A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAKUB AND MARYA

I recently assembled 15 photo albums from literally thousands of color prints my husband and I had amassed since the 1980s, as well as a handful of black and white prints left to us by our respective families and dating back to the 1930s.  Among the photos I inherited from my father, was a photo (above) of Cousin Andy Sova, Cousin Irene Sova, my father Steve Kalata, and Cousin Emil Sova taken in Garfield, New Jersey, in 1925.  The photo, like a Proustian madeleine, sent me to a file of raw genealogical research materials on my paternal grandparents my mother had compiled in the early 1990s, before her death in 1995.  I have her files here in Berlin.

In those files I found a few notes, some funeral cards, and several documents about my father and his parents, as well as my own notes from research on my father’s family I’d done in 2016 through ancestry.com.  It was all ultimately pretty sketchy and inconclusive on who, what, where, and when, but there were a few intriguing clues.  I decided to see if I could find out more about these grandparents, using additional search engines like familysearch.org, whose archive is maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and statueofliberty.org, whose archives are maintained by the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.  I also searched U. S. Census reports for 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 (the 1900 Census had no reference to my grandparents and the 1950 Census will not be available until this April).  Armed with this raw data from official sources, I next used Google’s search engine to put some meat on the bones and bring my paternal grandparents to life. 

Their story is both universal and unique.  It’s universal because it’s the “voyage to America, where the streets are paved with gold” immigrant's story.  And it’s unique, not only because it’s a story about my paternal grandparents, but also because of the extraordinary times in which they lived.  My grandparents’ story resonates deeply for me, even though I did not really know them.  It does so because it is a story whose moral seems to be:  The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

My grandparents' story unfolds in the historical context of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in crisis, oppression of ethnic minorities, nationalist movements, hope, risk, World War I, tragedy, the first Communist-led labor strike in the United States, the Great Depression, and endurance.  These are rather arid subjects I might never have investigated, and had I investigated them, they would have meant little to me.  What made these subjects interesting, compelling, and at times even exciting were two things.  First and foremost, the protagonists were my grandparents.  Second, what happened during their arc of history is happening again.  History really does repeat itself.  Context is everything.  Both breathe life into raw data. 

Let me put some names, faces, and places to these ancestors, based on what I have been able to piece together to date.  The faces are easy, the names a little tricky, and the places rather complicated. 

My paternal grandfather was named Jakub M. Kalata.  This is what he looked like at age 35 in his 1929 U.S. passport photo.

Jakub was born in the town of Újbéla, County of Szepes, Kingdom of Hungary, on May 10, 1894, about 43 miles south of Kraków, near the town of Zakopane on this map.

 Újbéla appears at the green dot way over to the top left of this map of Szepes below.

I don’t have a copy of Jakub's birth certificate, but his passport verifies his date of birth.  After the end of the First World War, on June 4, 1920 to be exact, the County of Szepes became located within the borders of the newly created state of Czechoslovakia which was carved out of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the empire’s breakup, Újbéla, Hungary, was then renamed Nová Belá, Czechoslovakia. This situation persisted until the Second World War, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by Nazi Germany and disappeared from the map. At one point during the war, Nová Belá became part of the First Slovak Republic until borders shifted back again after the war to the 1920 line.

Except for this wartime hiccup, Nová Belá, Czechoslovakia, as a place name, endured from 1920 until the “Velvet Divorce” of January 1, 1993, when Czechoslovakia peacefully separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.  However, the small area within Szepes where my grandparents were born did not become part of Slovakia.  Rather, it was incorporated into Poland.  From January 1, 1993, until today then, Nová Belá, Czechoslovakia, is now called Nowa Biała, Poland. 

My paternal grandmother has a similar story.  She was named Marya Blaźośek.  Here she is, probably in her 20s.

Marya was born in the village of Felső-Lapos, County of Szepes, Kingdom of Hungary, in February 1897.  Her village is at the green dot directly below Újbéla on the Szepes map.

