Moskowitz, Belle (1877–1933)

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Moskowitz, Belle (1877–1933)

Reform advocate and public relations director for New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and one of the most influential women in politics during the 1920s. Name variations: Belle Israels. Born Belle Lindner on October 5, 1877, in New York City; died in New York on January 2, 1933, of complications following a fall; daughter of Isidor Lindner (a watchmaker and cantor) and Esther (Freyer) Lindner; attended public elementary school, Horace Mann High School for Girls (1894), and enrolled for one year as a "special student" at New York's Teachers College, Columbia University; married Charles Israels, on November 11, 1903 (died 1911); married Henry Moskowitz, on November 22, 1914; children: (first marriage) Carlos, Miriam, Josef.

Worked as a program director at the Educational Alliance (1900–03); did social work, lobbying, and public relations for the United Hebrew Charities, the Council of Jewish Women, and the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections (1903–09); was active in the dance-hall reform movement (1908–13); served as a labor negotiator for the Dress and Waist Manufacturers Association (1913–16); was executive secretary of Governor Alfred E. Smith's Reconstruction Committee (1919–21); was director, Industrial and Education Department, Universal Film Company (1920–22); was publicity director, Democratic State Committee (1923–28), and political consultant to Governor Smith, especially on presidential campaigns of 1924 and 1928; was owner-director of Publicity Associates (1928–33).

The nomination in 1928 of New York's Governor Al Smith as the Democratic presidential candidate shattered a number of precedents. Four years earlier, the convention had deadlocked for 103 ballots before compromising on West Virginia lawyer John W. Davis; in 1928, Al Smith was nominated on the first ballot. The party platform supported Prohibition, but Smith, whose power base was in the ethnic melting pot of New York City, did not. Despite opposition from a few fundamentalist Southern states, Al Smith was the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee. And less than a decade after women had won the right to vote, his principal campaign advisor was a woman.

Belle Moskowitz, who began work with Smith during his first campaign for the governorship ten years before, had listened to the proceedings on the radio along with Smith and their families in the upstairs hall of the executive mansion in Albany. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Smith's choice to succeed him as governor of New York, made a rousing nominating speech. As the balloting continued, they went downstairs to greet well-wishers. When Ohio changed its vote to Smith, Moskowitz looked at the governor, sharing a long silent moment of triumph.

Moskowitz was born Belle Lindner on October 5, 1877, the sixth child of Isidor and Esther Freyer Lindner , but only the third (and sole daughter) to survive to adulthood. Belle's parents had immigrated to America from East Prussia in 1869, before the later wave of "new immigrants" intensified competition for jobs and housing. After running a successful watchmaking shop on Canal Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Isidor had been able to move his family to a three-story clapboard house in semi-rural Harlem before Belle was born. Behind the large display window of their ground-floor shop was a parlor where neighbors gathered to talk politics.

Esther was a conventional wife in some ways, a partner in an arranged marriage in which she deferred to her husband. But she had renounced the Old World sheitel (wig) and hoop skirts for American dress, and had once pursued and apprehended a would-be thief. Her grandchildren recollected that it was she who "ran the family." Her mother's indirect style of management influenced Belle, as did her father's scholarship. Isidor knew seven languages and served as cantor, temporary rabbi, and president of Temple Israel.

Belle's father took her with him on a trip to Europe when she was four or five years old. He sent her to a private high school, Horace Mann, the lab school for New York's Teachers College where the progressive curriculum included rhetoric and modern history, government, English literature, mathematics, and freehand drawing.

Moskowitz graduated from high school in 1894 and attended Teachers College as a special student. She planned to study for a career as a dramatic reader with Ida Benfey , whose public readings were popular New York theatrical events. After one year, Belle left to study with Heinrich Conried, later director of the Metropolitan Opera, and developed a character called "James, the Tailor-Made Girl." She presented monologues to private gatherings, and gave elocution lessons to children, but her parents preferred her to help in their shop rather than perform on a public stage.

Molly Dewson">
Belle Moskowitz… had been Al Smith's tutor and mentor to an extraordinary degree…. Mrs. M. was Al Smith's tent-pole.
—Molly Dewson

Like many college women in the late 1890s, Moskowitz was drawn to the neighborhood settlement houses, which ran programs to help immigrants adjust to their new surroundings. In January 1900, she began social work downtown at the Educational Alliance, one of the settlements serving the growing Jewish population that had fled persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia. For three and a half years, Belle, drawing on her earlier interest in theater, organized exhibits where Eastside artists could display their work, and entertainments, including plays staged by children for national and Jewish holidays. Her work at the Alliance introduced her to many of the important people in her later life, including both of her husbands and lawyers Abram Elkus and Joseph Proskauer, who claimed they introduced her to Al Smith.

