From Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and …
From Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing, by Peter Eisenstadt. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010, Chapter 1. The Utopian pp. 21-32.
1. The Utopian
ABRAHAM KAZAN
The year is 2044 of the Christian Era. The date is August 15th, the
bicentennial of the foundation of the Rochdale Society of Equitable
Pioneers in Rochdale, England. For half a century now this day has
been a worldwide holiday, celebrated by all the races and faiths of
mankind Over the International House at Rochdale flies the rainbow
flag of the Cooperative Union of the World. Let us bow our heads in
silence, remembering the twenty-eight weavers of Rochdale, their
burden, their vision, their hopes, and their labors.
Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer
When Abraham Kazan was nearing the end of his career in the mid-1960s he
was in regular contact with many of the most powerful people in New York City
and State, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller. After one meeting. Rockefeller
was very impressed with Kazan's business acumen, and his ability to construct and
negotiate complex deals. He gave him the highest praise a Rockefeller could bestow.
He told Kazan that he "could have gone into private business, and made himself a
fortune." If Kazan was flattered by Rockefeller's remark, he remained true to his
principles. "I am a co-operator," he replied, "interested only in building the
cooperative commonwealth."1 Though Kazan never expressed his belief in
cooperatives quite as fancifully as the distinguished American philosopher Horace
M. Kallen (Kazan's good friend, and a longtime supporter of UHF) did in 1936,
he evidently felt the same way: the Rochdale principles of consumer cooperation,
mutual aid, openness to all, democratic procedures, and cooperative autonomy were
a fulcrum for not merely changing the economy, but transforming the entire world.
Two qualities dominate most accounts of Kazan; his efficient business sense,
hard-nosed to the point of ruthlessness; and an undisguised and unrequited utopianism.
Kazan had been trying to build the cooperative commonwealth, the legendary land
somewhere to the left of the borders of conventional capitalism, for his entire adult life.
He achieved fame as a builder of nonprofit housing cooperatives in the 1920s, and from
the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1960s he was an ardent proselytizer
for all forms of cooperatives. In 1951, after several decades of working in association
with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), he formed his own
organization, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), which for most of its history
would be little more than an extension of his very forceful personality. From the early
1950s through the early 1970s, UHF was the largest builder of cooperative housing in
New York City, building more than 33,000 apartments in increasingly gargantuan
housing complexes (East River, Seward Park, and Penn South in Manhattan and the
Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, before turning its attention to Rochdale
and Co-op City. Former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. would write in
1977 that Kazan was "chiefly responsible for constructing more decent middle-income
cooperative housing for New York than anyone, anywhere, at any time," and was "the
father of cooperative housing in this country."2 By the time the last of Co-op City's
buildings were open for occupancy, in 1971, Abraham Kazan had passed away, and
soon, for all intents and purposes, so would the UHF. Kazan's career spanned the birth,
the growth, and finally the decay of the idea that nonprofit cooperative housing,
attractive and relatively inexpensive, could be an alternative to the cupidity and
vagaries of the private real estate market.
Abraham Eli Kazan's life story was part of the great arc of Jewish migration
from the Russian Empire to the United States in the decades around the turn of
the twentieth century He was born in 1889, in what is now Ukraine, and what was
then the southern portion of the Pale of Settlement. Kazan's family lived on an
estate that his father managed for a tsarist general, which he remembered in his oral
history as being some sixty versts (about thirty miles) from Kiev.
The political currents and rebellion coursing through Jewish communities in
cities and market towns in the late nineteenth century left Kazan's peasant backwater
largely untouched. In about 1904, when Kazan was 15, he left Russia, largely
because he couldn't get into a good Russian school because of quotas restricting
Jewish students. Though he took some night classes, he had little formal education
in the United States, and in many ways would remain a classic autodidact.3
Kazan spent his first year in the United States on the Lower East Side, and
like so many others at the time, he found work in the garment industry. However,
about a year after arrival, his parents and siblings also crossed the ocean to America.