I don’t have a copy of her birth certificate, but her death certificate recites the month and year of her birth.  From June 4, 1920 until January 1, 1993, (excepting the World War II period of shifting alliances and uncertainties), her village was located in Vyšné Lapše, Czechoslovakia.  Thereafter, her village was also incorporated into Poland, and it is now called Łapsze Wyżne, Poland. 

These border and place name changes were all rather head-spinning for a novice genealogist like myself.  But once I understood that cartographically speaking, Újbéla, Nová Belá, and Nowa Biała are the same place, and that so are Felső-Lapos, Vyšné Lapše, and Łapsze Wyżne, I was able to find them both on a map.  I cannot tell you how excited I was to figure this out!  I never knew where my paternal grandparents were born and now I do.  My husband and I plan to visit these birthplaces this spring.

Even more exciting was to discover that my grandmother’s village is only about six miles away from my grandfather’s town.  Here’s a Google map showing the proximity.

This is what Nowa Biała looks like today.

And this is what Łapsze Wyżne looks like today.

Both of my grandparents emigrated to the United States in the early 20^th c.  My grandfather came over in 1908 and my grandmother in 1913.  Although each was listed as a Hungarian national on their immigration papers, those papers also list them as ethnically Slovak and notes that their mother tongue was Slovak. 

Here are Jakub’s immigration papers.  He is “Jakub Kalata”at Line 19.

 

Here are Marya’s.  She is “Marya Blazocek”at Line 1.

 

Given how close my grandparents lived to each other, the obvious question was whether they knew each other before they emigrated to the United States.  I don’t know the answer to that question and haven’t found any evidence one way or the other.  My intuition, from the rest of the preliminary genealogical research I’ve done on them, is that they met in the United States, which brings me to their emigration.

Jakub left Hungary in 1908 at age 14. I know from his immigration papers that his calling or occupation was “farm laborer” and that he paid his own ship’s passage.  He arrived with $29, equivalent to $878.33 today.  Marya left when she was 16.  Her immigration papers list her calling or occupation as “maid serv” and state that she paid her own ship’s passage, too.  She arrived with $52, equivalent to $1,464.41 today.  (Jakub married up!)

Those seem to be considerable sums for a farm laborer and maid to have saved from their wages, which suggests that their families staked them to a new life in America and encouraged them to leave.   

What would make their families do that, and why would Jakub and Marya agree?  I don’t know for sure, but I can make an obvious guess:  opportunity.  Their immigration papers record that each already had at least one family contact in America, and the 1920 U.S. Census reports that Jakub and Marya were then working at a woolens mill in New Jersey.  Child labor laws at that time allowed children as young as 14 to work in textile factories, and the industry was booming.  But I'm getting ahead of their story.  First, I wanted to know what they left behind.

They left a beautiful pastoral landscape nestled between the Tatra and Carpathian Mountains.  Here are the Nowa Biała environs.

And here are the Łapsze Wyżne environs.

The peaceful beauty of the landscape, however, was not reflected in the late 19th c. Szepes societal milieu.  This is what my preliminary research revealed about the times and circumstances that preceded their emigration.  The situation for a Slovak living in Hungary at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th c. who was not a part of the nobility was one of ethnic oppression and linguistic suppression, coupled with a denial of the right to participate in civic society and a lack of economic opportunity. 

As noted, my grandparents’ nationality was Hungarian, but their ethnicity was Slovak. Their country of origin has a fraught and complicated history, which I am only beginning to explore.  That history is echoed by strife in the world today, including the stark partisan divisions within the United States, the current territorial conflict between the Ukraine and Russia, and the ethnic suppression by China of its Uyghur population. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

But as Jakub’s and Marya’s is a Hungarian origin story, I began researching the history of the late Habsburg Empire.  What follows is a brief synopsis of pre-World War I Hungarian history (emphasis added in bold):

 Hungary 1867-1914

After having been defeated in war by France and the House of Savoy-Piemonte in 1859 and later by Prussia in 1866, the Austrian administration realized that, in order for the empire to survive, an understanding had to be reached with the Hungarians.  The result was the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867, which established the Doppelmonarchie (dual monarchy) of Austria and Hungary….From then on, the Habsburg Empire was referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

Part of the reason for the split of the Habsburg Empire was the perceived need to contain an ethnic fever that had been boiling over within the non-Magyar population in Hungary since the beginning of the second half of the 19^th c.  The strategy of containment was called Magyarization.  From Hungarian history:

In Hungary, fervent nationalists got in power, pushing for an active policy of Magyarization in an attempt to coerce the ethnic minorities into assimilation.  This policy was resented by the minority Croats, Serbs, Slovaks and Vlachs (Rumanians) who over time came to regard Hungarians and Germans as oppressors….

