Zigmund Schlesinger: A Defender Of The West

After the Civil War, many former soldiers and others went out West to start a new life. They found that there was plenty of land available and that the buffalo, bison and other wildlife could sustain them while they farmed and built settlements. However, there was one problem that confronted them - the Indians.

The Indians had been living off the land for countless years. They saw the white men come and destroy the forests. Herds of buffalo and bison were being slaughtered and the newly built railroads were cutting up their territories. The Indians soon realized that in order to save their lives and their livelihood, they had to fight back. They burned houses and stockades of white settlers and murdered any travelers.

The situation became very serious for the white settlers. Action had to be taken. General George Forsyth was delegated by General Philip Sheridan to hire 50 first class frontiersmen to fight the attacking Indians. One of the first to apply was a young Hungarian-Jew, Zigmund Schlesinger, who had immigrated to America in 1864.

Schlesinger came to New York City and worked at many jobs. He heard about the opportunities that existed in the West and left New York to go to Kansas. In Kansas, he tried his hand at business by baking bread and cake and selling the foods under a canvas tent. The bakery failed as did some other business ventures.

When Schlesinger applied for the frontiersman with Forsyth, they were not anxious to have him. He was small with a high-pitched voice and had very little experience or knowledge of firearms and horsemanship. He was told if they couldn't get 50 men, he would be hired. Schlesinger was lucky. He was hired since a 50th man was not found.

In his diary, Schlesinger wrote of his first day as a member of the scouts in August 1868. After riding all day, Schlesinger recalled how stiff and tired he was when it was over. His riding abilities bore the brunt of ridicule from others. He was also reminded that he was a Jew.

Schlesinger had been involved in many minor encounters with the Indians. The encounter that eamed him the respect of the others took place at the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River in 1868. His scouting expedition was set upon by Chief Roman Nose with his band of Cheyenne and Sioux Indians. The scouts were pinned down for 9 days.

Their horses had been killed and they suffered 19 casualties. Schlesinger had been wounded in both legs and the head. Yet, he managed to shoot down any Indian who exposed himself. They held off the Indians until a U.S. Army relief column came to their rescue.

Forsyth wrote a letter to Rabbi Henry Cohen of Texas, lauding the heroism of Schlesinger: "...He was the equal in manly courage, steady and persistent devotion to duty, and unswerving and tenacious pluck of any man in my command."

Schlesinger took leave of his frontier life on October 21, 1868. He left the company and returned to New York. Eventually, he settled in Cleveland, where he established a successful cigar store business. Active in Jewish organizations, Schlesinger was one of the oreanizers of the Hebrew Free Loan Association, vice-president of his temple, and president of the Hebrew Relief Association.

He died in 1928, leaving behind a legacy as a Jewish Indian fighter and as a philanthropist.

Uriah P. Levy: A Naval Hero Who Ended the Practice of Flogging

Uriah P. Levy was a naval hero who served his country from the War of 1812 to 1862. He was the first Jew to obtain the rank of Commodore in the United States Navy, which is the equivalent of an admiral.

Levy left his home in Philadelphia, at the age of 14, to sign up as an apprentice seaman aboard a merchant ship. At 15, he became the mate of the brig POLLY AND BETSY, and at 20 he became master and part owner of the brig-of-war ARGUS, which ran the British blockade to France.

On her return voyage to the United States, the ARGUS destroyed 21 British merchant ships and captured a number of vessels, which Levy armed for battle against the British men-of-war. When he met the heavily armed British frigate PELICAN, Levy fought an unequal battle until the ARGUS was sunk and he was taken prisoner. He spent 16 months in Dartmoor Prison in England.

Levy was one of the first naval officers to recognize men for their ability and not by their ethnic roots, religion or social standing. When he was commander of the U.S.S. VANDALIA during the War of 1812, he fathered a law that would place his name in history. The law abolished flogging in the Navy.

Because there was no Naval Academy to train and guide the young officers, Levy wrote and published the "Manual of War," the first printed guide that detailed all aspects of a young officer's duties aboard a ship. This manual was in three volumes and included the "new age of steam."

When Levy was promoted to lieutenant in 1817, he was confronted by a large group of anti-Semitic officers who slighted, rebuffed and discriminated against him. At one point, he was forced to fight a duel and killed the man. He was court-martialed and found guilty six times. On appeal, however, each case was overturned by a higher board of inquiry.

The anti-Levy feelings were so great that his enemies managed, in 1855, to get Congress to set up a board of inquiry to purge him from the Navy. Levy and the board received many letters of sympathy and support. Once again the anti-Semites lost and Levy remained in the Navy. It was after this event that Levy was promoted to the rank of Commodore and given command of the Mediterranean Squadron.

Levy was a devoted admirer of Thomas Jefferson and when he found that Jefferson's home, Monticello, was in ruins and decay, he bought it on May 20, 1836. He worked hard to restore and preserve it for future generations.