His father, used to life on the manor, wanted to live in a rural setting. Forsaking
Manhattan, the family relocated to the Jewish agricultural settlement in Carmel,
New Jersey. This was one of almost one hundred Jewish agricultural settlements
formed in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with
the largest cluster, some twenty in all, like Carmel, located in southern New Jersey,
organized by recent immigrants from Russia.4
Many of these settlements were sponsored by Jewish philanthropists like the
Baron de Hirsch, in a largely unsuccessful effort to keep the new Jewish immigrants
from concentrating in large eastern cities. However the colonists had their own reasons
for wanting to live in agricultural settlements; many were associated with the
Am Olam (Eternal Life) movement, which held that landlessness was the bane of
Jewish existence in Russia. Because of legal restrictions on Jewish landownership, and
cultural reluctance to engage directly in agriculture, Jews were largely relegated to the
status of middlemen and merchants; hated by the peasantry, despised by the nobility
Am Olam offered, as an alternative, a potent ideological brew composed in equal
parts of the rejection of normative patterns of Jewish life in Russia, revulsion at that
country's ever more virulent anti-Semitism, admiration for local social revolutionaries
and socialists, and an idealization of the Russian peasant farm collective (the mir),
all suffused by a general spirit of anticapitalism. Some took the direct approach to
eliminating the problem of the Diaspora and immigrated to Palestine in what would
be the first wave of modern Jewish settlement there, establishing the forerunners of
the kibbutzim and moshavim of modern Israel. But they came in far greater numbers
to the United States, creating agricultural colonies that were, as one historian
wrote, tributes to the "spirit of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Tolstoy."5
Carmel was one of the largest of the Jewish agricultural settlements, with 1,250
residents in 1909. It was also one of the most radical, and developed a reputation
for the significant numbers of socialists, anarchists, and atheists in its ranks, and
for some of the best developed communal and cooperative institutions of any of the
settlements.6 Some of the residents at Carmel established in 1889 a cooperative for
the purchase of essential items for consumption. In addition to farming, many at
Carmel found work in nonagricultural pursuits, especially as tailors, some of whom
created a short-lived producer's cooperative making shirts and dresses. Around
1910 some residents in Carmel experimented with communal living arrangements.
Kazan had moved to one of the few places in the United States where Jewish immigrants
were living their lives cooperatively.7
The extent of Kazan's involvement with the cooperative activity at Carmel is not
clear. Of the time he spent at Carmel, he remembered that he, like sullen teenagers
everywhere, "actually did not do anything during the year I stayed in the country."
This is something of an exaggeration. He met a somewhat older immigrant whose
name is transcribed with the somewhat unlikely (or at least not very Jewish sounding)
spelling of "Rassass" in his oral history. Rassass helped Kazan learn English
and introduced him to radical socialist politics. Kazan's work as a labor organizer
commenced when a Philadelphia garment manufacturer, subcontracting some of
its work to one of Carmel's garment factories, was the subject of a labor action.
Despite the pro-labor sentiments in Carmel, there evidently was some debate on
whether the local garment factory should engage in a sympathy boycott, and by his
own recollection, Kazan and Rassass, working with an International Ladies' Garment
Workers' Union (ILGWU) organizer, held an open-air rally on the propitious
day of May 1. The protest led to Kazan's arrest, and to his father's worries that his
son would be sent to an American equivalent of Siberia.8
Kazan did other organizing for the ILGWU while in Carmel, but it is not too
surprising that it was hard to keep the teenaged Kazan down on the farm and away
from the attractions and possibilities of life in the city. After about a year in southern
New Jersey, Kazan returned to Manhattan. He never made any great claims
about the impact of Carmel on his subsequent career, but it would seem that the
example of workers living, working, and educating themselves together, on land
they owned, in a community that contained both factories and forests, made an
impression on him. Throughout his career Kazan's cooperative ideal was an urban
pastoral, and perhaps the "tower in the park" style of Kazan's developments, such
as Rochdale, had a distant reflection in the Russian peasant commune in New Jersey
where he lived as a teenager.
By his own account, Kazan's real introduction to cooperatives took place in
New York City sometime around 1909. He worked for a year in a garment factory
and joined ILGWU Local 35, but soon got a job as an "office boy" in ILGWU
headquarters and began his lifelong career as a labor movement official. He took
some adult education courses, and in a private library in Yorkville he met Tom Bell,
described by Kazan (rather narrowly) as an asthmatic Scottish liquor salesman,
who converted him to the cause of cooperation. This was almost certainly Thomas
Hastie Bell, a Scottish anarchist admired by Emma Goldman for his "propagandistic
zeal and daring."9 Among Bell's exploits was managing, during the state visit
of Tsar Nicholas II to Leith, Scotland, in 1896, to dash beneath the heavy security
surrounding the tsar, jump up to his carriage, and shout in his face, "Down with the
Russian tyrant! To hell with empires!" an act that must have endeared him to every
Jew he met in New York City.10
Bell was an anarchist with a literary bent. While in Britain he had been an associate
of William Morris and of the exiled Russian prince and anarchist Peter Kropotkin—
who described Bell as a "thoroughly honest, fully reliable man."11 Bell published
short volumes on two of his friends: one on Edward Carpenter, the anarchist
sympathizer and pioneering defender of male homosexuality, and another on
Oscar Wilde, whom he met a few months before Wilde died in Paris in 1900. They
discussed Wilde's essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and Bell came away
convinced that Wilde's political opinions, like his own, "were akin to Kropotkin's.”12
As much as Oscar Wilde or Bell, and originating from the same anarchist
inspirations, Kazan hoped that the transformation of the material condition of the
working classes would bring about revolutionary changes to the "soul of man,"
freeing it to realize its full creative potential.
