Baruch Charney Vladeck was an American socialist and jewish leader.
Background
Baruch Charney Vladeck was born on January 13, 1886, in Dukora, a small village near Minsk, Belarus. His name was originally Baruch Nachman Charney; Vladeck was a party name that he took in the Russian revolutionary movement and later assumed legally.
He was the second youngest son of six surviving children (five of them boys) of Wolf Charney, a leather tanner, and Broche (Hurwitz) Charney. Two of his brothers became well known in Yiddish literature, Samuel (who wrote under the name of S. Niger) as a critic and editor and Daniel, the youngest son, as a poet.
Education
Though his father died early in young Baruch's life, with the aid of a great-uncle, a rabbi, he was able to continue his schooling in the Minsk Yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, until he was fifteen.
Caught up in the current ferment of radical ideas in Jewish cultural circles in Minsk, young Charney was soon conducting classes for workers in literature and economics. The Czarist police found some of his recommended reading too liberal, and early in 1904 he was arrested and sentenced to six months in the Minsk jail.
Career
In a jail, amid a large group of political prisoners, Vladeck became committed to the revolutionary cause. On his release, he joined the "Bund, " a Jewish labor and socialist organization affiliated with the Russian Social Democratic party. He spent the next four years in fugitive life as an organizer until, fearful of arrest and exile, he fled to the United States in 1908. For three years, Vladeck toured the country, lecturing to Jewish and socialist groups and obtaining a first-hand acquaintance with America.
Settling in Philadelphia, he became in 1912, manager of the Philadelphia edition of the New York Jewish Daily Forward, the largest and most influential Yiddish daily in the United States. While in Philadelphia he studied economics and English at the University of Pennsylvania. He was naturalized in 1915. During World War I, Vladeck stepped forth to leadership in the American Socialist party. Moving in 1916 to New York City, he became city editor of the Forward, and a year later he was one of a group of Socialists elected to the board of aldermen.
He was re-elected in 1919 but lost his seat two years later when his district was gerrymandered. In the party split of 1919 Vladeck energetically fought the Communist wing. In the 1930's, when the newly revitalized Socialist party was divided between the Norman Thomas left wing and a right wing led, after the death of Morris Hillquit, by Louis Waldman, Vladeck sought to play a mediating role, but when the breach was final, he joined the right wing and, together with David Dubinsky, became one of the founders of the American Labor party.
Vladeck's early service in the board of aldermen had quickened his interest in municipal housing, and in 1934, he was named by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as a member of the New York City Housing Authority. This experience stood him in good stead when, as majority leader of a labor-anti-Tammany coalition in the New York city council in 1937, he initiated one of the first municipal slum-clearance projects in the country.
In later tribute, New York named one of its great municipal projects the Vladeck Houses. Meanwhile, as general manager of the Jewish Daily Forward, a post he held from 1918 until his death, and because of his own large gifts of oratory and persuasion, Vladeck had assumed a leading role in American Jewish life.
Vladeck died at the age of fifty-two of a coronary thrombosis. The affection in which he was held by the people of New York was demonstrated at his funeral, when over 50, 000 persons massed in Rutgers Square, facing the Forward building, to hear funeral orations by Gov. Herbert Lehman, Senator Robert F. Wagner, and other notables, while countless others lined the streets to view the cortege that bore his remains to Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
Achievements
Politics
Beginning with his early education, he read widely and, as an avocation, wrote poetry. A thick streak of revolutionary romanticism, a residue of his youth, always remained and showed itself most directly in his efforts to aid the daring underground operations in Germany, during the early days of Hitler, of a group of dissident left-wing socialists known as the New Beginning.
Yet, as regards American politics, this romanticism was always tempered by pragmatism. The socialist movement failed in the United States, he said near the end of his life, because it was out of touch with the masses of people. He called himself an "evolutionist rather than a revolutionist, " and, although a lifelong Socialist, supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1936 and Fiorello La Guardia for mayor of New York in 1937.
Views
The evolution of Vladeck's thought mirrors a similar adaptation by thousands of other socialists and radicals, including the leaders of the large and powerful needle-trades unions (the ladies' garment workers, men's clothing workers, and hatters).
His career symbolizes the transformations wrought by American institutions on a European-shaped radicalism.
Personality
A mild, scholarly-looking man, with close-cropped curly gray hair and large aquiline nose, Vladeck attracted people by the warmth of his personality and his ironic, yet sensitive, wit.
Connections
In 1911, Vladeck married Clara Richman, by whom he had three children: May, William, and Stephen.