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NY Times, March 5, 2020
The Unlikely Life of a Socialist Activist Resonates a Century Later
By Jennifer Szalai
Rebel Cinderella
From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes
By Adam Hochschild
Illustrated. 303 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.
She was an impoverished Jewish immigrant from Russia who had started
working in a cigar factory at the age of 11; he was the scion of an
old-money Episcopalian family who enjoyed a mansion on Madison Avenue
and a weekend house with a bowling alley.
When Rose Pastor married James Graham Phelps Stokes on the shores of
Connecticut in 1905, the couple insisted on omitting the word “obey”
from the ceremony. They became active members in the Socialist Party,
lending their support to a labor movement under siege during a time of
widening inequality.
Rose’s socialist commitments were seamlessly aligned with her life
experience; Graham’s were more surprising, but he took to them with the
ardor of a convert. Writing to his “darling Mother,” who like many women
of her station put a lot of stock in her own charitable deeds, he asked
whether she “recognized the injustice of the system which provides you
with your great income at the expense of others; and whether you
recognized the relation between this system and the terribly widespread
suffering which you endeavor so earnestly to relieve.”
In “Rebel Cinderella,” Adam Hochschild writes movingly about an unlikely
pair who also served as a potent symbol. The public was so fascinated by
the couple that some Americans kept scrapbooks documenting Rose’s
fairy-tale ascent. For several years, she was mentioned in the press
more than any other American woman. Hochschild notes that as the Gilded
Age yielded to the Progressive Era, Rose and Graham seemed like the
ideal embodiment of socialist ambitions: “What could better symbolize
the hope of human brotherhood than such a marriage of rich and poor,
native-born and immigrant, Gentile and Jew?”
Hochschild is a superb writer who makes light work of heavy subjects,
having published books about the conflagration of World War I and the
brutal colonialism of Belgium’s King Leopold II. In “Rebel Cinderella,”
he brings his roving curiosity to bear on a figure whose public life
coincided with the roiling decades of the early 20th century, with its
grotesque economic disparity, vicious anti-Semitism, seething white
nationalism and swelling anti-immigrant fervor. The time of upheaval
that he writes about bears an unnerving resemblance to our own.
The name Rose Pastor Stokes may no longer be familiar, but Hochschild
found plenty of newspaper clippings in his research, along with
thousands of letters, unpublished memoirs, Rose’s diary and even reports
detailing the surveillance of her by the predecessor of the F.B.I.
Unearthing some mournful poetry Rose wrote about her time in the cigar
factory, Hochschild corroborates her grim portrait with notes made by a
factory inspector. Where information is scant or nonexistent, he deploys
elegant workarounds that evoke a vivid sense of time and place. About
Graham’s bachelor years before meeting Rose, he writes: “For unmarried
men of his class and time, any sexual experience was likely to be
furtive and paid for.”
When Rose met Graham she was working as a reporter for The Jewish Daily
News (a job she was offered after writing an occasional column about
factory life), living on the Lower East Side as the sole breadwinner in
a household that included four of her younger siblings and their mother.
Graham had a medical degree and was living in settlement housing, where
the wealthy lived alongside the poor, which appealed to his sense of
noblesse oblige. He was charmed by her, recounting in a letter how much
he enjoyed her 25th birthday, when she invited him to her humble
apartment and offered him a glass of milk, bread and butter, an egg and
a banana. She was charmed by him, too, recalling years later that he had
reminded her of “the young Abe Lincoln.”
They embarked on a partnership that was remarkable — at least at first.
His ample funds afforded a material security that allowed them to devote
all of their time to the socialist cause. Rose proved to be a
charismatic orator, holding forth with the exuberance and volume that
were essential before the advent of loudspeakers and mics. She would
eventually take to writing plays, believing they were a tool for
justice, and she had an instinct for theatrical gestures. During a
restaurant workers’ strike, she suggested putting salt in the sugar
bowls and replacing the drinking water with vinegar.
As Rose was flourishing, though, Graham seemed to languish, and a little
more than halfway through “Rebel Cinderella,” Hochschild foreshadows a
dark turn. Graham had started a book on the Founding Fathers but never
finished it, and ran for elected office several times without success.
He was never as popular a speaker as his wife, and would get petulant
when she had been away for what he felt was too long. But he could be
petulant when Rose was at home, too, accusing her of “loafing” when she
was convalescing from bronchitis. “The terrible loneliness of one’s soul
in such moments!” she confided in her diary.
World War I was the external shock that did in their marriage, as Graham
began supporting American involvement in the war and even sent letters
to the State Department to name former comrades he suspected of being
German agents. Rose initially sided with Graham, but she soon recoiled.
She felt like she was betraying her own class and ideals, and was
particularly disturbed by an invitation to visit the White House, or
“the seat of Capitalist power,” as she put it. “What is wrong with me
that I elicit such an invitation?”
Hochschild suggests that Rose’s story should speak to us because in our
new Gilded Age, “the appeal of making that magical leap from poverty to
great affluence is once again resurgent.” But the parallels, as he
acknowledges, aren’t exact. The Cinderella scenario seems hopelessly
retrograde — not to mention that a social safety net, however fraying,
exists largely because of efforts by agitators like Rose. Hochschild’s
book shows us what a radical movement looked like from the inside, with
all of its high-flown idealism and personal intrigues. Whatever
protections we take for granted once seemed unfathomable before they
became real.
Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.
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