The policy of forced assimilation was designed shortly after the empire was divided in 1867.  Its goal was to make all of the peoples within the Kingdom of Hungary Hungarian in language and culture and thereby stabilize the new Hungarian state.  Magyarization started off soft, as described in Wiki on Magyarization:

 [T]he 1868 Nationality Act, that declared "all citizens of Hungary form, politically, one nation, the indivisible unitary Hungarian nation…, of which every citizen of the country, whatever his personal nationality, is a member equal in rights." The Education Act, passed the same year, shared this view as the Magyars simply being primus inter pares ("first among equals"). At this time ethnic minorities de jure had a great deal of cultural and linguistic autonomy, including in education, religion, and local government. 

Notwithstanding the appearance of autonomy on paper, there was resistance in Szepes to the forced assimilation and marginalization of its predominantly Slovak population.  Per Wiki Szepes:

The spirit of nationalism, growing in the 19th century, moved also in [Szepes]. In 1868, 21 settlements of Szepes sent their demands, the 'Szepes Petition', to the Diet of the Kingdom of Hungary, requesting special status for Slovaks within the Kingdom.

As the Nationality Act was being discussed, the Slovaks of Szepes did not argue for a separate pan-Slavic state, but rather for status equal to that of the Hungarians.  Their petition failed, but it further spread a spirit of nationalism among Slovaks, as recounted in this article on the 1868 Szepes Petition.

The cultural and linguistic autonomy afforded on paper to ethnic minorities under the 1868 Nationality Act didn’t last for long, at least not officially. What had been a policy of soft Magyarization soon became hard in 1871 with the installation of a new prime minister. Political dissent was no longer tolerated, and education became the tool to stamp out ethnic minority languages.  From Wiki on Magyarization: 

[The new prime minister] became steadily more allied with the Magyar gentry, and the notion of a Hungarian political nation increasingly became one of a Magyar nation. Any political or social movement which challenged the hegemonic position of the Magyar ruling classes was liable to be repressed or charged with 'treason'..., 'libel' or 'incitement of national hatred'. This was to be the fate of various Slovak, South Slav [e.g. Serb], Romanian and Ruthene cultural societies and nationalist parties from 1876 onward.

[T]he majority of students in commune-funded schools who were native speakers of minority languages were instructed exclusively in Hungarian.

Beginning with the 1879 Primary Education Act and the 1883 Secondary Education Act, the Hungarian state made more efforts to reduce the use of non-Magyar languages, in strong violation of the 1868 Nationalities Law….[During this period] in about 61% of these schools the language used was exclusively Magyar, in about 20% it was mixed, and in the remainder some non-Magyar language was used.

The process of Magyarization culminated in 1907 with the lex Apponyi (named after education minister Albert Apponyi) which forced all primary school children to read, write and count in Hungarian for the first four years of their education. From 1909 religion also had to be taught in Hungarian.

Notwithstanding these repressive laws, in terms of linguistic homogenization, Magyarization had only limited success according to Wiki on Magyarization:

The process of Magyarization did not succeed in imposing the Hungarian language as the most used language in all territories in the Kingdom of Hungary. In fact, the profoundly multinational character of historic Transylvania was reflected in the fact that during the fifty years of the dual monarchy, the spread of Hungarian as the second language remained limited. In 1880, 5.7% of the non-Hungarian population, or 109,190 people, claimed to have a knowledge of the Hungarian language; the proportion rose to 11% (183,508) in 1900, and to 15.2% (266,863) in 1910. These figures reveal the reality of a bygone era, one in which millions of people could conduct their lives without speaking the state's official language.

