The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (22 page)

As Pollock led by converting active lines into pure abstractions, Rothko instilled colors with emotion, foregoing the necessity of shapes drawn from real things. The tension in his paintings was often derived from the elemental force of the colors themselves. For example, he was concerned with the effect of how a certain kind of yellow might react with a certain kind of red or purple and how their relationship might inject an emotion into the viewer. Rothko did not name his paintings, but assigned numbered dates to them. The viewer then had to react to what was on the canvas without any help from everyday images or literary or historical references. Pure art for art’s sake, colors melting into colors, were to take us away from the pain of the real world into visions of infinity.

T
he magic of science reveals itself when research, first intended to produce one result, surprises with the unexpected. Ferdinand Julius Cohn, son of the German Jewish ghetto in Breslau, studied to become a botanist. His studies of microscopic plant organisms, such as fungi and algae, were innovative and influential. Yet these studies led Cohn to unimagined discoveries in an entirely different field—bacteriology.

Cohn shifted his focus away from plants to different but remarkably similar living things called Vibronia (a form of bacteria). He identified these bacteria as a form of plant life, not the animals scientists then assumed they were. This identification and his related discovery of spores built the foundation of modern bacteriology.

The son of a merchant, Cohn was a child prodigy who was first thought to be slow and difficult. Overcoming a hearing defect, he attended the University of Breslau, studying his beloved botany. Cohn was refused a degree, however, because he was Jewish. Despite emancipation from the ghetto, for most of the nineteenth century, Jews could not enjoy equal rights in most of Europe. He ventured to Berlin, where he received his doctorate at the age of nineteen. While studying microorganisms, he became interested in the politics of revolution. During the 1848 rebellion Cohn made clear his radical support, and during the ensuing suppression was barred from a teaching position in the Prussian capital. At age twenty-two Cohn returned to Breslau where he would remain for most of his life. Securing a teaching post at the university, Cohn began to research the cell lives of the tiniest creatures.

Scientists during the 1850s were looking within cellular structure for the very substance of life. Cohn was sure he had located the driving force of life in a single material called protoplasm. Although his research on protoplasm would prove very influential during the nineteenth century, it was a way station along a path of much more important exploration.

In a major text on fungi and algae published in 1854, Cohn identified a bacterium called Vibronia, asserting that it was a form of plant, not animal, life. Vibronia had been thought to be an animal due to the way it moved, propelled quickly by cilia or long tendrils. Cohn, the master botanist, recognized how Vibronia was similar to, yet different from, fungi and algae. He noted, in addition, the particular ways this bacterium developed, remarkably close to the growth of algae.

After establishing a prestigious institute on plant physiology, Cohn began the second phase of his career, primarily studying bacteria. He began an academic journal to record and publicize his findings. The journal would contain articles, which would serve as the basis of contemporary bacteriology. Cohn’s major work of this period included the classification of bacteria into groups according to their shapes, the discovery that fungi and bacteria had no genetic relationship, but that bacteria ate much like plants, ingesting their nitrogen from the same source but carbon differently (bacteria loved carbohydrates), and the notation of the temperatures at which bacteria could survive (they can be frozen, only to thrive again when thawed) or be boiled to death (eighty degrees Celsius). Cohn also greatly influenced the pioneering work of Robert Koch, whose discovery of the cure for anthrax revolutionized farming.

As the father of modern bacteriology, Cohn merits inclusion on the list of the Jewish 100. His analysis and cataloging of bacteria enabled other scientists not only to identify bacterial hazards to good health and hygiene, but also to develop effective means of defense in humanity’s continuing war against microbes.

S
amuel Gompers was an organizer of the cigar makers’ union, founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and leader in what was truly a class struggle for equitable wages, reasonable work hours, child labor laws, industrial regulations, workers’ compensation, the right to bargain collectively, and the use of strikes and boycotts to force economic concessions. Most of the power of organized labor over the past one hundred years, not only in America but across Europe, arose from the work of this tireless man.

The ability of labor to organize seems today almost an inalienable right. Before Gompers, this was not so. In the early days of the sweatshops, laborers had no rights. Men, women, and children worked all day and night, six or seven days a week, in substandard conditions for inadequate pay. Many of these workers were Jewish, most refugees from tsarist and Polish persecution, all seeking a better life in America only to find unending hardship, drudgery, and degradation.

