The Book Borrower (17 page)

—We were supposed to give you this! Jeremiah said I should give you this! called Deborah, hair flying.

—Elephant platypus! screamed Mary Grace.

Oh. Yes. The article about the anarchist. She hugged Deborah hard and took the folded sheets of paper. Deborah and Mary Grace ran back home—no coats!—and Ruben and the boys walked on.

—Elephant platypus! the boys screamed after Mary Grace. Then, Elephant giraffe! Elephant orangutan. In the dark, they spun in circles again and staggered forward and spun in circles, a taller and a shorter one, outlined like the dark trees.

—Porcupine, they gasped, giraffe, platypus.

—No, no, platypus, elephant platypus.

—Elephant platypus! When they spun past her, she reached to touch their hair. Each boy in turn stopped and then they took the leash from her and she walked between them and again touched a hand to each head. Their hair was fine and silky, with snags and tiny roughnesses, and she felt a few hairs for nits—two years before, all of Deborah's girls and both her boys kept giving one another head lice; Deborah said, You're in our nitwork. But now everybody was clean. Nobody had any troubles at all. There were no troubles anywhere on earth.

 

THE LITTLE ANARCHIST

GUSSIE LIPKIN AND THE BOYNTON TROLLEY WRECK

 

[The article, unsigned, was from
Jewish Monthly,
November 1972, pp. 24-28. It was accompanied by photographs, one of a woman and one of a trolley car, but they had been photocopied and were hard to see.]

 

“The
Boynton Herald,
Miss Lipkin, reported that 'wrenches, auto cranks, paving blocks, bottles, coal, and missiles of all description' were thrown at the strikebreakers. Miss Lipkin, did you throw bottles and paving blocks?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Did you throw anything, Miss Lipkin?”

“Mud, sir.”

“You threw mud?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how did you acquire this mud, Miss Lipkin?”

“I knelt in the yard of the trolley company and scooped it up in my hands, sir.”

“In your hands?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Lipkin, this event took place on January ninth, did it not?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“And there had been a snowfall the night before, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And yet you ask us to believe that you scooped up mud in your hands?”

“The yard was in the sun, sir. The snow where I was standing had melted.”

“I see. And did some of this mud fall on your dress, Miss Lipkin?”

“Yes, sir.'

“Miss Lipkin, you are nineteen years old, am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.'

“And you are Jewish, are you not, Miss Lipkin?”

“Objection, your honor. The defendant's religion . . .”

“Objection sustained.”

 

The above quotations—which I discovered by chance one rainy afternoon in the Boynton, Massachusetts, Public Library while doing research for a graduate dissertation on the history of the New England textile mills—are from the transcript of a long-forgotten but fascinating trial that took place in October 1921 in the grimy Massachusetts mill town of Boynton: the trial of a young Jewish girl, daughter of an illiterate immigrant mother and a father who loved to read, a trial not for mud throwing, it turns out, but for murder. “The Little Anarchist,” as Gussie Lipkin was called by that very same
Boynton Herald,
or sometimes “the Emma Goldman of Boynton,” has nearly been forgotten by Jewish historians, by feminists, and by historians of the radical left, but she might well be of interest to all of these. Bright though uneducated, this woman at fifteen joined an anarchist cell that had met briefly in her parents' living room. Three years later she was apparently its leader and spokesperson. Short, plump, and not attractive—judging from the single surviving photograph—with a low forehead and rather thin, cropped hair, Gussie Lipkin had been born in Boynton in 1902 to Jewish immigrants from Russia who went on to have two other daughters. They had landed at Ellis Island a year before her birth, and were drawn to the small, desperately poor Jewish community in Boynton by the prospect of work in the mills. By the age of eighteen, Gussie Lipkin had become estranged from her parents and lived briefly as the common law wife of a factory worker and union leader who was rumored to have left a wife and child behind in Europe.

In 1921, Warren G. Harding became president of the United States. Hitler's storm troopers were becoming active. The first radio broadcast of a baseball game was made from the Polo Grounds in New York. And, though the “Red Scare” was dying down, Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of murder. Just a year earlier, national hysteria about possible Bolshevism in America had led to extreme measures, including the deportation of a shipload of radical aliens, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In January 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered raids on leftist organizations. Known radicals, aliens, and unlucky bystanders were illegally rounded up, held under appalling conditions, and in some instances deported.

Also in that year came the death of the inventor of the rubber tire, which was changing the lives of Americans. Twenty years earlier, people had gotten around mostly by trolley: on the still familiar urban trolleys but also on interurbans, which ran for dozens and sometimes hundreds of miles from city to city. Now that system of ubiquitous public transportation was changing. An article in
The New Republic
entitled “Passing of the Interurbans” (August 20, 1919, pp. 92-93) points out that there was a decrease in passengers everywhere. The writer, C. J. Finger, attempts to persuade his readers of the futility of increasing fares, an expedient he calls “foolish.”

The trolley was doomed, and yet hundreds of lines existed and thousands of men worked on them. With the decrease in use came increases in fares—from six cents to seven, even eight—and wage cuts. And, inevitably, there were strikes. A savage strike took place in Denver in 1920 and one nearly as brutal in Albany and Troy, New York, in 1921. The trolley men of Boynton, Massachusetts, received news of a 25 percent wage cut, which seems outlandish but was typical, just before Christmas in 1920. On January 5, 1921, the conductors and motormen struck the line, and scabs were hired.