In terms of access to basic government services, however, Magyarization was more successful. To aid in its Magyarization of the population, the Kingdom of Hungary conducted a census in 1869.  Participation in political affairs for those without Hungarian surnames was based on income as reported in the census.  In short, if the census showed that you were poor, you could not vote.  From Wiki on Magyarization (emphasis added in bold):

The policies of Magyarization aimed to have a Hungarian language surname as a requirement for access to basic government services such as local administration, education, and justice.

The census system of the post-1867 Kingdom of Hungary was unfavourable to many of the non-Hungarian nationality, because franchise was based on the income of the person. According to the 1874 election law, which remained unchanged until 1918, only the upper 5.9% to 6.5% of the whole population had voting rights. That effectively excluded almost the whole of the peasantry and the working class from Hungarian political life. The percentage of those on low incomes was higher among other nationalities than among the Magyars, with the exception of Germans and Jews….

Magyarization became real for me when I realized that my great grandparents must have been directly affected by it.  According to her death certificate, Marya's mother was born in 1870.  I don't  know when Jakub's mother was born, but given that Jakub and Marya were three years apart in age, it is reasonable to suppose that she was also born around 1870, or even a little earlier.  If that supposition is correct, then both of my grandparents' parents were subject to Magyarization.  

And of course their children would have suffered through Magyarization too.  They were poor and Slovak, and therefore they would have been excluded de facto from political life by their non-Hungarian surnames and low incomes.  Jakub and Marya would have had no opportunity to change their political and social status in the Kingdom of Hungary unless they renounced their ethnicity.  Ethnic repression and denial of access to civic life might very well have made my great grandparents urge their children to leave.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

But there were other, even more compelling issues as well.  Wiki Szepes notes that the economy of Szepes was principally based on agriculture.  If you were a Slovak boy from Szepes in the early 20^th c., unless your family owned land, your economic destiny might have been to work as a peasant farm laborer, as Jakub did.  And if you were a girl from a non-landowner family, your opportunities might have been limited to working as a maid servant, as Marya did.  Either way, if you came from a non-noble Slovak family in Szepes, you were poor and had little or no opportunity to change your economic status. Again, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

I imagine this was the primary reason Jakub and Marya's families decided to send their children to America.  It may have also made Jakub and Marya eager to emigrate.  And they were not alone.

The early 1900s saw mass emigration from Hungary, mostly to the United States.  From Wiki on Magyarization:

Hungarians, the largest ethnic group in the Kingdom representing 45.5% of the population in 1900, accounted for only 26.2% of the emigrants, while non-Hungarians (54.5%) accounted for 72% from 1901 to 1913. The areas with the highest emigration were the northern mostly Slovak inhabited counties of Sáros, Szepes, Zemlén, and from Ung county where a substantial Rusyn population lived….

The Kingdom's administration welcomed the development as yet another instrument of increasing the ratio of ethnic Hungarians at home. 

The Hungarian government’s determination to homogenize its state even went so far as to help non-Hungarians leave. Per Wiki on Magyarization:  

The Hungarian government made a contract with the English-owned Cunard Steamship Company for a direct passenger line from Rijeka to New York.

(As an interesting aside, one of those Cunard ships was the Carpathia, which raced to save passengers from the sinking Titanic in 1912.)

My grandparents, however, did not leave Hungary on a Cunard vessel from Rijeka.  Jakub left for America on a Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, sailing from Bremen, Germany, to New York.  Here is an image of the ship:

I think he must have gone to Bremen by rail, because the railway came to Szepes in 1871 (Wiki Szepes).  Here is an image of a Szepes railway station circa 1900.

Jakub might have traveled overland from Újbéla north to Kraków and then west to Berlin and on to Bremen.  Or he might have traveled from Újbéla to what is now Prague and then on to Munich and ultimately Bremen.  No doubt there were various rail routes he could have taken.  At any rate, on December 15, 1908, Jakub boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse at Bremen.  He arrived in New York on December 23, 1908, where he was processed at Ellis Island.