Levy, a religious man, was the first president of Washington, D.C., Hebrew Congregation and was a member of the Shearith Congregation in New York. In World War II, a destroyer escort was named the U.S.S. LEVY in his memory and it served in the war with distinction. The first permanent Jewish chapel ever built by the U.S. Armed Forces also honors him. The Commodore Uriah Levy Jewish Chapel is located near the main gate at the historic naval station in Norfolk, Virginia, and the public is invited to visit it.

This is one of the 150 illustrated true stories of American heroism included in Jewish Heroes and Heroines of America, © 1996, written by Seymour "Sy" Brody of Delray Beach, Florida, illustrated by Art Seiden of Woodmere, New York, and published by Lifetime Books, Inc., Hollywood, FL.

The 1909 ILGWU strike established a precedent for serious collective action in other branches of the garment economy.

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The following article serves as an introduction to the roles that Jewish women played in the American labor movement. It is reprinted with permission from A History of the Jews in America, published by Knopf.

It was a devouring inferno. Employees labored sixty&S209;five hours a week. At the height of the season they worked seventy&S209;five hours, and sometimes until dawn. Not infrequently they were obliged to provide their own needles, thread, knives, irons, occasionally their own sewing machines. Within the factory's premises, too, a sinister "internal" sub&S209;contracting system functioned, obliging employees in effect to work for their foremen on a piecework basis.

The ordeal was even more intense for women, for they were paid less than men for equivalent work. They too were charged for their equipment, their clothes lockers, their very chairs, and were fined for even the briefest tardiness, for damage to a garment. At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, women were obliged to leave the plant to reach outside toilets. As a precaution against "interruption of work," the steel door leading outside to the facilities was locked. Employees required the foreman's permission to have it opened.

By the early 1900s, as it happened, many of these women were recent Bundists [the Bund was the General Jewish Worker?s Union in Russia and Poland]. Indeed, in Russia they had made up a third of the Bund's membership. Like their male counterparts, they did not abandon their militance in the United States. Nor was their activism limited to the workplace. It encompassed also the women's&S209;suffrage movement. In New York, Jewish women garment workers represented the very core of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

One of those workers, Rose Schneiderman, was a leader of the city's Women's Suffrage Party. The Polish&S209;born Schneiderman had been brought to the United States as a youngster. After four years of schooling she had gone to work in a cap factory, to support her widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. Eventually she doubled as an ILGWU organizer and as an officer of the New York branch of the Women's Trade Union League. A fiery redhead, Schneiderman proved so captivating a speaker in behalf of workers' and women's rights that, many years later, in the 1930s, she became secretary of the New York State Department of Labor.

Meanwhile, within the trade&S209;union movement, other women played decisive roles: Fannie Cohn, a veteran of the Bund, and the ILGWU's only woman vice&S209;president; Bessie Abramowitz , a spunky twenty&S209;year&S209;old in 1910 when she helped organize the Chicago strike of thirty&S209;three thousand men's&S209;clothing workers; Pauline Newman, the first women?s organizer of the historic shirtwaist industry strike. They were a remarkable breed. They were also the pioneers of the garment industry's "Great Revolt" of 1909&S209;1914.

In the shirtwaist factories, Jewish women com

Peter Brimelow Archive

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Republished on VDARE.COM on March 28, 2003

Review of Bernard Baruch: the adventures of a Wall Street legend, by James Grant

By Peter Brimelow

National Review, Sept 7, 1984 v36 p44(2)

According to Jim Grant, Dorothy Parker once said that two things confused her: the theory of the zipper and the exact function of Bernard Baruch. This last confusion is not merely widespread; it is militant. The business of America may be business, but it is not its favorite leisure reading or topic of dinner-table conversation. Financial journalists learn early to accept that their field is not only harder to figure out and more difficult to write about than politics or culture; it is also inherently repellent to their media peers. Like all journalism, it beats working for a living, but not with the same fanfare.

One consequence of this schism in American culture--for there are of course millions of Americans who think about nothing but business, albeit mutely and ingloriously--is that public figures who come from the business side are apt to be viewed somewhat selectively. The undertone of puzzlement in last year's reviews of the first volume of George H. Nash's definitive life of Herbert Hoover, for example, arose from the fact that it turned out not to be about politics at all, but was instead a detailed study of the arcane but hyperactive world of turn-of-the-century mining promotion, in which the future President spent his youth. Equally, while there have been four biographies of Bernard Baruch, they have focused almost exclusively on his public career as chairman of the War Industries Board and general-purpose sage to the New Deal. Baruch's Wall Street prowess has been taken on faith, or rumor.

Baruch would have liked it that way. Grant, however, has proved to be an unusual biographer. Formerly the bond-market columnist of Barron's, he now publishes his own fortnightly commentary on interest rates. By working through the records with technical knowledge and remarkable assiduity, he