Labor & Electeds Launch Campaign Against City Point

One of the largest projects in Brooklyn with the least oversight is City Point, the publicly-subsidized skyscraper at the former Albee Mall. Here is the most recent news from City & State:

A controversial development project in downtown Brooklyn is facing opposition from labor unions, community advocates and elected officials who say the developers are hiring non-union contractors that pay workers unfair wages and benefits. A portion of the City Point project, a large-scale retail, office, and residential complex on Flatbush Avenue Extension, is being financed with public money, including $20 million in Recovery Zone Facility Bonds from the 2009 stimulus package. As a result, union organizers and others say that the realtor, Acadia Realty Trust, should be held accountable for paying their workers a fair salary. “With respect to the City Point project, there is tremendous opportunity to ensure that working families and middle-class workers can benefit from an initiative that would not have been made possible without generous city subsidies," said U.S. Rep.-elect Hakeem Jeffries. “Public-private partnerships like City Point must deliver a clear benefit to the public if they’re going to make sense. That’s why this is an important campaign and I’m hopeful that Acadia will conclude that the right thing to do is to ensure that everyone benefits from this project.” Calls placed to Acadia for comment went unreturned.

For more, click here. 

Louis Brandeis, the progressive cabal and Social Security

Was Social Security the result of some sort of cabal? 

According to the US government Social Security website:

Some historians date the beginning of the health insurance movement in this country from a speech by Louis D. Brandeis (later a Supreme Court Justice) in 1911. Others point either to the Progressive Party's platform in 1912, to the establishment of the AALL's Social-Insurance Committee that same year, or to the First American Conference on Social Insurance (under AALL sponsorship) in Chicago in 1913. The debate did not begin in earnest, however, until 1915.

In any case, there seems to have been an alliance of progressive organizations that lead up to the establishment of Social Security. According to "American Economics Becomes a Policy Discipline:Economic Expertise during The Progressive Era" by Thomas C. Leonard:

The economic reform organizations formed a tight network; they shared personnel as well as common causes and methods. John R. Commons, for example, later served as NCL president, from 1923 to 1935. Henry R. Seager, A.B. Wolfe of Oberlin College, and Arthur Holcombe of Harvard were members of the NCL minimum-wage committee as early as 1909 (Hart 1994, 209 n. 94). Ely and Father John Ryan of Catholic University, author of A Living Wage and drafter of the 1913 Minnesota minimum wage legislation, were also active NCL advisers. Josephine Goldmark, sister-in-law to Louis Brandeis, was active in the NCL leadership. She supervised the production of the famous Brandeis Brief, an annotated compilation of social science reports defending maximum-hours (and in later versions, minimum-wage) legislation for women, which was completed with AALL assistance. Alice Goldmark Brandeis, another NCL stalwart, secretly paid the expenses of its Washington office (Bary 1972).

The NCL worked out of the United Charities Building in New York City, a Progressive Era symbol of the overlapping and interlocking network of progressive reformers. The Charities Building, also housed the National Child Labor Committee, the Charity Organization Service, the New York School of Philanthropy and two prominent reform journals, Outlook, edited by Lyman Abbott, and Paul Kellogg’s The Survey.27 The Russell Sage foundation, established in 1907, and funder of the landmark Pittsburgh Survey directed by Kellogg, tried, unsuccessfully, to locate its headquarters in the Charities Building. Josephine Goldmark, in her memoir of Florence Kelly, recalled the quip of a friendly visitor in 1906, “what’s this bunch calling itself today?” That day the bunch was being addressed by John R. Commons, who had traveled from Wisconsin to introduce the newly formed AALL.

German immigrants fighting for Lincoln and against tyranny

The defeat of the liberals in the 1848 revolution brought had a big impact on the Civil War in the United States. Many of these immigrants were considered German, though that meant something a bit different back them. According to "German Americans During the Civil War:"

Their numbers would swell until Germans made up a  full quarter of the fighting force of the American Civil War.

While 216,000 German-born men were on the rolls of both the North and the South, 177,000 of  them, the vast majority, fought in the Union Army, sixty seven later receiving the Medal of Honor.

New York Germans were particularly dedicated to the Union cause:

While the majority of Germans served in ethnically mixed units, about a fifth of German enlistees  served in units which were all German. Over 36,000 New York soldiers were of German descent  (the 20th New York Infantry alone lost 120 men), and almost a third of them served in all-German  units. The most notable were the 29th, 46th and 52nd New York. After New York came Missouri  with 30,000 Germans serving and the 12th and 17th Missouri regiments being all German.

The enthusiasm for Lincoln has its roots in Berlin of 1811, and this turned into a series of civic organizations around the US. According to A Regimental History of the  Twentieth Regiment, New York State  Volunteer Infantry:

The Turner societies, or turnvereins, which still exist today, trace their roots to a gathering near Berlin in 1811.  Their charge was to foster nationalism and patriotism through a program of disciplined physical training and gymnastics.  The name “Turner” seems to come from the German turnen, “to perform gymnastics,” an adaptation of the French tourner, meaning “to turn.”   Turner societies sprouted up throughout the German-speaking territories until their radical espousal of German unity and representative government led authorities to suppress them in the 1830’s.

