Background

She was born on July 18, 1879 in the small Jewish settlement of Augustowo, Suwalki, Russian Poland. She was the daughter of Jacob and Anna (Lewin) Wieslander but her father died when she was very young and her mother soon remarried, giving the child her step-father's name of Pastor. They were desperately poor. When Rose was three they moved to London, settling in the Whitechapel slums.

When she was eleven her people emigrated to America, settling in Cleveland, and for the next twelve years she helped support the increasing family - six other children were born - by her earnings in a cigar factory.

Education

Rose attended the Bell Lane Free School where Israel Zangwill was once a pupil and later a teacher.

Although her formal schooling was ended, her mind was constantly active and rebellious. She read, wrote, and studied at night, some of her poems were published in the New York Jewish Daily News.

Career

In 1903 she went to New York as a feature writer.

In 1918, she was sentenced to ten years in prison under the Espionage Act, for a letter written to the Kansas City Star denouncing the United States government as allied with the profiteers, but the sentence was reversed on appeal and eventually the government dropped the case.

The breach between wife and husband widened, and on October 17, 1925, the latter was granted a divorce. Although Rose retained his name throughout her life, she never accepted any alimony from him, and lived from this time in poverty.

She was several times arrested in the years that followed for picketing in strikes and taking part in radical demonstrations.

In 1930 it was found that she was suffering from cancer, which Communists claimed had its inception when she was clubbed by police in a riot in December 1929, and she now became more than ever a symbol and a martyr. Liberal and radical friends raised funds to send her on a trip to Russia and also, on two occasions, to a German clinic for treatment, but she died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1933.

Achievements

• Rose Harriet Pastor was primarily known as the author of a propaganda play, dealing with feminism and labor conditions, The Woman Who Wouldn't (1916); a translation with Helena Frank, Songs of Labor (1914); and an autobiography. Her contribution, however, was emotional rather than intellectual; she has been remembered not so much for anything she wrote or said, as for the ardor and sincerity with which she embraced the cause of rebel workers every-where and acted in accordance with her convictions.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Masses / November, 1913

    (New York: The Masses Publishing Company, 1913. The Novemb...)

  • book

  • The Liberator Magazine / February, 1923 / Cover by Frank Walts

Politics

For some years she was an active supporter of the Socialist Party, the Intercollegiate Socialist Study Society, and other radical movements. In 1917 she withdrew from the Socialist Party, after its adoption of the St. Louis Platform condemning American participation in the war, but after a few months Rose Pastor Stokes rejoined the party, and from that time was increasingly identified with its left wing and with those factions that eventually helped to found the American Communist Party.

Views

Quotations: "For ten years I have worked and produced things necessary and useful for the people of this country and for all those years I was half starved. . I worked at doing useful work and never had enough. But the moment I left the useful producing class--the moment I became part of the capitalistic class which did not have to do any productive work in order to exist - I had all the vacations I wanted, all the clothes I wanted. I had all the leisure I wanted - everything I wanted was mine without my having to do any labor in return for all I had received. "

Connections

Some five months after her arrival to New York she interviewed the young millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes - son of Anson Phelps Stokes - who was living at the University Settlement on the East Side and was interested in socialism. Out of this interview, which she wrote up with high praise for Mr. Stokes and his views, grew the romance which culminated in their marriage, July 18, 1905.

It was revealed that some time in 1927 she had remarried. Her second husband was Isaac Romaine, a private language teacher and a Communist.

Father:

Jacob Wieslander

Mother:

Anna (Lewin) Wieslander

Spouse:

James Graham Phelps Stokes

Spouse:

Isaac Romaine

Friend:

Samuel Ornitz

References

• early 1900s photo Rose Pastor Stokes Vintage Black & White Photograph e9
• The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal (New York State Series) by Alan Robert Ginsberg (2016-04-05)
• Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes
• The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal (New York State Series)
• Songs of Labor and Other Poems
• Songs of Labor and Other Poems