Gompers was born in London in 1850 to Solomon Gompers and the former Sara Rood. In 1863 the family emigrated to America, where Solomon became an expert laborer making cigars. Samuel followed his father’s example, apprenticing for small cigar-making companies. Although Samuel married another London-born Jew, Sophia Julian, he never practiced Judaism (except for a wearing a cantor’s skullcap as an older man to hid his thinning hair). First, Ethical Culture, then trade unionism, would supplant his origins.

After the Civil War, mechanized means of mass production overcame the skilled art of expertly rolling cigars by hand. Cheap labor was supplied by slum workers, mostly newly arrived from Bohemia. Faced with the threat of the loss of their livelihood and a nationwide economic depression in the 1880s, the skilled cigar makers organized. Gompers worked as a local union organizer, becoming known for his talented oration. He was soon named president of his local union. Because of his union activities, Gompers lost his job and was out of work for several months, his family subsisting on flour soup and handouts from relatives. The life of a union man was not easily chosen.

Gompers rose quickly to national prominence. He acknowledged that the union could not resist either improved industrial methods or the entry of legions of unskilled workers. Gompers’ “new unionism” recognized the need for central management of work stoppages (not the random, ineffective strikes cigar makers were unfortunately so fond of), securing benefits for the unemployed, coordinating local activities with national labor groups, and publicizing union issues in newspapers and magazines.

Largely resulting from the failure of the most prominent of national groups of the time, the Knights of Labor, to protect workers adequately, Gompers formed the AFL in 1887. Gompers, thirty-seven years of age, was elected its first president, serving, except for one year off, for thirty-eight years until his death. In the early days of the AFL, Gompers was its only full-time officer. He developed its own journal, built up a strike fund, and brought many disparate, sometimes conflicting trade movements under one umbrella. The AFL consisted for many years primarily of skilled workers who were employed by small owners. Gompers refused to admit migrant laborers or workers without skills. He publicly opposed an open-door immigration policy (a position the major labor unions continued to endorse in their opposition during the 1990s to NAFTA), showing particular resentment of Chinese immigration. He who had been an immigrant himself as a young boy chose to ignore his own tale.

Gompers remains a controversial figure in labor history. He founded the first great labor federation committed to many of the guiding principles of the movement. However, he considered the goals of trade unionism to be paramount. The period between the Civil War and the First World War was a time of bitter hostility toward the labor movement. Anything that stood in its way had to be overcome, whatever the cost. Gompers sought to make labor unions respectable, not an easy task in an age of extremely violent anarchism, vibrant socialism, and abundant radicalism. As head of the War Committee on Labor during the First World War and in his aggressive stance against the “Red Scare” that followed the Russian revolution, Gompers did much to gain respectability for his federation. He was also active in early legislative efforts to protect children in the workplace, establish the eight-hour day, and provide for compensation to injured workers. His lack of foresight in welcoming semi-skilled and unskilled laborers into the AFL was rectified by its merger in 1955 with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which represented many of those workers.

A tireless traveler while the head of the AFL, Gompers logged tens of thousands of miles per year in journeys across the country extolling the virtues of trade unionism. On one such trip to San Antonio in 1924, a weary, now blinded Gompers succumbed, leaving the future of the labor movement to mostly lesser men.

F
inding the right way to express oneself is the challenge of everyday speech. Do we say what we think, do we think what we say, do we repeat what we should not have said, do we fail to say again what we should have repeated? Do our words mean what we think they mean, or can they mean something different, something not burdened by custom, expectation, convenience?

Gertrude Stein was a Jewish American woman born in the 1800s who showed twentieth-century writers how to write. From a prosperous background, she provided psychological and edible sustenance in her Paris salon to a generation of great artists. Painters such as Picasso, Matisse, Rousseau, and Braque, as well as a later group of American expatriates—authors Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Anderson and composer Thomson—feasted on her sage counsel.

Stein believed that for the United States, the twentieth century began just after its Civil War. Since Europe entered the modern era only after the First World War, America was therefore the oldest country in the world, and by its innovative spirit, the newest. For Stein, the American century was not about people living on top of each other in antique European cities, reflected in a continental literature obsessed with itself. Rather, modern art was about wide, open American spaces, large shapes and angles, broad vistas, the thing being what it is and isn’t it fine as it is!

Ernest Hemingway owed his mostly nonrepresentational work largely to her direct influence. The familiar Hemingway style with its taut, plain sentences, letting in no extraneous emotion, is what it is because of Gertrude Stein. She helped him clean up his plodding early prose into powerfully expressive poetry.