Subject: Cigarette industry

Trade Card & Broadside - Front: Golding Bros.(not Jewish), 8th Ave., Corner 36th St…. Note: Image captures the contentious spirit of the day -- athletics, "uniforms" for teams, strongmen, etc. More importantly, it depicts the tug of war between labor and industry, legislation and free enterprise / business.....IMPORTANT Reverse: "Grand Annual Ball of the Cigarette Makers ~ 1881."… "Music by Boswald's Full Orchestra ...." to be held at Tammany Hall, Saturday evening, Nov. 12th, 1881. "OFFICERS -- Wm. Rubens, President / Abe Rubens, Sec'y / Barney Kommel, VP / Nathan Cohen, Treas." .... etc. Note: Strong direct link between the trade union and the Jewish community of New York / Bowery. HISTORICAL NOTE on Roosevelt and Social Legislation (from www / Presidential biography): "... when the Cigarmakers' International introduced a bill in the session of 1882 to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses in New York and Brooklyn. Samuel Gompers, then in his early thirties and head of the union's strongest local, was its principal proponent. The bill was referred to the Com- mittee on Cities, and Roosevelt was appointed one of a subcommittee of three to investigate conditions. Gompers, who had collected his evidence by making the rounds of the tenements disguised as a book agent with a set of Dickens, immediately approached him. Roose- velt's first reaction was antagonistic because, as Gompers remembered, "he disbelieved the conditions which I portrayed to him." Gompers, however, finally induced him to go with him on one of his rounds, "after which ... his whole manner toward me changed." " It was a fortunate circumstance that Gompers was the first to bring Roosevelt in practical contact with the consequences of the laissez-faire phil- osophy, for Gompers was, of all the labor leaders of his generation, the most moderate and reasonable. The tenement cigar evil was good ground, too, for an open-minded young public servant to gain experience upon. In the early eighties, some 670,000,000 cigars were manufactured in New York City every year, over a third of which were made in tenements, chiefly by Bohe- mian immigrants, ignorant of the English language, hard pressed by competition, and an easy prey for their landlords. Since the landlords were also the manufacturers, they were in a position to compel their tenants both to live and work on the premises. Hours of labor ranged from sixteen to eighteen a day and were spent in dark, crowded rooms, two families often sharing one apartment or even a single room. The tobacco was stowed in corners, alongside the foul bedding or commingled with scraps of food. Little children working under these conditions sometimes fell asleep on piles of tobacco, consump- tives coughed upon it, and victims of other diseases labored on through contagious stages of their illness. The situation was not only a vicious travesty on life for the workers, but a menace to the health of the city. Roosevelt made three visits to the tenements, once with Gompers, once with his colleagues on the subcommittee, and again by himself. What he found filled him with both astonishment and revulsion, and he promptly championed the prohibitory bill. "Businessmen who spoke to me about it shook their heads," he later wrote, "and said that it was designed to prevent a man doing as he wished, and as he had a right to do, with what was his own," but Roosevelt felt that "whatever the theories might be, as a matter of practical common sense I could not conscientiously vote for the continuance of the conditions which I saw...."