Rose Harriet Pastor Stokes

• Rose Pastor Stokes
• Born: July 18, 1879
• Died: June 20, 1933

Author, socialist, and cofounder of the American Communist party, was born in Augustów, Poland, to Joseph Wies-lander and Anna (Lewin) Wieslander. Her father died soon after her birth, and she took the name of her stepfather. The family emigrated to London’s Whitechapel ghetto, where her stepfather worked as a cigar maker and her mother sewed bows on women’s slippers, a task at which she helped from at the age of four. She received her only formal education between the ages of seven and nine at the Bell Lane Free School, a Jewish school in London.

In 1890 Rose Pastor emigrated to the United States with her parents and their six younger children. They settled for a time in Cleveland, where she found work in a cigar factory, receiving some additional education there from the workers, who took turns reading aloud. She began submitting poems to a local Jewish paper, the Review and Observer, and then to the Jewish Daily News of New York, which invited her to become a regular contributor. Her first collection of poems was published when she was fourteen.

When her family moved to New York City in 1903, Rose Pastor became assistant editor of the English department of the Jewish Daily News and Jewish Gazette. Under the pen names Zelda and Observer she wrote poems, columns of advice to young women, and feature stories. At this time she also began contributing to the International Socialist Review. One of her Jewish Daily News assignments was an interview with the wealthy James Graham Phelps Stokes, a social worker at the University Settlement on the Lower East Side (and the brother of the housing reformer I. N. P. Stokes); the meeting led in 1905 to what the press described as a “Cinderella marriage” between the poor but vivacious journalist and the millionaire socialist. After a three-month trip to Europe, they settled on the Lower East Side, where, amid a circle of bohemian and radical friends, they devoted themselves to writing socialist propaganda and working for such reforms as birth control and woman suffrage. The couple had no children.

From 1907 to 1917 J. G. Phelps Stokes was president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the educational branch of the Socialist party. Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the society’s most successful lecturers and took part in numerous labor disputes, including the shirtwaist workers’ strike of 1909-10 and the hotel and restaurant workers’ strike of 1912. In 1913 she and other socialist intellectuals signed a letter to the International Socialist Review protesting the expulsion of Industrial Workers of the World president William G. (Big Bill) Haywood from the executive board of the Socialist party, opening a rift between right- and left-wing socialists that widened into a breach with the onset in Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Continuing her prolific writing, she had articles and poems published in Everybody’s, The Arena, The Independent, and The Century. Her translation, with Helena Frank, of the Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld’s Songs of Labor was published in 1914. In 1916 she wrote The Woman Who Wouldn’t, a feminist/socialist play about a young flowermaker who, after being refused an abortion by the family doctor, rears her child alone, becomes a famous labor leader, and later refuses to compromise her independence by marrying the child’s father.

Rose and J. G. Phelps Stokes left the Socialist party because of its stand against American entry into World War I and participated in an unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition of pro-war socialists and progressives called the National party. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Rose Pastor Stokes—but not her husband—returned to the Socialist party.

In 1918 she was the central figure in one of the most notorious prosecutions under the World War I Espionage Act. She was indicted for writing to The Kansas City Star, “I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers.” The judge admitted into the record her entire socialist background, including her sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution; charged the members of the jury to find her guilty if they believed that her remark might tend to lower the morale of the troops; and informed them that the First Amendment protects only “friendly criticism.” Although her conviction and ten-year sentence were overturned on appeal in 1920, throughout the war the Stokes case stood as a reminder of the fate awaiting anyone who dared to discuss the subject of war profiteering.

In 1919 Stokes was one of the left-wing socialists—along with John Reed, James Larkin, and leaders of the Socialist party’s Slavic federations—who formed the American Communist party. For years she was one of its most colorful figures. She was one of the delegates who escaped the police raid on the Party’s “secret” open-air convention in Bridgeman, Michigan, in 1922. In the same year she was a delegate to the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow, where, “still pretty and purring and sly as a puss,” according to the poet Claude McKay, she served as the reporter for the Negro Commission.

Having long displayed an affinity for espionage and the use of pseudonyms, she was a leading advocate of the policy, rejected by the Soviet leadership, of keeping the American Communist party an underground organization. She was elected to the central committee of the Workers’ party, which was renamed the Workers’ (Communist) party in 1925 and the Communist Party U.S.A. in 1929.

During the 1920s Rose Pastor Stokes worked for the Communist party on several fronts. In 1921 she ran as a Communist for president of the borough of Manhattan. She contributed articles to the Daily Worker and to Pravda and continued her lectures and picketing. In 1929 she was arrested during a strike of the Needle Trades’ Industrial Union and in the same year was clubbed by the police during a demonstration.

When her husband sued for divorce in 1925, Rose Pastor Stokes reported that they had been “friendly enemies” for years, and though she kept his name she refused alimony. In 1927 she married Isaac Romaine, also known as V. J. Jerome, a teacher and Communist advocate who later became the Party’s cultural authority. In 1930 she retired to Westport, Connecticut, suffering from cancer. She died at the age of fifty-three in the municipal hospital of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she had been sent by friends for treatment. Her ashes were returned to New York, and her small estate was divided among friends in the Communist party, to which her chief contribution had been the force of her personality rather than theoretical or organizational talent.

The papers of Rose Pastor Stokes, including an autobiography, were turned over to Communist friends and have not been made public. For biographical data see Notable American Women (1971); The Dictionary of American Biography (1936); Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (1943); and the American Jewish Yearbook, 1904-05. For an account of her espionage conviction, see Z. Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States (1941). See also C. McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937) and B. Gitlow, I Confess (1939).