But as Kazan relates it, the influence of Bell was in other ways very practical.
Bell convinced Kazan "that there was no sense in trying to build a socialist society
for improving conditions in the country, when we are not prepared, we haven't
got the men to manage You have to be practical and take over businesses. If you
haven't got the men to take it over how are you going to do it.?" Without practical
managerial experience. Bell argued, the coming of socialism wouldn't really change
much—the newly empowered workers, would "have to fall back on the same people
that are mismanaging it now." Kazan had been a committed socialist, but he now
concluded that socialism was no longer sufficient—anarchism and the creation of
cooperatives was now the focus of his energies.13
Bell's message can easily be read as a call to abandon radical agitation for work in
practical businesses. But this is to misunderstand the anarchist critique of socialism
that lay behind Bell's argument: gaining control of the means of production through
politics is merely to change ownership, leaving the means of production themselves
unchanged and the new owners hostage to the expertise of the old managerial class.
The most important thing for workers to do is to create their own forms of enterprise,
learn how to manage them, and to start doing this in the here and now. For Bell,
political agitation for some future revolution was merely postponing the day of
reckoning. Unless workers are ready, any future revolution will be at best cosmetic.
It is not politics, but workers creating their own forms of economic organization,
that will usher in comprehensive social transformation.
Kazan followed Bell into several cooperative enterprises until, in 1910, Bell's
asthma led him to depart for Arizona. These ventures included a short-lived
cooperative hat store on Delancey Street; and then a Second Avenue restaurant,
which had a reputation for good talk and poor food. The restaurant supposedly
employed a young member of Local 10 of the ILGWU, David Dubinsky, as a
waiter, and, during his few months in New York City in 1916 and 1917, had Leon
Trotsky as a patron. Kazan soon moved on to larger cooperative ventures.14
At the time Kazan started working for the ILGWU, it was a leader in what was
known as the New Unionism, the effort by workers to go beyond collective bargaining
and become full partners of both capital and the state in planning for the industrial
future of the United States. One goal of the New Unionism was to improve the
lives of workers away from the shop floor by developing better facilities for leisure,
housing, and shopping, including a renewed interest in consumer cooperatives.15
World War I and the accompanying rise in the cost of living gave an impetus
to cooperatives within the labor movement. Kazan got his start in large-scale
cooperatives around 1916, with the assistance of ILGWU president Benjamin
Schlesinger. (Kazan later returned the favor and persuaded the city to name the
intermediate school they erected in Rochdale Village in Schlesinger's honor, to
the endless befuddlement of students, parents, and teachers, who wondered about
the identity of this by then quite obscure figure.) Kazan, who always had a rather
jaundiced view of small shopkeepers as petit bourgeois reactionaries, was angered
that some grocers were charging extremely high prices for sugar. With
Schlesinger's assistance, Kazan set up a sugar cooperative with 7,000 members.
This expanded into a cooperative grocery store at Second Avenue and 14th Street,
and one Passover, the store distributed over 100,000 pounds of matzoh. But at the
end of 1918 the grocery store was closed, and Kazan took a job with the ILGWU's
rival among the city's garment unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America (ACWA).16
The Amalgamated, under its longtime president Sidney Hillman, was, if anything,
even more committed to the New Unionism than the ILGWU .17 In the ACWA
Kazan worked primarily on a variety of union-sponsored welfare and quality
of life programs, and his success in turning around a failing credit union (at the
time an innovation only recently introduced into the United States) enabled him to
get more directly involved in cooperatives."18 His single-minded support for
cooperatives would lead to frequent differences with his superiors. On one level
this reflected an ideological chicken-and-egg debate—what came first, building
workers' institutions or the political support that would enable their survival? For
Kazan, the creation of cooperatives was an end in itself; for most other union
officials, cooperatives were part of a broader political program of workers'
advancement, and not necessarily the most important part. Kazan's anarchist
tendency to dismiss electoral politics as irrelevant did not fit in well with the
ACWU's agenda, and this contributed, eventually, to his leaving their employ.
Even those who approved of cooperatives wondered if they could survive without
political support. In his oral history Kazan said of the ACWU leadership:19
They were dreaming of bringing about socialism in this country, and they
were active during electoral campaigns, trying to elect a congressman or
assemblyman or other officials. In their opinion, no matter how much success
could be achieved via cooperative work, some legislators would put legislation
on the books that would wipe out all possibilities of conducting cooperative
business.
Kazan felt that this was backward. Create successful cooperatives first, he argued,
and the political support would come. Politicians will always want to be associated
with success.