When the Forty-eighters immigrated to the United States, turnvereins blossomed quickly in the new land and soon became a strong voice in the German community for political, social, and religious reform.  The societies were also centers of literary and cultural studies and gymnastic exercise.  Many local turnvereins also had associated military organizations called Turner Rifles or "Turner Schützen".  Their dual purpose was marksmanship and protection of the society members in the often violent environement where they lived.  In 1855 the Turners ventured into American politics with a strong anti-slavery stance and naturally gravitated to the newly formed Republican Party.  The following year they endorsed John C. Fremont for president.  Fremont, who would later become a Union major general, ran on a slogan that shines considerable light on his supporters’ political leanings:  "Free speech, free press, free work, and a free Kansas."

You can read more in the PDF "The New York Turn Verein."

Here is a link connecting Joseph Goldmark to this movement: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dettweiler/genweb/e006.htm

Brahms, Hungary and Liberalism

As a Hungarian folk musician, I have been asked by the NY Philharmonic twice to join them on stage to perform in programs with the Brahms Hungarian Dances. Until recently, I just assumed that Brahms wrote the Hungarian Dances simply because he thought it exotic. I failed to realized that Brahms was deeply connected to Hungary through his formative relationship with Euard Remenyi.

I have begun to realize that I, probably like most people, fail to understand the political context of Brahms' music. Here's a bit from "Brahms the Beleaguered" published by the NY Sun (R.I.P.!) back in 2004:

One critic complained of Brahms's use of "Jewish-temple triplets." Another lumped him with Eduard Hanslick (whose book, "The Beautiful in Music," argued that music was a pure form, not directly expressive of emotions), Karl Goldmark, and Adalbert Goldschmidt as "the music-loving and music-making Jewry." Popular support for Bruckner - a composer scorned by Brahms - was, wrote Mr. Swafford, "identical with the struggle to form a new society purged of the Jew-ridden liberals." Brahms, who was not Jewish, found the trend repugnant. "I can scarcely speak of it," he said. "It seems so despicable to me."

"Think of the American culture wars," said Mr. Frisch. "You could see Brahms and Bruckner lined up for congressional hearings on the arts. It's ironic, because Brahms is often viewed as the conservative one. "Yet, while he kept one foot in the past, the other was always firmly planted in the future. Brahms, reported Clara Schumann, spoke of "how the old masters had the freest form, while modern compositions move within the stiffest and most narrow limits." He was simply looking beyond the limits of the then-popular style, and he encouraged many young composers to do the same.

Origins of the Welfare State in America

It's fascinating to me that some of harshest critics of the progressive movement in the 19th and early 20th century write with such vivid detail. I found this Libertarian author who was trying to show that labor unions were not that important in the horrible (as he would see it) development of the welfare state. He blames much of the guilt of the rise of the Welfare State on Yankees, who eventually ally themselves with secular Jews. The article is titled "Origins of the Welfare State in America " by Murray Rothbard.

Here's how it connects with the remarkable Goldmark family:

If the female social reform activists were almost all Yankee, by the late 19th century, Jewish women were beginning to add their leaven to the lump. Of the crucial 1860s cohort, the most important Jewess was Lillian D. Wald (b. 1867). Born to an upper-middle-class German and Polish-Jewish family in Cincinnati, Lillian and her family soon moved to Rochester, where she became a nurse. She then organized, in the Lower East Side of New York, the Nurses' Settlement, which was soon to become the famed Henry Street Settlement. It was Lillian Wald who first suggested a federal Children's Bureau to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, and who led the agitation for a federal constitutional amendment outlawing child labor. While she was not a Yankee, Lillian Wald continued in the dominant tradition by being a lesbian, forming a long-term lesbian relationship with her associate Lavina Dock. Wald, while not wealthy herself, had an uncanny ability to gain financing for Henry Street, including top Jewish financiers such as Jacob Schiff and Mrs. Solomon Loeb of the Wall Street investment-banking firm of Kuhn-Loeb, and Julius Rosenwald, then head of Sears Roebuck. Also prominent in financing Henry Street was the Milbank Fund, of the Rockefeller-affiliated family who owned the Borden Milk Company.

Rounding out the important contingent of socialist-activist Jews were the four Goldmark sisters, Helen, Pauline, Josephine, and Alice. Their father had been born in Poland, became a physician in Vienna, and was a member of the Austrian Parliament. Fleeing to the United States after the failed Revolution of 1848, Dr. Goldmark became a physician and chemist, became wealthy by inventing percussion caps, and helped organized the Republican Party in the 1850s. The Goldmarks settled in Indiana. 

Actually, the Goldmarks mostly lived in New York. The family of Alice Goldmark's brother, Louis Brandeis, settled in Indiana. Joseph Goldmark lived for many years on 2nd Place near Court Street in Brooklyn. Joseph Goldmark grew up in Hungary, and his younger brother Goldmark Karoly was a famous Hungarian composer.