about the labor movement, it has many pitfalls, but the strongest thing it accomplished, and sometimes it was difficult, it brought together Americans of every stripe under the banner of being a unionist. You could have a Republican being a unionist, a Pole, a Black, a Jewish person who came out of a Jewish background, a Jewish employer who could respect the concept of a union. Some didn’t, but a lot did, as part of the Jewish Talmudic social action tradition.

“That’s the wonder of America, that it puts people in contact with each other in ways they wouldn’t expect to be. It changes the way the way that they deal with the world and that they deal with life, and I don’t think we appreciate that. In America, we have this tumult, this tumult which forces people to relate to each other and learn from each other in big and small ways.”

—-end—-

Published New Mexico Jewish Link, Fall, 2018
Two awards from New Mexico Press Women
2nd Place, Personality Profiles over 500 words
2nd Place, News or Feature Photograph

(some related sources I looked at:

Recollections From The Modern School Ferrer Colony. Victor Sacharoff and Others. Friends of the Modern School.

Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States. Paul C. Mischler. Columbia University Press.

The Haymarket Martyrs Monument

Illinois Labor History Society. IllinoisLaborHistory.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education

Special Collections, Leonard H. Axe Library, “Rosen, Stanley R. Collection of Labor, Labor History, and Labor Education” (2017). Finding Aids. 111.
http://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/fa/111

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hutcheson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson

Progressive Education (wikipedia)