As in the ILGWU, the Amalgamated supported Kazan's passion for cooperatives
up to a point, and as part of a greater goal. In 1919 Hillman argued that while
consumer cooperatives would not "free the worker from his present status," they
"will bring a large measure of democracy and human happiness into industry."20
Hillman, like Kazan, had an interest in cooperatives as a means of providing workers
with managerial experience.21 However, cooperatives were at best a temporary
substitute for a comprehensive social democracy. As Hillman's biographer Steven
Eraser has written, cooperatives "notwithstanding some overblown rhetoric," were
for Hillman never "more than second-best solutions."22 Kazan felt this acutely, and
later claimed that while Hillman was ready to bask in the reflected publicity from
cooperative endeavors, he never took them sufficiently seriously.23 In his memoirs,
Kazan went out of his way to diminish the role Hillman and Amalgamated played
in the creation of his cooperative housing developments.24 The actual sequence of
events and apportioning of credit between the two men is difficult to untangle from
extant records, but whatever the truth, and despite their differences, Kazan and
Hillman certainly worked together closely to create Kazan's first great effort in the
area of cooperative housing, the Amalgamated Houses.
The year 1927 was a remarkable year in the Bronx, which in addition to the
heroic feats of Babe Ruth and the 1927 Yankees saw the opening of no less than four
cooperative housing projects in the borough, all built by different factions of the
Jewish left, among them the Amalgamated Houses. Although there were precedents
for cooperative housing in the United States and Europe, there was nothing to
rival the Bronx efflorescence of 1927. The United Workers Cooperative on Allerton
Avenue, known as the Coops, were closely aligned ideologically to the Communist
Party The Shalom Alechem Houses, constructed by the socialist fraternal organization
Workmen's Circle, built a cooperative overlooking the Jerome Park Reservoir
that opened in 1927. The Farband Cooperative, with its roots in the Socialist-Zionist
movement, opened a cooperative on Williamsbridge Road. The largest and most
ambitious of the four cooperatives was the Amalgamated Houses.25
On November 1, 1927, the first cooperators moved in to Amalgamated Houses,
less than a year after the groundbreaking, on Thanksgiving Day 1926. As would be
his pattern, Kazan was in a rush to move in families, who started occupying apartments
even before the electricity had been turned on. The decision to expand was
made almost immediately, and by 1931 there were 620 units in the Amalgamated.
The Amalgamated Houses were an immediate success and were hailed by the housing
expert Edith Elmer Wood in 1931 as "the best and most successful cooperative
housing thus far seen in the United States."26
The Amalgamated and all the Bronx cooperatives shared a common ethic and
aesthetic. They were conceived as anti-slums, urban housing that tried to reverse,
condition by condition, the problems slums caused. If slums were crowded and
teeming, Kazan and the other cooperative builders would build housing that was
airy and spacious. If tenement greenery consisted of grass in sidewalk cracks, he
would build his housing around parks. If tenement apartments were small and
unsalubrious, they would build roomy, well-lit, and well-ventilated apartments. If
tenements were thrown up haphazardly, without a thought other than profit
maximization, they would not only build housing, they would build communities.
And if tenement dwellers were subject to the arbitrary whims of landlords, they
would create buildings whose residents would be owners who could vote
democratically on their future.
The planning and the architecture for these cooperatives came from many sources:
the "philanthropic tenements" that rich benefactors (such as John D. Rockefeller
Jr.) had been building in New York City since the late nineteenth century, as
well as the socialist and especially anarchist ideas about small-scale communities
and regional development promulgated by the nineteenth-century anarchist Elisee
Reclus and especially Peter Kropotkin, in his Fields, Factories, and Workshops
(1898). This anarchist tradition, in turn, had a considerable impact on the first
generation of urban planners, such as Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, the
theorist of the "garden city," who led the leftist and liberal push to eliminate
tenement housing.27
Cooperative ventures of all sorts flourished at the Amalgamated. There was a
bus service to take children to school and adults to the subway for the work day, a
credit union, and a grocery that purchased eggs directly from a cooperatively run
farm in the Hudson Valley. There was a full-time educational director and extensive
cultural offerings, which included plays in English and Yiddish, a day camp and
nursery, a library with several thousand volumes, a music room and string orchestra,
an auditorium seating five hundred, and a lecture and concert series. After an
argument with the utility Con Edison (whose monopolistic practices and prices
made it one of Kazan's betes noires) the Amalgamated Houses operated its own
power plant from 1937 to 1944, when the war brought this experiment to an end.
Kazan wrote in 1929 that the members of the Amalgamated "had been given the
privilege to show [that] where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater
good can be accomplished for the benefit of all."28 Kazan wrote the following year
that the Amalgamated would be "the nucleus of the metropolis of the future."29 The
Amalgamated Houses would be the blueprint for all his future success, and for the
rest of his career Kazan would try to duplicate the success he enjoyed there.