Belle resigned to marry Charles Henry Israels, an architect 12 years her senior, on November 11, 1903. In addition to designing apartment hotels and model tenements, Charles led a boys' club at the Educational Alliance where he had met Belle. The couple lived with Charles' widowed mother, Florence Lazarus Israels . Her mother-in-law's help with the children and housekeeping freed Belle to work outside the home, but there was often a tense family atmosphere. A slump in her husband's business prompted Belle to begin writing professionally at home around the time of the birth of their first child, Carlos, in 1904. In 1907, their daughter Miriam was born, followed in 1909 by Josef. (In 1911, a daughter died at birth.) The family moved to Yonkers in 1909 so the children could grow up in the country. Moskowitz nursed her infants, but then delegated some of the child care to nannies or grandparents when her activities took her away from home.

Continuing her career in social welfare, Moskowitz did editorial work for Charities, a magazine published by United Hebrew Charities. She also joined the New York section of the Council of Jewish Women, which was coping with the increased rate of Jewish immigration following the rise of pogroms. Her special interest was in children, particularly pregnant teenagers. In 1905, her first major project was the establishment of the Lakeview Home for Girls on Staten Island, where pregnant teens could receive vocational training. Through this work, she learned to analyze social problems and develop solutions. She also learned administrative skills, and gained experience with the state legislature.

Moskowitz also worked with broader-based reform groups, such as the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections, which introduced her to the larger reform community. She served as that organization's assistant secretary in 1906, and organized its first exhibition, establishing a tradition of graphic presentation to support reform campaigns. An exhibit of 100 photographs, depicting the sad effects of child labor, was an urgent argument for parks and games. In 1908, she was named a vice-president, the first woman to so serve in the male-dominated organization (there would be no woman president until 1924). Belle continued her editorial work for Charities, acting as editorial assistant from 1908 to 1909, and through both activities developed expertise she would later use in public relations work for Al Smith.

In 1908, Moskowitz led a crusade for dance-hall reform. Her concern for sexually active teens led her on a quest for wholesome recreation for working girls, and she joined forces with temperance advocates to ban liquor from dance halls. She publicized conditions and aroused public opinion to pressure lawmakers through press conferences, articles and speeches, demonstrating a rare ability to attract support from a cross-section of the community, and in the process becoming one of New York's more

influential social reformers. In 1910, a compromise bill was passed to regulate alcohol in dancing establishments, and over the next three years, dance-hall reform movements spread across the country.

In November 1911, when Moskowitz was 34 and her eldest child was seven, Charles developed bronchial pneumonia; he died two days after their eighth wedding anniversary. His mother moved to a boarding house, Belle's parents moved in to help with the household, and Moskowitz looked at once for paid work. She first fell back on writing, producing "how to" articles for women's magazines and a child-care pamphlet for Metropolitan Life Insurance. Within a few months, she landed a job as commercial recreation secretary for the Playground and Recreation Association of America, lobbying for state support of playgrounds and supervised recreation, and serving on the executive subcommittee for summer programs in Europe. By the summer of 1912, in addition to chairing 14 executive meetings, freelance writing, and continuing to work for dancehall reform, Moskowitz took the plunge into party politics. The Progressive Party welcomed women's participation, and she served as district leader in her local ward in Yonkers, helping to elect a Progressive alderman.

A suspected case of police corruption following the murder of a gambler who was to have testified before a grand jury created a public outcry for reform. Belle was the only woman on a citizens' committee organized to investigate the situation; serving with her was a former colleague from the Educational Alliance, Henry Moskowitz. Although the committee's recommendations never became law, its members formed the nucleus of a "fusion" movement to support anti-machine Democrats in the 1913 city elections. When John Purroy Mitchel, the reform candidate, was elected, he named Henry Moskowitz president of the Municipal Civil Service Commission. The salary enabled Henry to propose marriage to Belle.

Two years younger than she, Henry had been born in Rumania and immigrated to the United States as a young child. While a student at City College, he had helped Felix Adler found the downtown Ethical Society. He then earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in Europe and returned to the U.S. to work for social reform and industrial justice. Henry and Belle had worked together after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, lobbying in Albany to pass regulations on factory inspection and working hours for women and children. In part due to their work, Assemblyman Al Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, co-sponsored a bill to create the New York State Factory Investigating Commission. Belle and Henry were married on November 22, 1914.