According to the passenger list (above), Jakub’s final destination was Passaic, New Jersey, where he was to join his brother, John Kolnaszej, who lived at 142 Highland Avenue, Passaic, New Jersey.  His closest relative in Hungary was listed as his mother, Anna Kalyata (possibly an error or a Magyarized spelling?).  This brother John Kolnaszej was a surprise for me.  It means Jakub and this brother had different fathers and that his mother had remarried. John Kolnaszej would have been older, because my grandfather had another brother, also named John, who was about four years younger.  I know this from the 1930 U.S. Census.  Unfortunately, I have not found any information on either Anna Kalyata or John Kolnaszej and they are for now ghost presences. 

My grandmother also left for America on a Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship, the George Washington, sailing from Bremen to New York.  Here is an image of the ship.

Marya also likely traveled overland by rail from Felső-Lapos to Bremen, where she set sail on November 15, 1913.  She arrived on November 24, 1913, and was also processed at Ellis Island. 

(A note on spelling here is in order.  Marya’s surname is spelled differently on every document about her I have.  She is Blazocek on the passenger list (above), Blasochak on my father’s birth certificate, the daughter of Martin Blasascik on her death certificate, and her mother Anna’s married surname is spelled Blazosek on Anna’s death certificate but Blaźośek on her funeral card.  I don’t know if these anomalies are the result of mistakes, Magyarization, border changes, linguistic differences, typewriters without foreign language keys, or phonetic spellings, but they certainly complicated my genealogical research.)

According to the passenger list, Marya‘s final destination was listed Clifton, New Jersey, where she was to join her (cousin?—illegible) Andro Sowa, who lived at 20 Holden Avenue.  Her closest relative in Hungary was listed as her aunt, Anna Fonacek (sp.?), which implies that Marya's mother Anna was not then living in Felső-Lapos.  Had she perhaps already emigrated?  Unfortunately, I have not found any immigration information on either Andro or Marya's mother, but I did hear my father mention the family name Sowa (he pronounced it as “Sova”), and I have that 1925 photo of the Sovas and my father (above) that started all of this.  And Marya's mother does turn up later in the story.

Wiki on Magyarization notes that the reasons for emigration from Hungary to America were mostly economic.  If Jakub and Marya left because they were poor and likely to remain so, what were their economic opportunities in their adoptive country?  What did my grandparents do when they got to America, in 1908 and 1913, respectively?  

According to the 1920 Census (below), they were working in a woolens mill where Jakub was a wool sorter and Mary was a weaver.  I imagine they found work in the mill some years earlier, shortly after their arrival.  Maybe Jakub's older brother John or Marya's cousin Andro, who were already in the Clifton-Passaic area, had found work at a woolens mill.  Perhaps they wrote letters home to the Kalatas and the Blaźośeks, encouraging them to send Jakub and Marya to America because mill work was available there and paid more than a Hungarian peasant farm laborer or maid servant could hope to earn.  Perhaps knowing that a job awaited them was the main driver of my grandparents' emigration.  

But what was it like to work in an American textile mill in 1908 or 1913?  It would have been perfectly legal and perfectly dreadful for 14-year-old Jakub and 16-year-old Marya, as the photos of child textile workers below illustrate.

 

Per Wiki Child Labor Laws:

As the United States industrialized, factory owners hired young workers for a variety of tasks. Especially in textile mills, children were often hired together with their parents and could be hired for only $2 a week. Children had a special disposition to working in factories …as their small statures were useful to fixing machinery….

If Jakub and Marya left the rolling farmland of Szepes and its Tatra and Carpathian Mountains to find the streets of America paved with gold, they must have been sorely disappointed--literally.  What they found instead were bleak factory buildings and backbreaking, dangerous mill work for subsistence wages.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

My guess is they worked at the same mill and that’s where they met before they married, but this is just a guess.  Because Jakub’s initial destination was Passaic and Marya’s was Clifton, I think the woolens mill was most likely located in the Passaic County area.  There were a number of these mills. The biggest and most important was Botany Worsted in Passaic, but they might have worked at Forstmann and Huffman Mills in Clifton, Garfield Worsted (a Botany affiliate) in Garfield, Gera Mill in Passaic, New Jersey Spinning Company, or Passaic Worsted Spinning Mill.  