Kazan's later career in cooperatives continued to exemplify the anarchist-
cooperative principles he learned from Thomas Hastie Bell. The extent to which
the later Kazan can be called an anarchist is a vexing question. On the one hand,
as far as I know, he never publicly spoke or wrote about anarchism, and the subject
does not come up in his oral history. Against this, there is the testimony of Kazan's
protege Harold Ostroff who when I interviewed him in 2004 told me that "Kazan
defined himself as an anarchist."30 There is no reason to doubt Ostroff's assertion,
to which one can add much circumstantial evidence—the prevalence of anarchists
among Kazan's friends and colleagues (including Ostroff himself), and his
continuing adherence to certain anarchist principles, most importantly the rejection
of politics as a means of advancing the interest of workers, in favor of the formation
of communities and cooperatives dedicated to mutual self-help and advancement.
The impact of anarchism on the Jewish labor movement is often overlooked,
largely because of anarchism's relative fading after 1920, but when Kazan became
active in the Jewish labor movement, few issues were more important than the constant
ideological sparring between anarchists and socialists. The rejection of politics
led to two main anarchist tactics for advancing their aims: terror and assassination,
and self-help and mutual aid. After 1920, the first tactic was repressed by the
government and rejected by almost all who remained true to the anarchist calling,
while cooperation was gently co-opted by socialists and progressive liberals. In addition,
after the rise of Communism, a left polarized between Communists and
non-Communists tended to bring the socialists and anarchists together, both in
their tactics, and increasingly, in their ideologies.
In his early ascent, Kazan was surrounded by anarchists. When Kazan joined
the ILGWU, a sizable anarchist faction had been active in the union for some time,
including the organizer Rose Pesotta, author of the well-known memoir Bread
upon the Waters.31 The Amalgamated Houses became a haven for anarchists, many
of whom would be very active in its management and in other cooperatives built
by the UHF. Harold Ostroff was the son of a lifelong anarchist (and a longtime
Amalgamated Houses resident), as was Abe Bluestein, who served as a manager at
Amalgamated Houses and later business manager at Co-op City, and who saw in his
work with cooperatives a natural extension of his anarchist beliefs.32 Another anarchist
who lived in the Amalgamated, albeit briefly, was the German emigre Rudolf
Rocker, who was probably the most influential anarchist of the interwar years. In
the fall of 2004, when I was finishing my interview with Harold Ostroff, he went to
a bookshelf and pulled down a dog-eared copy of Rocker's Nationalism and Culture
(1937). This was, he said, the most important book he had ever read, and that both
he and Kazan had been longtime admirers of Rocker.33
One of Kazan's mentors in cooperation was James Peter Warbasse, the founder
of the Cooperative League of America in 1916 and a tireless advocate for all things
cooperative for half a century. (The importance of the link was demonstrated
after Warbasse's death in 1957, when Kazan memorialized him in a sister project
to Rochdale Village, the 4,000 unit Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn,
opened in 1961. It was the only UHF cooperative named after an individual.) If
Warbasse was not an anarchist de jure, he certainly was an antistatist, who hoped,
as he expressed it in 1937, that the state would eventually wither away. "But as the
people in their cooperative societies supply their needs, the need for state service
declines Government is a product of injustices which cooperation would heal.
The cooperative society is the antithesis of the state. Cooperation prophesies the
fading of the state.”34
To be sure, Kazan did recognize that the cooperative movement had to work
with the state and the relevant government agencies on occasion, particularly in the
building of housing cooperatives, which required a massive initial investment far in
excess of what the prospective residents could provide themselves. And from the
Amalgamated Houses on, he understood the importance of obtaining tax reductions
or abatements to make cooperative housing ventures viable. But the role of the
government was that of a catalyst, providing an initial boost, and then letting the
self-owned and self-governing cooperative to manage its own affairs. If cooperatives
and the cooperative economy were a success, there would be no need for workers
to take over the state; the state would recognize their manifest advantages and superiority
over other forms of economic organization, come to them, and beg their
assistance. And this (at least for middle-income housing in New York City in the
1950s and early 1960s) is more or less what happened, when Robert Moses sought
the assistance of Kazan in his plans for middle-income housing.