Their joint income enabled the Moskowitzes to afford live-in help, and they employed a nanny, cook, and maid. Belle tried to be home by 5:00 pm for time alone with her children, making them feel loved even though they would have preferred to see her more. "A career is a splendid thing for a mother," Moskowitz believed. "It gives her a wider contact with life … through which she can better develop the budding personalities of her children."

In January 1913, Belle had accepted a position as a grievance clerk in the Dress and Waist Manufacturing Association, seeing it as an opportunity to have a real effect on industrial conditions. It was a taxing job, and she was fired that summer for having settled a majority of complaints in the unions' favor. She was rehired in January 1914 as chief clerk, moving up to manager of the labor department two months later. Although she helped arbitrate thousands of disputes, eventually conciliation proved unsatisfactory to both sides; unions and manufacturers gave up settling complaints through the grievance system, and Belle Moskowitz left for good in the fall of 1916. She would later use her hard-won experience in resolving conflicts by creating mixed boards of representatives in her political career.

Moskowitz made her only attempt to run for public office shortly before her marriage in 1914. Endorsed by the progressives as state representative to the New York State Constitutional Convention, she finished ninth out of fifteen candidates. Family and personal illnesses sidelined her for a time. Three attempts to have children with Henry ended in miscarriage or the death of the child soon after birth. In 1916, she joined the Women's City Club of New York as a charter member, and organized Mayor Mitchel's Committee of Women on National Defense to coordinate war-related activities of women's groups. The network of powerful women she contacted through these activities became part of the power base she formed to support Smith and the state Democratic Party.

Al Smith, who came from a Catholic, mostly Irish, family, had left school after the eighth grade to help his widowed mother support the household. The Tammany Hall Democratic Club served as a surrogate parent, offering Smith a job as a process-server for the Commission of Jurors. In 1903, Smith was elected to the State Assembly, where he served for 12 years. Hard work earned him increasingly important committee assignments. Through his interest in labor issues, he became vice-chair of the Factory Investigating Commission. He then was elected sheriff of New York County, and, in 1917, president of the Board of Aldermen. In 1918, he was nominated by the Democratic Party for governor.

It was the first election in New York open to women voters, who had won suffrage the year before. An Independent Citizens Committee for Alfred E. Smith, comprised of professionals, lawyers, and reformers, one-third of them women, included Belle Moskowitz. She suggested a Women's Division to address the "social interests" of women and was put in charge. The end of the war seemed to Moskowitz an opportunity for new beginnings, and after Smith won the election she and Frances Perkins presented Smith with a plan for a Reconstruction Commission. A blue-ribbon commission of experts, which included Democrats, Independents, and even Republican federal office-holders, it was set up to deal with the state's social, political, and economic problems. Smith named her the commission's executive secretary, and she chose Robert Moses as chief of staff. Although the Republicans in the legislature voted down the commission's funding, fearing it would get Smith reelected, private funds were raised. Moskowitz organized and coordinated all 11 committees and their reports, released in 1919 and 1920, which defined Smith's future programs in labor, public health, and government reorganization. Not coincidentally, they reflected many of Moskowitz's ideas about the relationship between society and government.

Belle Moskowitz enjoyed the use of power, but she was not personally ambitious. Like Eleanor Roosevelt , Frances Perkins and other women, she was interested in politics not to advance her own career but to promote an agenda. She turned down offers of official posts, which made her more effective as Smith's strategist-atlarge during his rise to power but left her adrift when his fortunes declined. Her self-effacing behavior protected Smith from criticism of "petticoat government," and was also in keeping with her traditional beliefs about male and female roles. Perkins, who worked closely with them both, noted: "Belle arranged things so that when they went before Al, it was so logical to make the decision that she'd already told you would be made … as though it were something that he had thought of." With women, however, she was more forthright about claiming power. Politicians and editors learned to come to her first, although New York political reporters respected her long-standing rule of never being quoted directly.

Moskowitz suggested programs to Smith, recruited people to implement the programs, and then publicized their success. The reconstruction plan she favored featured the reorganization of state government; industrial justice, including a 48-hour work week for women; and quality-oflife improvements such as better hospitals, lowcost housing, the state park parkways system promoted by Robert Moses, and an education policy to raise teachers' salaries and equalize schools across the state. Although Smith was defeated after his first term in 1920, he would be re-elected in 1922, 1924, and 1926, partly because of the popularity of reconstruction.