 Here is a more recent photo of the Botany Worsted Mill complex.

Regardless of which woolens mill was their employer, the working conditions in textile mills at that time were Dickensian.  From Wiki Woolens (emphasis added in bold):

From the end of the 19th century, Passaic, New Jersey, located just south of the city of Paterson, was the heart of an industrial district which included the towns of Lodi, Wallington, Garfield, and the city of Clifton. While cotton and woolen mills had been constructed in the area as early as the 1860s, it was not until 1889, when Congress increased the rate of tariffs on imported worsted wool that the textile industry expanded in any meaningful way.

In the middle part of the 1920s, there were over 16,000 workers employed in the wool and silk mills located in and around Passaic, New Jersey. The largest of the mills in the area, the German-owned Botany Worsted Mill, employed 6,400 workers, with three other giant mills employing thousands more. The workers at these facilities were predominantly foreign-born, including among them representatives of 39 nationalities, with immigrants from Poland, Italy, Russia, Hungary in particular evidence. Fully [half] the workforce was female.

Wages of these workers were miserable. A 1926 survey indicated that male workers in the Passaic textile mills averaged wages of from $1,000 to $1,200 per year, while female workers typically earned from $800 to $1,000 per annum. Female workers worked 10 hours a day to earn this sum, with the pace of work rapid and the use of the piecework system prevalent. With an income of approximately $1,400 estimated to be necessary to maintain a basic "American standard of living," many New Jersey factory workers found themselves on the brink of financial disaster.

This was not just a question of creature comforts for many Passaic textile workers, but a matter of life and death. The 1925 report of the New Jersey Department of Health showed a death rate for infants under 1 year of age that was 43% higher than for the rest of the state, 52% higher for children aged 1–5 and 5–9. Sanitary conditions were poor and an exhaustingly long work week in poorly ventilated facilities resulted in a higher than average rate of tuberculosis  as well as other diseases.

Here is an image of inside of the Forstmann and Huffman Mill in Passaic from 1959.

Sometime after they each found work and each other, they married. The 1920 U. S. Census (below) shows that Jacob (anglicized from Jakub) and Mary (anglicized from Marya) Kalata lived together at 163 Lake Avenue, Clifton, New Jersey when that data was reported on January 8, 1920.

I believe my grandparents were married at SS Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church in Clifton, New Jersey, sometime between 1918 and 1919.  I extrapolated their marriage year from Jakub's age of first marriage, 24, as reported on the 1930 U.S. Census. I believe the marriage ceremony would have taken place at SS Cyril & Methodius, because my grandfather’s obituary says he was a member of that congregation. 

Here is Jakub and Marya's marriage photo; unfortunately, there is no date and there are no identifications on the reverse side.

My father, Stephen Francis Kalata, was born on December 15, 1920.  His birth certificate (below) was completed by a midwife and is riddled with errors, as he wrote on a Post-it note attached to a photocopy of the certificate he used to get his first passport in 2004, when he visited us in Italy.  His birth certificate (politically) incorrectly states that his parents were born in Austria, and it (chronologically) incorrectly states that he was born on December 18th.  Even in December 1920, their birthplace would have been located in Czechoslovakia, not Austria.  And that birth date is impossible, because my father's birth certificate was signed on December 17th.  If nothing else, this genealogical research has led me to question the accuracy of official records.

After my father was born, conditions at the Passaic County woolens mills deteriorated and took a dramatic turn for the worse.  According to Wiki Woolens , in September 1925, Botany Worsted, citing competitive pressure from New England woolens mills, cut its workers’ hours to reduce costs.  Shortly thereafter, it also cut their pay by 10% and their overtime by 25%.  Botany’s cuts were soon matched by all the other mills in the Passaic area, except one.  

During this time of financial stress, my grandmother’s health was also rapidly deteriorating.  My father remembered very little about his mother, except that she was mostly confined to bed in a darkened room that smelled of medicines.  He may not have known it then, but she was dying from tuberculosis.  According to her death certificate, she had been suffering from the disease for at least six months.  Based on what I’ve read in Wiki Woolens and several other sources, she most likely contracted tuberculosis at the mill.  She died on December 30, 1925, two weeks after my father’s fifth birthday.

This image is not of my grandmother, but it evokes the situation my father remembered.

With her death, my grandfather was left a widower, and Anna Blaźośek, Mary’s mother, came to live with Jacob and my father until Jacob remarried in 1929.

Tragedy at home was worsened by unrest at the mill.  The September 1925 hours, wages, and overtime cuts produced a sharp labor backlash, and on January 25, 1926, less than a month after my grandmother died, the workers at Botany decided to strike.  

These textile workers were not yet unionized and had no unemployment insurance or other social safety nets to help them survive a strike that went on for 14 months without pay.  They relied on local bakers, social welfare organizations, and church groups to help them survive the walkout.  Some workers' children were sent away to summer camps to ease the burden on their families.

A paper jointly authored at VCU, drawing on the work of a number of scholars, provides a vivid description of the strike.   Don't miss the link to the Prologue to the silent film about the strike embedded in the text.

The 1926 Passaic Textile Strike began on January 25th, 1926 and lasted through March 1st, 1927. The work stoppage involved more than 15,000 wool and silk workers in and around Passaic, New Jersey who mobilized in response to a 10 per cent cut in their already meager wages. The Passaic Textile Strike is notable for the use of force against the demonstrators, the debates over free speech, the role of intellectuals and intellectualism, and for being the Communist Party’s first attempt to organize a large-scale demonstration encompassing the region’s textile industry.

Before the Passaic Textile Strike, the United Textile Workers (UTW), an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), attempted to organize the textile workers; however, like in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, the mill managers purposely hired immigrants from many different countries to prevent the workers from easily communicating and organizing. Thus, Albert Weisbord, an active member of the International Workers of the World (IWW) and communist and socialist parties, left New England for Passaic to organize the textile workers. He created and led the United Front Committee (UFC), a communist-affiliated subgroup of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). Within two months of his arrival, Weisbord and the UFC enrolled approximately 1,000 workers to unionize the region’s textile workers.

When UFC members asked only for an abolition of the wage cut, overtime wages, and nondiscrimination of union members, …the manager of the Botany Worsted Mills… fired all 45 UFC members on the spot. Within an hour, 4,000 Botany Mills workers had formed a picket line. By the end of the week, workers from Gera Mill, the Passaic Worsted Spinning Mill, and the Garfield Worsted Mill had joined the strike, totaling approximately 8,000 strikers.

On February 9, 1926, striking textile workers, their families, and their supporters attempted to cross the bridge from Passaic into Clifton, NJ to shut down the Clifton Forstmann & Huffman Mill. Police brutally attacked the picketers and forced them to turn around; however, the following day, the strikers rallied further support and were able to break through the police lines. Two months into the strike, 15,000 strikers had been assembled. These individuals walked daily in picket lines at their targeted mills, and a striker’s committee, comprised of workers from each mill, met each morning at 9:00. Strikers garnered financial support from across the nation by creating and distributing a seven-reel silent film about their efforts, called The Passaic Textile Strike.

The Passaic City Council attempted to outlaw picketing and public meetings by introducing a Riot Act on February 25th, 1926. Regardless, on March 1, 2,000 strikers gathered in Passaic. The following day, the police attacked the assembled group with clubs, tear gas, and high pressure cold water from the fire department. This continued into the following day. By March 3, picketers, their families, and the media came prepared with steel helmets, and the police continued their attacks and arrests. On April 10, 5,000 child workers and school children marched in support of the strike. They, too, were attacked by the police.

By the end of April, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had intervened, objecting to the enforcement of the Riot Act and martial law. Despite this, on July 26, Passaic police chief, Richard Zober, ordered the police to attack the strikers with clubs once again. As a result, the Associated Societies and Churches of Passaic, comprised of Russian, Polish, Slovakian, and Hungarian immigrants, gathered to mediate a settlement between mill management and mill workers, and they ultimately sided with the strikers, calling the companies “Kaiser-like.”

On November 12, 1926, the Passaic Worsted Company signed an agreement to the following terms: “(1) recognition of the union; (2) the right of the workers to bargain collectively; (3) no discrimination in rehiring; (4) arbitration for further disputes, and (5) no outside help to be engaged until all the strikers were reemployed.” Six hundred workers at the Worsted Mill met, voted, and accepted the terms. The Botany Mills, Garfield Worsted Mill, and the Dundee Textile Company followed suit. Other mills refused to sign contracts with their workers, only offering to “endeavor to reemploy as many of our former workers as we possibly can, without demonstration. By March 1st, all of the workers had voted to end their strike.

After the strike, the mill companies broke their agreements with their workers, firing them only to rehire them at lower wages.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

According to Wiki Woolens, a majority of the strikers were foreign-born, with the biggest percentage being Poles, followed by Italians and Hungarians.  I don’t know whether my grandfather joined the picket lines, participated on the mediation committee, or whether he was fired and then rehired along with other textile workers.  But I do know from the 1930 U.S. Census (below), that he was still employed as a “laborer” in a woolens mill in 1930.  He had remarried a woman named Irene Frankovic, become an American citizen in 1929, and was living in a rental apartment at 69 Van Riper Avenue, Clifton, with his wife, my father, and his brother John, who was also a laborer in a woolens mill.  

By 1940 though, according to the 1940 U.S. Census (below), Jacob had bought his own home at 45 E. 9^th Street, Clifton, and was living there with Irene, my father, and Jacob’s two children with Irene—Rita and Edward.  Jacob had by then left the mill, bought a milk truck, and owned his own milk delivery business.  I think he must have started that business in the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression.  My father was 19 at the time of the Census and was working in a sun glass factory, polishing frames.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

My father joined the Navy in 1943 and married my mother in 1947.  Their engagement photo is below.  I was born that same year.

My parents and I didn’t see Jacob and Irene very much.  My father said Irene never took to him, which created a rift between him and his father.  Visits between our families were therefore understandably uncomfortable, seldom, and short.  My grandfather died of a ruptured gastric ulcer and necrosis of the stomach on July 17, 1959, only two years into retirement.  My father went to his funeral. My mother and I did not.  I didn't understand at the time why we didn't go; now I find it very, very sad.

What do I remember of my grandfather?   I never saw him smile.  I never heard him laugh.  He was a stern, humorless, wiry man with big, bony, capable hands who spoke very little.  I think I now understand why he was so joyless.  He took a great risk as a young boy.  He left everything he knew for the unknown in the hope that life would be better in America.  He married for love and he lost her.  He had a mind-numbing, backbreaking factory job that killed his wife and left him to care for the 5-year-old in that photo, in the middle of a 14-month-long, violent labor strike.  

He eventually managed to save enough money to buy a house and start his own business, and how he did that is something I'd really like to know.  Yet, he found himself struggling to deliver milk in the middle of the Great Depression, at a time when farmers were dumping milk to maintain prices.  His business was so precarious that, although my father was an excellent, enthusiastic student active in the high school drama club, Jacob made his son give up his education after his sophomore year to help him deliver milk.  My father never graduated.  The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

Jacob was a stiff-upper-lip kind of man, from strong peasant stock, accustomed to hardship, who suffered from ulcers but ignored his own physical pain ultimately at the expense of his life.  Here is a photo of Jacob in his backyard at 45 E. 9^th Street, Clifton, with his son Edward's dog, Tinker.

He was Jakub, Jacob, and Pop.  He was my paternal grandfather.  I'm glad to finally know him, even if it's only through some faded memories, photographs, official documents, and online research.  I would have loved to hear the Brief History of Jakub and Marya in his own words, while sitting on his knee.  I would have asked him how he saw his life.  Did he think that the more his life changed, the more it remained the same?  Or did he see things differently?  But that's something I can never ask and will never know.

Keep it real!

Marilyn