In any event, Kazan never lost his anarchist conviction that politics was a futile
diversion, and that extraneous political obligations tended to muck up the transition
to a postcapitalist society. The tenacity with which he held to this was responsible
for his reputation in some quarters for ruthlessness. He felt abundantly confirmed
in his beliefs by the events of the 1930s, when all the Bronx cooperatives save the
Amalgamated were forced to abandon their cooperative form of organization. The
immediate cause of the reversals was the Depression, and the Amalgamated too
found itself in dire financial straits, but managed to weather the storm. For Kazan
the reason for his success where others failed was evident. Reviewing this matter in
1947, Kazan concluded that "the most important single factor that is responsible
for the success of our Cooperative is the uncompromising policy set by sponsors of
the organization to confine its activities to such as would serve the general welfare
of all its members." For Kazan, other "so-called cooperatives" allowed themselves
to become "the tail-end of some other ideology," with disastrous results.35
The other cooperatives, Kazan thought, had been wrong to tie their operations
so closely to ideologies or to union membership. Vocational or ideological tests and
other preconditions for membership divided the cooperative between favored and
less-favored groups. An official ideology such as Communism or Socialist-Zionism
needlessly divides a cooperative into insiders and outsiders, creating endless political
debates, and perhaps most importantly, fosters the dangerous notion that an
individual owes a primary allegiance to like-minded ideologues residing elsewhere,
rather than to one's fellow cooperators. Supporting good causes such as refugees
from Hitler or striking workers, Kazan felt, was all well and good, but not with
the funds or imprimatur of the cooperative. There was nothing more crucial, or
from Kazan's perspective more radical, than ensuring the health of cooperatives
in an often hostile capitalist environment. Cooperation was an end in itself. When
cooperatives were fruitful, they tended to multiply. The more cooperatives there
were, the more the cooperative movement could accomplish. It was no accident
that Kazan dedicated his largest and most ambitious project to date to the spirit
of Rochdale. As a UHF publication described it in 1962, Rochdale Village would
not be a housing development but "a city within a city—with its own traffic-free
thoroughfares, park, library, schools, shopping centers, and office buildings." For
Kazan, the scale meant that of all his cooperatives, Rochdale would have the greatest
chance of realizing the cooperative ideal, the size making all sorts of ancillary
cooperative ventures possible. In addition to the cooperative supermarkets and
pharmacies, there were plans for a cooperative furniture store, gas station, beauty
parlor, and bowling alley.36
And with enough large cooperatives, there was no industry or service that could
not be provided with greater efficiency and less expense. Kazan wrote as early as
1929, shortly after the opening of the Amalgamated Houses, that "once the element
of profit is eliminated there is no reason why everything possible in commercial
enterprise should not be within the reach of the man of moderate means in
cooperative undertakings" and he never moved from this belief.37 Kazan's ultimate
goal was to establish an entire cooperative sector of the economy. The UHF journal
Co-op Contact in 1960 laid out an expansive, abecedarian vision of a society in
which consumers had fully organized for cooperation:38
We need consumers with vision to see the advantages of using their own
savings and purchasing power to own and operate their own automobile
agencies and repair shops, bakeries, barber shops, beauty parlors, baby-
sitting services, book and record stores, credit unions, colleges, clothing
stores, clinics—including medical, dental, and optical—drug stores,
electric generating plants, food stores, florists, funeral parlors, factories,
furniture stores, farms, gas and oil service stations, homes, hospitals, hotels,
hardware stores, insurance companies, jewelry stores, laundries, motion
picture houses, moving van services, publishing companies, photographic
supply stores, restaurants—bars, candy stores—recreation facilities—camps,
bowling alleys gymnasiums—radio stations, repair shops, shoe stores, travel
agencies, transportation facilities—taxicabs, buses, airlines—television
stations, tailor shops, telephone and telegraph services, etc., etc. etc.
Of course, nothing like this was ever realized at Rochdale or anyplace else in
the United States, though Rochdale did boast two cooperative stores, a pharmacy,
credit union, and a cooperative health center.39 As in all utopias, it was difficult for
the results to measure up to the expectations, and though Kazan was on some level
satisfied with the results, he always wanted more, and in his memoirs suggested that
" in some respects this development [Rochdale] was a disappointment. My dream
of seeing the cooperative idea expanded in different directions did not materialize.
I was hoping that more activities not only in foodstuffs but in many other fields
would develop on a cooperative basis."40
In any event, Rochdale Village was inaugurated with the highest of expectations.
In the groundbreaking ceremony for Rochdale Village, a narrator called the assembled
to stand and honor the Rochdale Pioneers, "these twenty-eight poor men of
Rochdale who lighted an unquenchable torch," their names recited, their spirit
invoked.41 " It is to be hoped," said the initial announcement of the plans for the
new cooperative, in early 1960, by its developer, the UHF, "that the members of
Rochdale Village, by their actions will make the name of their cooperative as famous
as the society in Rochdale, England."42 In his own remarks, Kazan, in unmistakably
utopian language, spoke of his hopes for Rochdale Village:43
The 6,000 families that will live in Rochdale will have a wonderful
opportunity—an opportunity to develop a community within the larger confines
of the city that will serve their taste and needs. It will be a place where
neighbors will know neighbors, where roots and traditions will be established.
A community which will be motivated not by self-interest, but by mutual aid
and self-help. Where each can contribute and all will benefit.