In the late afternoon of January 9, 1921, as a trolley operated by scabs made its way through the snowy New England countryside, it collided with one coming in the opposite direction. One person was killed. To the horror of the Boynton community, the dead young woman was Sarah Lipkin, the youngest sister of the known radical Gussie Lipkin. No one knows why Sarah Lipkin was journeying on the trolley that afternoon. Her body had barely been removed from the wreckage when rumors spread through Boynton that an arrest had been made. Gussie Lipkin had been found walking along the trolley tracks. Obviously, the frantic townspeople insisted, in conspiracy with the strikers and other sympathizers—and possibly in some mysterious collusion with her sister—Gussie had somehow altered the signals and caused the crash. She was dirty and exhausted, and readily confessed that she had been among the crowd of sympathizers who attempted to keep the trolley lines from operating, by any means at their disposal, that morning. Yet Gussie Lipkin insisted on her innocence of the crime with which she was charged: murder. Murder of her own sister.

“Hang the little Jew” was one of the slogans found painted on factory walls and fences in Boynton in the next few days. We can only speculate, decades later, on how much antiSemitism existed in the town at that time. The newspaper ran one editorial commenting on the high percentage of Jews in the “radical organizations among us.” “Let our Jewish neighbors look after their own,” said the editorial. “Law-abiding citizens desire nothing more of them than the same adherence to the rules of right and wrong, the ideals of our country, that we ask of ourselves.” Certainly there was no major anti-Semitic rally or demonstration; yet even in the courtroom testimony quoted above there is implied prejudice.

The trial lasted for seven weeks. The motormen of both trolleys, one of whom had been injured in the crash, testified at length. The jury found Gussie Lipkin not guilty. A year later she was arrested again, after a small demonstration by an anarchist group at a strike of women seamstresses. Clearly the authorities were determined to make some charge stick, and Lipkin spent eighteen months in the Boynton city jail after a successful prosecution on a charge of disorderly conduct and inciting to riot.

Gussie Lipkin left Boynton in her midtwenties and lived for a time in New York, then later in Paris. She studied art and became a sculptor. At some point she took the name Berry Cooper—Cooper being the name of her second husband. Her sculpture is not unknown. In midlife she returned to New England. In the last reference to her I can find, she was exhibiting sculpture in a show designed to raise money for the Freedom Riders in the early sixties. I can find no record of an obituary, but an artist of my acquaintance has told me she died of emphysema several years ago, while living in the west.

It's tempting to speculate on why Gussie Lipkin has been so totally ignored. Her trial was somewhat notorious. The
New York Times
sent a correspondent to Boynton, although in the end it ran only two short mentions of Lipkin, buried in the back pages. A Jewish law student from New York University, Jacob Lauterman, wrote an amicus brief on behalf of a Jewish philanthropic organization and sent it to various left-wing organizations, without any results.

Maybe the energy of the left was already absorbed. It was the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, of Red-baiting and vigorous protests all over the nation. Even devoted servants of justice must choose their causes. Certainly the Jewish community was divided. There must have been embarrassment, and the fear that possibly Gussie Lipkin was not being framed, but was guilty. At her trial, her lawyer portrayed her as a selfless, idealistic young woman, overcome with grief at the death of her sister. In any case, Gussie Lipkin deserves some belated attention from all of us. Disturbing the dust on the yellowing pages of the
Boynton Herald
is evidence of a fiery spirit, a woman who refused to allow others to think for her, a stub-born, intelligent girl.

 

 

All week Ruben wondered if the model would wear clothes. Then Jeremiah was so slow picking her up on Thursday night she thought he wasn't coming. She shifted the clumsy drawing pad to her other hand as she waited in the street. Her fingers, reaching around the edge of the pad, were cold, even in gloves. The pages blew open: her lumpy drawings in the dark.

He showed up. You know anything about this shit?

She touched the drawing pad on her lap. What shit? She thought he was upset that they'd had to chip in three dollars apiece to pay for the model. She was tired of Jeremiah's objections to the drawing class.

—This dame Janet Grey hasn't told you?

—Told me what?

—She's dumping Deb.

Janet Grey had phoned an hour ago, while they were eating, and told Deborah that she needed only one adjunct teacher for the spring term because enrollments were down, and that she preferred to hire Toby Ruben.

—But why?

—Enrollments.

—But she's so close to Deborah.

—Apparently she likes you better.

—Is Deborah furious with me?

—It's not your fault.

Ruben thought they should skip the art class and go to Deborah, but she couldn't bring herself to miss drawing the model.

—Deborah and I teach two classes apiece now. Couldn't we each have one? Janet Grey told me yesterday she wants me to teach two sections again in the spring.

—I don't know the details.

They were going into the building. She tried to stop thinking about Deborah and Janet Grey. She was afraid Deborah would think she was in cahoots with Janet Grey. Yet how could Deborah imagine that? Deborah was the one who liked her. Ruben didn't like Janet. She'd had maybe three conversations alone with Janet. She and Janet taught on Tuesday, when Deborah wasn't there. Once, they had talked about Deborah, only a little. Janet asked Ruben, Would you consider Deborah an intellectual? Ruben didn't know what she meant. She didn't know whether it would be good or bad to be an intellectual. What had she said?