250
Mooney. The Workman's Circle even opened soup kitchens during large strikes.
There were also socialist organizations in the Jewish community, such as the
Labor Zionist organization the Histadrut, with its distinct local and international
traditions and concerns, but with a membership that overlapped with that of the
Socialist Party. And beyond and below these institutions was the network of
landsmanshftn, or local neighborhood mutual benefit associations, often based on
kinship or ties of regional origin, that functioned as an infrastructure for the
communalist and collectivist values of the Jewish community. But the institutions
that were the central carriers of socialist ideology in the Jewish community were
neither officially socialist, nor entirely Jewish: the trade unions with large Jewish
memberships, particularly the industrial unions/5
Most garment workers in the city were Eastern European Jews, so it is not
accidental that the garment workers unions, including the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, were the
most socialistically-inclined unions in Baltimore. Nor was it accidental that many
of the locals of the garment unions were virtual Jewish community institutions. Of
the garment workers unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) was by
far the largest. It was, in fact, at that time the city's most important industrial union
and among its most militant; the ACWs multitude of locals were headquartered by
its powerful Joint Board, a center of labor radicalism. Many of the locals of the
ACW tended to be dominated by a one or another white ethnic group, and its
Jewish locals, their meetings often conducted in Yiddish, were infused with the
culture of Eastern European Jewish community and with socialistic sentiment.
Of course, socialistic currents ran in other white ethnic proletarian
communities in Baltimore - the Finnish community, for example, or the Italian
community. Also, there were other ethnicities in the more militant industrial
unions. The ACW had a large Italian minority in the union, which was largely
contained in overwhelmingly Italian locals that conducted their meetings in Italian;
|