There was nothing wild-eyed or what, by the late 1960s, would be called
"countercultural" about the utopianism Kazan imparted to Rochdale and his other
cooperatives. This was a practical, hard as nails, no frills utopianism, utilitarian and
perhaps even somewhat drab. This reflected Kazan's personality. He certainly could
be pragmatic and pliable when he needed to be. Of all human endeavors, few are
as complex, or require as many actors and participants to come to an agreement, as
large-scale construction projects, and Kazan had no interest in promoting schemes
that failed to come to fruition, or in architectural renderings that remained inert on
the drawing board. Kazan's practical utopianism required more than noble failures
and moral victories. He knew when and how to compromise and when to seek allies,
even unlikely allies, but this was a superficial flexibility. At his core, there was an
unswerving commitment to things that really mattered to him. On these there would
be no budging. His somewhat dour personality was in part the product of his clear
sense of the goal he sought, and an acute awareness of the obstacles, detours, or
diversions from that path that all too often had waylaid the unwary. And that path,
as he told Nelson Rockefeller, as he had told countless others for a half century, was
the building of the cooperative commonwealth.
Notes Chapter 1. The Utopian
Epigraph. Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Cooperation (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 436-438.
1. "Abraham E . Kazan Dies at 82; .Master Co-op Housing Builder," NYT, December 22, 1971.
2. Robert F. Wagner, "'His Achievements Have Laid a Permanent Beneficent Kazan Stamp On
Our Town...,'" in Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, Story of a Co-op
Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002).
3. Reminiscences of Abraham E . Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970,
3-4. The account of Kazan's early life is drawn heavily from this source.
4. For an approximate tally see Donald E . Pitzer, "America's Communal Utopias Founded by
1965," in Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997), 471^73.
5. Abraham Menes, "The Am Oylom Movement," in YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science
4 (1949), 9-33. For anarchist influences on the early Jewish collective settlements in Palestine,
see James Horrox, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Edinburgh:
AK Press, 2009). For treatments of Jewish agricultural settlements in the United States, see
Ellen Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-J920 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1995); Joseph Brandes, Immigrants to freedom: Jewish Communities
in Rural New Jersey since 1882 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); and
Pearl Bartelt, "American Jewish Agricultural Colonies," in Pitzer, ed., America's Communal
Utopias, 352-374.
6. Brandes, Immigrants to freedom, 63.
7. Ibid., 63-64. The main principles of an 1889 agreement to collectively farm and market agriculture
and agricultural related products are reproduced in Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural
Colonies m New Jersey, 109-110.
8. Reminiscences of Abraham E . Kazan, 7-8.
9. Ibid., 20-25; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931), 262-264; Paul Avrich,
Anarchist Portraits: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995), 29-33. Goldman met Bell in Scotland during a speaking tour of Scotland
in January 1900, and Bell lived briefly in Goldman's apartment with his family after his arrival
in New York in 1904; Candace Falk et a l , Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American
Years, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003-), 504; and vol. 2, 22-23.
The one problem with the identification of the Tom Bell in Kazan's oral history with
Thomas Hastie Bell is that Kazan describes Tom Bell as a "Scotsman, quite an elderly man" of
about sixty years of age. Bell was born in 1867, and would have been about forty when he met
Kazan, which certainly does not qualify as quite elderly. On the other hand, Kazan describes
Bell as suffering from asthma, and that he moved to Arizona for health reasons. Marion Bell,
Thomas Hastie Bell's daughter, says her father suffered from asthma and moved to Arizona
around 1910 (Anarchist Portraits, 29-33). Emma Goldman describes him as "a very sick man,
suffering from asthma," Goldman, Living My Life, 264. There can't have been many Arizona bound
asthmatic Scottish anarchists named Tom Bell living in New York City in the first
decade of the twentieth century, and perhaps the asthma made Bell appear older than he really
was. In any event, the second half of his life was an advertisement for the restorative properties
of Arizonan and Southern Californian air—he lived until 1942, into his late seventies.
10. Goldman, Living My Life, 264; "Revolutionary Portraits: Tom Bell," in Organise for Revolutionary
Anarchism, no. 66 (Spring 2006), .
html. For Bell's connection to Jewish anarchism and his friendship with Saul Yanovsky, the
longtime editor of the well-known Yiddish language anarchist newspaper, the Fraye Arbeyter
Shtime, see Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 197-198.
11. For Bell's connection to Morris, see Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 29-33, 154.
12. Thomas Bell, Edward Carpenter: The English Tolstoi (Los Angeles: Libertarian Group, 1932);
Bell, Oscar Wilde: sus amigos, sus adversarios, sus ideas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Américalee, 1946). This is a translation from Bell's unpublished manuscript "Oscar Wilde Without
Whitewash," which probably is similar to Bell's article, "Oscar Wilde's Unwritten Play," The
Bookman 71 (April-May 1930), 139-150, an account of Bell's interactions with Wilde while
working as a secretary for the English publisher and author Frank Harris (1856-1931). According
to the melodramatic account by Bell, his final encounter with Wilde took place when
Harris sent him on a mission to deliver Wilde some badly needed funds, only to arrive at
Wilde's cheap Parisian hotel several hours after his death.
