Pesotta, Rose (1896–1965)

Russian-born American labor organizer and union official, who rose from working in a New York City garment factory to become a vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Name variations: Rose Peisoty. Born Rose Peisotaya in Derazhnya, Russia (now Ukraine), on November 20, 1896; died in Miami, Florida, on December 7, 1965; daughter of Itsaak Peisoty and Masya Peisotaya; had one sister, Esther; possibly married twice (one source claims she lived with three men, but the relationships were never formalized); no children.

Rose Pesotta, a lifelong anarchist, was one of the most remarkable women in the American labor movement in the first half of the 20th century. Born Rose Peisotaya in 1896 in Derazhnya, Russia (now Ukraine), she enjoyed a happy Jewish childhood as the daughter of a successful grain merchant. Her formal education included two years in a local girls' school and private tutoring. As a member of some of Derazhnya's radical circles, she read and was greatly influenced by the theories of such anarchist thinkers as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon. In 1913, at age 17, she emigrated to America, the Goldene Mdeeni (Land of Gold), not to find wealth but to escape tsarist oppression and rigid parental authority. Her sister Esther had already arrived in New York City. On her first day in the new world, Rose's name was changed from Peisotaya to Pesotta during her processing at Ellis Island.

To support herself, Pesotta began working as a waistmaker in one of Manhattan's garment factories. Soon, she joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), becoming active in Local 25, one of that union's most dynamic locals. She also became involved in anarchist politics among New York's Jewish workers, particularly after being inspired by a speech given in 1914 by anarchist icon Emma Goldman . Her sister Esther characterized Goldman's influence on Rose succinctly: "Emma helped Rose to believe in anarchism like a rabbi believes in God." After Goldman was deported from the United States, Pesotta maintained an active correspondence with her. Throughout her life, Pesotta was a passionate advocate of anarchist ideals, which included a faith in the free association of workers as an alternative to centralized authority, and an abiding distrust of distant, bureaucratic governance.

By the early 1920s, she was serving as a member of the Local 25 executive board. Pesotta had a formative experience in 1922, when she attended summer-school courses for working women at Bryn Mawr College. A year later, she enrolled at Brookwood Labor College at Katonah, New York, a pioneering institution which provided liberal arts courses to young activists from urban factories and shops to encourage them to seek leadership positions within their own unions. Committed to organizing the unorganized as the best method of advancing the ideals of anarchism, in the 1920s Pesotta was drawn to the dramatic political confrontations of the day. She was actively involved in the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchists accused of a murder committed during a robbery, whom many believed were sentenced to death more for their politics and ethnicity (and the open biases of the presiding judge) than for the flimsy evidence presented at their trial. From 1922 until Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, Pesotta was a passionate participant in protests and demonstrations on their behalf, and she was arrested during a demonstration at the time of their executions (along with Dorothy Parker and many others). Despite the fact that few American workers ever took a serious interest in anarchist ideas, Pesotta was very active in New York anarchist circles throughout the 1920s. From 1925 through 1929, she served as general secretary of the anarchist publication The Road to Freedom, to which she also contributed articles until its demise in 1932. She echoed Emma Goldman in her denunciation not only of capitalism, but also of the Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

With the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, the American labor movement began to enjoy significant support and encouragement from a friendly Washington administration. In 1934, soon after joining the ILGWU staff, Pesotta became the only woman member on the union's General Executive Board. She also became an ILGWU vice president. Unlike the other members of the ILGWU leadership, men who had been socialists in their youth and now supported the Washington-directed liberalism of the New Deal, Pesotta had a different perspective from which she viewed the new situation for American labor. Because of her anarchist values, she retained an abiding faith in working-class mobilization from below, as opposed to state intervention from above on behalf of essentially passive and grateful workers.

As a professed anarchist, Pesotta pleased few in the labor movement in the 1930s. She was seen by anarchist ideological purists as having betrayed their ideals by accepting a paid job with the ILGWU. Socialists, on the other hand, were skeptical that an anarchist could accomplish anything of value either in trade-union work or in the political arena. In a letter to Hippolyte Havel, an ally of Emma Goldman and editor of the anarchist journal Freedom, Pesotta granted that American unions were essentially capitalist institutions. But, she asked, "Should we then grow lettuce and cabbages on some deserted farm pending the millennium?"

A highly effective labor organizer, Pesotta spent the 1930s conducting organizing campaigns in Atlantic City, Buffalo, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Seattle. In both Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, she conducted effective campaigns among female Latino workers, displaying a remarkable ability to communicate effectively with different ethnic groups. Her ability to bridge what at first often appeared to be great cultural, educational and linguistic gaps came from her genuine respect for working people and their labor, a respect derived from her personal experience as a needleworker who regarded her own work as a craft rather than as merely an unskilled trade.

