Why my great-grandfather, a strike leader, kept ending up in prison – The Forward

This summer I learned something unexpected about my great-grandfather.

My husband, children and I had driven upstate to visit my grandfather's cousin, Rebecca, in Woodstock, New York. She is a woman in her early 80s and one of the last surviving Kaplan women of her generation.

As soon as we entered her one-story house, she handed me a book, open to a page with a photograph of my great-grandfather. He stands behind bars, wearing a dark vest and tie over a starched white button-down shirt. It was 1920; the prison was Deer Island Prison in Boston Harbor.

As his son (my grandfather) explained to me years ago, my great-grandfather, known as Ime Kaplan because most people couldn't pronounce his first name, Chaim, often ended up in prison. This was not due to criminal activity, but rather because of his passionate political involvement. Although I had heard of him from relatives before, I didn't realize until then how influential he was. The governor of Boston and even the federal government knew about him.

Beginning in about 1910, Ime led strikes for migrant textile workers, demanding an end to “starvation wages” and expressing a collective desire for the families of immigrant workers to receive an education. He was a charismatic social activist who dreamed of creating a better world. As my Uncle Don put it, “I guess you'd call him a revolutionary.”

Unfortunately, my great-grandfather also had to suffer greatly.

I leafed through the book that Rebecca handed me. America's Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare and the Palmer RaidsIn it, the author, historian Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, discusses the American government's campaign to suppress dissent between 1917 and 1920. I soon discovered that Ime's arrests were also mentioned in many newspaper articles at that time.

When I got home, I searched Newspapers.com and was amazed to see his name under his photo on the front page of The Boston Globewith the headline “Strike leader released”.

In fact, the name Ime Kaplan appeared dozens of times in 1919 The Boston Globeand more than once on the front page.

I grew up hearing stories about him from my grandfather Harry. “Honey, there wasn't even a weekend back then,” he once said. The five-day week wasn't introduced for factory workers until 1926, when Henry Ford announced it for his own workers. And the weekend wasn't legally guaranteed for all U.S. workers until 1940.

Ime was born in 1893 in Vasilishki, a shtetl near the city of Minsk., in the Vilnius region of Eastern Europe, to Meyer and Tsipe Kaplan. He was sent to chedera traditional Hebrew school for boys, and was being groomed to become a cantor. Sometime in the early 1900s, Ime's parents and their children fled violent pogroms in Eastern Europe and arrived at Ellis Island.

At the age of 13 or 14, Ime, along with his parents and sisters, became a worker in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. As a Yiddish-speaking teenager, he taught himself English at night school. He met his wife Lizzy in the woolen mills. He must have had natural leadership qualities, because despite his lack of formal education in America, he quickly became secretary of the General Strike Committee in Lawrence. In 1919, a letter he wrote on behalf of striking textile workers to the Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, appeared in The Boston Globe.

Ime published the letter as the voice of the 20,000 “striking textile workers of Lawrence protesting the treatment we have received at the hands of our city’s police department.”

“We have seen the workers of Europe overthrow governments and secure rights and privileges never before achieved,” he wrote. In 1917, after the end of World War I, a wave of workers and soldiers had indeed begun to strike in Italy, Germany and, above all, Russia. Governor Coolidge rejected the strike committee's demands to organize into unions and “march peacefully.” It was not until 1935 that Americans were granted the right to legally organize into unions.

In January 1920, Ime was imprisoned for his leadership in the emerging labor movement. In the Palmer Raids, undercover federal agents arrested more than 6,000 activists in 36 cities who they believed to be “foreign radicals.” He was described as a Russian immigrant, a Jewish agitator, a socialist, and a Marxist. Other Jewish immigrant anarchists targeted in the Palmer Raids included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

The Palmer Raids marked the beginning of the “First Red Scare” – the U.S. government's deep fear of left-wing activists, including those in the labor movement. This red shadow would follow my grandfather's family for another generation, into the McCarthy era.

Ime's activism followed him throughout his life. According to my father, Bob, one of Ime's oldest grandchildren, he was blacklisted “all along the East Coast.” In search of work, Ime and his family moved to Philadelphia. His brother, Rabbi Joseph Eli Kaplan, the spiritual leader of the Atlantic City Community Synagogue, helped him find work as a fruit and vegetable vendor. Years later, Ime's oldest son (my grandfather), Harry, told me about the horse that pulled the cart and how his special job was to wash and brush this large animal, which he loved like his own pet.

Ime settled with his aging parents in a community of Yiddish-speaking socialists in New Haven, Connecticut. He opened a fruit and vegetable store on Legion Avenue. Like the Lower East Side, this small commercial district had everything: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the dry goods store. All of the stores were owned by Jewish and Italian immigrant families.

Every now and then someone would try to rob the store. Even as an elderly store owner in his 60s and 70s, Ime, unarmed, could “take the gun away from the burglar,” Uncle Don said. He usually emerged from the scuffle with a bloody face.

In the worn photographs that my great-aunt Mildred (Ime's youngest and only daughter) first showed me about 12 years ago, he stands next to his store with a grocery apron wrapped neatly around his waist. He is smiling, a kind of closed, downward smile that looks like a frown. I have seen my family members, first-generation immigrants, smile like that many times.

Ime led a life of hardship: he was blacklisted, impoverished and displaced. His wife Lizzie and four children were thrown out on the streets countless times. When he became a grandfather and great-grandfather, his family life offered him some imitate (Joy).

All the while, Lizzie, the “practical one,” was a counterbalance to his unrealistic ideals. She managed the family's meager finances and made sure everyone had something to eat. “She even brought him chicken soup to the Deer Island prison,” said my great-aunt Mildred, Ime's youngest daughter. Ime had principles, but he loved his wife's home cooking.

My great-aunt Mildred described Ime's three sons (her older brothers) as tall, handsome young men “with movie-star qualities.” But when the eldest son, Harry, won a full scholarship to Yale University on the basis of his achievements, Ime did not congratulate him. Did his purely anti-capitalist principles prevent him from praising his own children? And yet Ime lived to see the birth of several great-grandchildren before his untimely death in 1973, the victim of a horrific hit-and-run accident caused by an elderly, visually impaired driver. Lizzy survived.

After reading the 1919 headlines to my seven-year-old son, I said, “Your great-great-grandfather, Chaim Mendel, was famous!” I told him how he was arrested while working to make the world a better place at a time when there were no laws to protect workers. “Oh, so he was like Rosa Parks?” my son asked.

In a way, perhaps he was. As a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant activist, he risked arrest to protest against the unfair laws of the time.

“Did you hear about Rosa Parks through Xavier Riddle?” I asked him, referring to a PBS Kids program that teaches history to elementary school children.

“Yes,” he replied. “Why can't Chaim Mendl be with Xavier Riddle?”

That's a great question. I'd like to know that too.