13. Reminiscences of Abraham E . Kazan, 26-27.
14. Ibid., 53; Robert Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American
Labor Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 17.
15. Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York:
Free Press, 1991), 114-178.
16. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 32-34.
17. Fraser, Labor Will Rule.
18. Although the earliest credit unions were created in Germany in the 1860s, there were very few
credit unions in the United States until 1910. Joseph Knapp, The Rise of American Cooperative
Enterprise (Danville, I L : Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1969), 138-142.
19. Reminiscences of Abraham E . Kazan, 71-72.
20. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 153
21. Ibid., 154. Fraser notes that despite Hillman's enthusiasm for cooperatives, at the 1920 ACWA
convention many felt the cooperative movement was "based on bourgeois principles" and that
the "cooperative movement is a capitalist institution."
22. Ibid.
23. Reminiscences of Abraham E . Kazan, 77.
24. Kenneth G. Wray, "Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the
United Housing Foundation," master's thesis, Columbia University, 1991, 6; Reminiscences
of Abraham E . Kazan, 71-72.
25. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in
the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 151-159. See also Andrew
Hazelton, "Garden Courts to Tower Blocks: The Architecture and Social History of
the Labor Cooperative Housing Movement in New York, 1919-1950" and "Three Bronx
Utopias: Pre-War Labor Housing Cooperatives and the Socialist Vision"; Tony Schuman,
"Labor and Housing in New York City: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing
Movement," unpublished papers.
26. Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 180.
27. For philanthropic housing and John D. Rockefeller Jr., see Plunz, A History of Housing in New
York City, 88-121, 155, 160. For the anarchist tradition in urban planning and its influence
on urban planning as a whole see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of
Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (London: Blackwell, 1996), 3-9, 143-144,
241-272. For Peter Kropotkin's views on urban planning see Fields, Factories, and Workshops
(London: Thomas Nelson, 1898).
28. Abraham Kazan, "Our Latest Step Forward," November 8, 1929, reprinted in Story of a
Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing
Cooperatives, 2002).
29. Leyla F. Vural, "Unionism as a Way of Life: The Community Orientation of the International
Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America" (PhD
diss., Rutgers University, 1994), 219, citing Abraham Kazan, "Building the Co-operative City
of the Future," Milwaukee Leader, May 10, 1930.
30. Interview with Harold Ostroff
31. Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 349-351, 435^39. In the 1960s, Pesotta moved into Penn South
(a UHF cooperative) in part to be close to her anarchist colleagues, where in the words of her
biographer "she joined a co-op credit union, supermarket, and pharmacy, always trying to
live her anarchistic cooperative beliefs." Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist
and Labor Organizer (Albany, NY: S U NY Press, 1993), 165. In the 1920s the ILGWU
became the venue for one of the first and one of the most bitter fights for control of the labor
movement between the Communist and non-Communist left, and the anarchists played an
important, and by some accounts, crucial role in the decisive victory of the non-Communists,
and many, like Rose Pesotta, rose in the hierarchy of the union. Parmet, The Master of Seventh
Avenue, 31-53. Abe Bluestein told Paul Avrich that David Dubinsky acknowledged that without
the support of the anarchists, the Communists would have won; Anarchist Portraits, 437.
32. Interview with Harold Ostroff; Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 150, 439.
33. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture {Nevi York: Covici-Friede, 1937); interview with Harold
Ostroff
34. James Peter Warbasse, "Basic Principles of Cooperation," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 191 (May 1937), 14.
35. Kazan, "The Birth of the Amalgamated Housing Corporation," in Story of a Co-op Community.
36. "As Cooperative Housing Grows," Co-op Contact 5, no. 2 (January 1962); Reminiscences of
Abraham E. Kazan, 510.
37. Kazan, "Our Latest Step Forward."
38. "Visionaries Wanted," Co-op Contact 4, no. 5 (June-July 1960).
39. Each of these cooperatives was independent, and had to be separately joined by its members.
Anyone could shop in the Co-op Supermarket, but only members could participate in its
management or receive a dividend computed as a percentage of their purchases. Persons in
the surrounding community who did not live in Rochdale could, and did, join the Co-op
Supermarket.
40. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 508.
41. "Plans for Groundbreaking Ceremonies," January 1960, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives,
Cornell University,
42. "6,318 Unit Housing Cooperative to be Built on the Site of the Jamaica Race Track," Co-op
Contact no. 3 (February-March I960).
43. "Governor and Mayor Help Launch Rochdale Village," Co-op Contact 4, no. 4 (April-May
1960).
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