Moskowitz contributed to public acceptance of Smith's campaign for reform through innovative public-relations techniques. She was one of the first to recognize and develop the potential of public relations, beginning with her exhibits at the Education Alliance and continuing with staged events to promote her legislative agenda. To publicize Smith's reconstruction plan, she pioneered the use of film. In 1921 and 1922, while Smith was out of office, he worked on a plan for a Port Authority to serve New York and New Jersey. Moskowitz directed the publicity campaign for this plan as well, producing a film to show how the Port Authority would bring food more quickly to market. She also worked closely with women's groups to get Smith re-elected governor in 1922, and later to pass his legislative program though the Assembly. As the only person devoted full-time to his political success, she accepted the position of publicity director of the Democratic State Committee, and helped build a strong Women's Division, of which Eleanor Roosevelt was an important member, to campaign extensively throughout the state every year. In 1924, and especially in 1928, Moskowitz would work for Smith's nomination and election as president.

Alfred E. Smith was already a strong contender for the presidential nomination in 1924. Franklin D. Roosevelt, recovering from losing the use of his legs after a bout with polio, directed the preconvention campaign, while Belle Moskowitz dealt with publicity. She worked closely with women delegates to the Democratic convention, who now made up almost 14% of the total. FDR's rousing nomination speech was generally considered to have helped him more than Smith, who deadlocked with former President Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo. In desperation, the convention finally nominated the former ambassador to Great Britain, John Davis, who proved a lackluster candidate.

By 1927, Moskowitz considered the political situation auspicious. Smith had few rivals, and Southern Democrats knew they needed a candidate from the populous Northeast to win. She participated in strategy sessions as well as in publicity work, urging Smith to discuss openly the issue of his religion. She did not regularly meet with the "War Board" of men promoting Smith's candidacy, although she frequently consulted with a small inner circle drawn from the same group. Her source of power was her index of every person who had ever sent Smith a supportive letter; with this list, she cultivated contacts in the West and handled publicity about Western support in a way which made Smith appear unbeatable. Her strategy for California, where McAdoo was still strong, overrode a recommendation made by the War Board and helped Smith win the primary there.

After Smith's nomination, he chose John J. Raskob as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), although Moskowitz and long-time advisor Joseph Proskauer opposed him. She also did not work well with Franklin Roosevelt, the gubernatorial candidate for New York. Moskowitz was in charge of publicity, sending out daily press releases to 2,700 newspapers, arranging interviews, and working on Smith's speeches as well as on the DNC campaign handbook. She did not travel much outside of New York, and was not sensitive to attitudes in other parts of the country, which may have limited her effectiveness. More than that, however, Smith's liberal, provincial New York, anti-Prohibition demeanor was not appealing to voters in the conservative 1920s, and Smith was defeated, receiving 15 million votes to more than 21 million for Herbert Hoover. However, in an interview which appeared in the New York Telegram at the end of 1928, Moskowitz predicted that "unemployment may spread…. And hunger would bring a new interest in progressive ideas."

Moskowitz had hoped that FDR, now governor of New York, would hire her as his private secretary, as Smith suggested. But Roosevelt had Eleanor to advise him, and said he needed a strong man to lean on in public. Moskowitz opened her own public-relations firm, Publicity Associates, through which she earned far more than she had ever before. She also made writing and speaking engagements for Al Smith to keep him in the public eye. He allowed his name to be put forward at the 1932 Democratic convention, ostensibly in the interest of an open convention, but most Democrats wanted the party to unite behind the man most likely to win back the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many of Roosevelt's New Deal policies would be based on the progressive programs he had inherited as governor of New York from Smith and Moskowitz.

On January 2, 1933, 55-year-old Belle Moskowitz died from complications following a fall on the steps of her house. Her death doomed Al Smith's efforts to remain a player on the political scene and ended an extraordinary alliance. In addition to the ethnic, religious, and cultural differences between them, there had been the difference in gender. Belle's granddaughter and biographer, Elisabeth Israels Perry , observed, "No male politician had ever relied so heavily on the advice of a woman outside his family." Smith posthumously paid tribute to the keenness of Belle Moskowitz's mind and its "ability to get at the essentials of a complicated question and to explain it briefly and simply," as well as to her tremendous capacity for work. Her obituary in The New York Times noted that during Al Smith's ascendancy in the Democratic Party, Belle Moskowitz "wielded more political power than any other woman in the United States."

sources:

The New York Times (obituary and editorial). January 3, 1933.

Perry, Elisabeth Israels. Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith. Oxford University Press, 1987.