During a period of sit-down strikes, Pesotta was dispatched in February 1936 by the fledgling Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to assist striking rubber workers in Akron, Ohio. A victory was achieved in this first test of the CIO's philosophy of industrial unionism. Pesotta was also to play a leading role in the United Auto Workers' organizing campaign in Flint, Michigan, from December 1936 through January 1937. While in Akron, she fell in love with Powers Hapgood, a Harvard-educated radical and an experienced labor organizer. Despite their attraction to each other, Hapgood had no intention of leaving his wife and children, and their affair was doomed from the start. Nonetheless, the two shared a belief that the industrial union movement offered the best hope for American workers to create a system of popular economic, as well as political, governance. Concerned over the drift towards centralized and bureaucratic rule, along with paternalistic and authoritarian methods of control, which were taking over all aspects of American life, both Pesotta and Hapgood believed that the time to halt these tendencies was running out.

By the end of the 1930s, it seemed apparent to grassroots labor organizers like Pesotta and Hapgood that labor-based democracy was losing the opportunity to hold its own in a society that defined success in terms of large and ever more powerful institutions. Hapgood could only watch as his own union's leader, the mine workers' John L. Lewis, enjoyed vast and virtually unchallenged power. Pesotta was increasingly disturbed by the almost total authority wielded by the autocratic ILGWU leader David Dubinsky. She was upset by the contrast between the egalitarian rhetoric of the ILGWU leadership and its often shabby and disrespectful treatment of the women who comprised at least 85% of the union's membership of 300,000. In a November 1939 letter to Dubinsky, Pesotta informed him in the bluntest terms possible of an unacceptable "state of affairs in our organization and the present moral disintegration within our ranks." She condemned ILGWU policies that had become "complacent, self-righteous, [and] powerful in our own might," but which had virtually abandoned any sense of obligation or connection to the union's overwhelmingly female rank and file. She found that under Dubinsky and the other male ILGWU leaders women had been kept in a subordinate role, the union leaders expected deference to their bureaucratic structure and personalistic control, and the entire system was based on clear limits of internal discussion and debate.

Realizing that the ILGWU leadership's sexism was not likely to change, in February 1942 Pesotta quit her staff position with the union and returned to a job sewing in a Manhattan clothing factory. She had insisted that she be given power to help in the management of the union, only to discover that she was still regarded as a token whose power was symbolic rather than genuine. In 1944, she resigned from her seat on the union's General Executive Board.

Ann Schofield has written that Pesotta "was an intense and charismatic woman, beloved by the thousands of women workers she organized, but her life was largely tragic." In Notable American Women, Alice Kessler-Harris characterized Pesotta as a "vital and volatile woman," who could "rise from depression and despair to periods of inspired activity." While she may have married twice, she also lived with men, writes Kessler-Harris "[t]wice in the 1920s and again in the 1950s" in informal relationships "preferring the freedom of long and deeply rooted friendships to the ties of marriage." In a letter to the wife of a man with whom she was having an affair, she once explained her choice not to have children by asserting, "Personally, I would not use an innocent babe as an alibi, for nothing is more erroneous than this, and because of this I did not have any children to tie [a man] for life to myself."

Pesotta's awareness of her Jewish heritage and identity deepened as a result of the Holocaust. In 1945, she accepted a position as a fund raiser for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. In 1950, she worked briefly for the American Trade Union Council for Histadrut, the national union of the newly created State of Israel. Soon, however, she returned to a Manhattan garment shop, where she worked until shortly before her death in Miami, Florida, on December 7, 1965. Despite her many considerable achievements as a trade unionist, it seems reasonable to suggest that in a better world Pesotta would likely have been able to achieve even more. In this regard, Schofield places blame on the male leadership of the ILGWU, "whose faults she could see so clearly [and which] turned a deaf ear to her pleas to become more inclusive of its female and multiethnic membership. By doing this, [the union] lost the services of one of its most talented leaders."

sources:

Bourque, Monique C-E. "'Toward a More Humane and Abundant Life': The Work of Anarchist Rose Pesotta in the ILGWU," M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1988.

Buhle, Mari Jo. "Pesotta, Rose (1896–1965)," in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 600–601.

Bussel, Robert. "'A Love of Unionism and Democracy': Rose Pesotta, Powers Hapgood, and the Industrial Union Movement, 1933–1949," in Labor History. Vol. 38, no. 2–3, 1997, pp. 202–228.

Fink, Gary M., ed. Biographical Dictionary of American Labor. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. "Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and their Union," in Labor History. Vol. 17, no. 1. Winter 1976, pp. 5–23.

——. "Rose Pesotta," in Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Laslett, John H.M. "Gender, Class, or Ethno-Cultural Struggle? The Problematic Relationship Between Rose Pesotta and the Los Angeles ILGWU," in California History. Vol. 72, no. 1. Spring 1993, pp. 20–39, 95–96.

Leeder, Elaine. The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.

New York Public Library. Rose Pesotta Papers.

Pesotta, Rose. Bread Upon the Waters. Edited by John Nicholas Beffel. Reprint ed. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987.

——. Days of Our Lives. Boston, MA: Excelsior, 1958.

Schofield, Ann. "Pesotta, Rose," in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography. Vol. 17. NY: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 382–383.

Seller, Maxine S. "Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman," in Journal of Ethnic Studies. Vol. 3, no. 1, 1975, pp. 59–70.

Shepherd, Naomi. A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Sorin, Gerald. "Rose Pesotta in the Far West: The Triumphs and Travails of a Jewish Woman Labor Organizer," in Western States Jewish History. Vol. 28, no. 2, 1996, pp. 133–143.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia