In order to not have heat dry out tobacco leaves so they were not rolling around the cigar the air had to be kept very humid in these factories so the windows were nailed shut in summertime so the breeze wouldnt blow the humidity out. Very fine tobacco dust filled the air and filled the lungs of people working in these places. Cigar workers had the second highest rate of tuberculosis of any occupation in the United States. Only stonecutters had it worse. Rose would have lung problems for the rest of her life. When she was 21 years old something happened that changed the course of her life. She saw a copy of the you dish newspaper published in new york, the jewish daily news. The paper ran one page in english and invited contributions from readers around the country. It was a new york paper that was trying to go national and said wherever you are send us your stories, write us letters, tell us what is going on in your life and rose began writing, they gave her an advice column just between ourselves girls, she was amazed when she received a check in the mail for 2 to learn that you could get paid for writing. She wrote under the pen name of zelda. She was even more amazed and delighted when after two years of doing this the newspaper invited her to new york to work in its office and write for the english page of the paper fulltime at double the salary she was earning as a cigar worker. She arrived in new york in 1903 at the age of 23 and imagine how the city looked to somebody other than the first time, there were Steam Powered trains rumbling along, on the streets themselves below ground, thousands of people working the subway station and on the streets even a few of the new horseless carriages and of course skyscrapers, unlike anything we had ever seen before. New york at that time is a city that would have terrified donald trump because it was a city of immigrants, more than half the men in manhattan 24 years old were foreignborn. New york would soon be the largest city in the world, it was already the largest jewish city in the world. This is a picture of the Lower East Side where rose lived and worked. Most of the people she wrote about for the newspaper were shop assistants, street peddlers, she gathered their stories and ran to the office and reams of copy every day. But one day in the summer of 1903 the editor gave her different assignment which was to go interview somebody who worked in a settlement house. You know what settlement houses were i think. These were places established in the poorest neighborhoods. They offered nutrition for children, things like baths and showers not just for kids but for adults because for millions of People Living in tenements in new york and other cities there werent baths and showers. They offered Adult Literacy classes and classes and many other things as well. Although settlement houses served a population that was almost entirely immigrant and very poor, the volunteers who staffed settlement houses tended to be welltodo college graduates. Eleanor roosevelt for example at this time worked in a settlement house on the Lower East Side in new york. The settlement house where rose was sent to do her interview was called the University Settlement on the Lower East Side not far from the Newspaper Office and here is the man she was asked to interview, volunteer working there, James Graham Phelps stokes. As you can tell from the name very different backgrounds, anglosaxon protestant, his friends call him graham. He and rose fell in love. He came from the most different kind of background imaginable. Here, for example, his parents summer home. A house in the berkshire mountains in western massachusetts. At the time it was built in the 1890s it was for a time the largest private home in the United States, 100 rooms and legend has it that one of grahams brothers who was in the class of 1896 yale sent a telegram to his mother saying he was bringing some fellows home for the weekend. His mother in the telegram, the apostrophe got dropped from the telegram and his mother replied many guests here has room for only 50. When not in this home or later summer and weekend homes the family lived in new york and madison avenue and 30 seventh street a building that today is part of the morgan library. Here are grahams parents. Each of them came from a family with a substantial fortune which they combined. The familys wealth rested on a number of things, part of the phelps mining empire, new york city real estate, luxury apartment buildings on the Upper East Side and a cluster of gold and silver mines in nevada in a railroad that ran to them. The family was very active philanthropic we, good works at various times, graham and other members served on the board of booker t. Washingtons Tuskegee Institution and there were other philanthropic ventures as well. Here is a picture of grahams parents surrounded by nine children and some of the spouses and offspring of those children. It was, in terms of the country of the time in immensely respectable family. The boys were expected to play prominent roles in life and they did. One of them became a distinguished architect, one became an editorial writer for the New York Times, one became what today would have been called the provost of Yale University and later was dean of the National Cathedral in washington. A grandson became an episcopal bishop. The girls were expected to marry well as one said then, one married at nobleman in europe, and the former secretary of state. But Graham Stokes took a quite different path in life. After he graduated from college he went to medical school at Columbia University and then he worked as a medical student on a horsedrawn ambulance in new york before the first time came into contact with a very different side of the city where he had grown up. This was the new york of the tenements and he was shocked at what he saw. Tiny apartment where there were 7 or 8 people to a room, tenements were often the only toilets with outdoor outhouses like these and famously the tenements of new york city also doubled as sweatshops for the garment industry. Graham was outraged by what he saw and that was what made him become part of the Settlement House Movement and go and live in the University Settlement we saw a photograph on the Lower East Side and that where rose met him for the first time. They courted secretly for two years over the strenuous but well concealed opposition of grahams family and then finally the news leaked out probably because a newspaper reporter bribed a telegraph operator to tip them off of anything of interest became over the wires. It was front page news, to when young jew ran on page one of the New York Times and it was reported all over the world, europe, australia received immense attention. Here it is as the lead story on page 1 of the new york herald. As you can see, not sure if you can read it, a poor jewish girl. What attracted interest was it was not a marriage of extremely rich and extremely for but a jew and gentile, very unusual. It is an ethnic difference, they are still interested in such matches today, people are fascinated with prince harry and megan markel. The same newspaper sign rose up to write a series of six articles calling her the genius of the ghetto. Then they were married on july 18th, 1805, roses 20 sixth birthday, graham was 27 years older. They lived in a blaze for the past 20 years in the core of the publics fascination was there seemed to be the cinderella story. Poor virtuous cinderella, brought her to live in his castle. What fascinates us and has for so many things is the version of the cinderella story, we are curious about possibilities for transformation. Will prince charming be softened by his new bride . Will she be transformed and flourish and thrive in the castle in a way she couldnt before . This is what curiosity about this is what caused people to follow so closely what happened to this couple. Here is the picture before they were married. Their laws did not fit the cinderella script. Graham stokes had to some degree left the castle and rose had no desire to live in one even though they often stayed in one or another of his parents homes, always made her uncomfortable. She and graham were conscious they had enormous disparities of wealth. Some lived as grahams family did. Others were desperately poor and worked in dangerous conditions like these child call minors, the year after they married, they joined the group that had the best solution to these problems, the socialist party. At the time the partys leader was eugene debs, a nobleman, charismatic, much beloved, five times candidate for president , he had become life as a Railway Worker and head of the Railway Workers union and when he campaigned for president in 1908 he traveled around the country in a special train called a red special the flu red flags, red bunting and engineers passing locomotives on the next track and gave long suits with red special rolling by. When he came to new york, Graham Stokes was on the platform, he was running as a socialist candidate on the Lower East Side and rose went out and campaigned for both of them. They did not win their elections but people remained fascinated by this couple, the tenements, it was turned into a silent film. The film was lost as with many films of that era, did not survive but we have promotional photos of the actress playing rose and graham. What they are saying to each other, your guess is as good as mine. This is a time when many people even those who were not involved in the socialist movement became acutely conscious of some of the injustices of American Life. One episode that dramatize the Labor Conditions of the time involved clothing workers, workers who worked in new york city just off washington square. There was a terrible fire, workers on the upper floor were trapped, most were unable to get that out, the fire escape collapsed under the weight of everybody on it and the stairwell which could have allowed workers to escape from the burning factory was blocked to keep out union organizers, they were left out the windows to their death to escape the flames. Almost all of them were women. Half of them were teenagers, almost all were immigrants. 120,000 people marched in a morning procession through new york city, 300,000 people lined the sidewalks and this seemed to crystallize and dramatize the awareness people began to have about the enormous disparities of wealth in this country. Labor and social justice that we were writing about. Womens rights, she got very involved in that case, some of the battles that were still going on in the me too ara, a woman named sarah cotton was in immigrants from russia, worked as a nurse in manhattan for a doctor whose home and office were in the same building, the doctor had given her room to live in. One night when she was asleep, he piped chloroform under her door and when she was unconscious, raped her. A couple weeks later, she realized she was pregnant, got a gun, shot and killed the doctor, surrendered to the police. Rose went to the prison where she was being held, told her story to the press at greater length than anybody else had and rose announced she would pay sarah cottons once released from prison, a place to stay. Sarah cotton gave birth in prison, she was found not guilty in part because another woman had come forward, assaulted by the same doctor. Starting a few years after rose and graham were mary, for a decade or so the United States was convulsed with hundreds of thousands of workers walking out every year and it was at a time when labor unions had almost none of the rights they later acquired. Strikes were authorized by police, chicago into that paddy wagon and sometimes by militia or National Guard troops, clothing workers in massachusetts facing state militia. They were authorized by the Industrial Workers of the world. One big strike of garment workers was in new york city not close enough to read the signs strikers are holding up at the remarkable thing to me is there are signs in english, russian, you dish and italian. Rose was heavily involved in the strike speaking to groups of strikers often many times each day and in the Garment Workers Strike which began in 1909 she came into her own as an organizer and popular speaker and she soon became recognized as one of the great radical writers, eclipsing her husband and the cascade of newspaper stories that continue to were more about her than about them as a couple. They were not happy about this. It happened in 1912, a strike of hotel and restaurant waiters in new york city organized by the wild a while organizer walking into one restaurant or Hotel Dining Room after another. The Luncheon Club of the Stock Exchange and just as lunch or dinner was about to be served, the organizer would blow a whistle and all the others would go out. Rose was on the strike committee, addressed many rallies of striking waiters, to handle publicity for the strike and wrote about miserable conditions in which many of the workers worked and in the papers there were many heartfelt letters of thanks for those who took part in the strike. One of the buildings involved in the strike was hotel new york. If any of you are new yorkers you may recognize it, still there on broadway from 70 third and 70 Fourth Street as an apartment house today at the time claimed to be the Largest Hotel in the world which was possibly through. There were a number of dining rooms and restaurants and was a famous Gathering Place for musicians, show Business People and mobsters. Its owner was grahams uncle, William Dodge stokes or uncle will as he was called in the family. A passionate hater of labor unions, immigrants and much more. He was absolutely furious that rose was encouraging his workers to go on strike against him and he exploded in anger and later comes back into the story, you will see. Let me turn to another aspect of roses and grahams lives, one of the things that made them so fascinating was their friends. They knew and worked with what to me are the most interesting people in the United States. There is rose with eugene debs on the left, and behind ms. Max eastman, editor of the masses, and kind of a precursor to the new yorker. Another was mabel dodge, a wealthy heiress famous for holding salons in her Greenwich Village health, and sometimes asked Graham Stokes to moderate these discussions. They were also friends with big bill haywood, the leading figure on the iww, a former minor, cowboy, famous for using his fists when required, long passages of shakespeare by heart. Another friend was the journalist john reed. In many ways the liveliest journalist of his generation determined to be at the center of the action. And in mexico or russia. And w e b du bois, the greatest by conflictual of his time. And upton sinclair, the jungle, we are food and drug laws. And Margaret Sanger in the middle, the Birth Control picture, that is something we take for granted today. The area where she was photographed was set down by the police and sanger was sent to jail. Rose was active in the campaign for Birth Control when talking about such things publicly and was against the law. Another friend frequently arrested and shown one of the mug shots, the firebrand and all these folks, many houseguests on location, the period of American Life when all these people were active was a remarkable time. It was a time, speaking of the years 19001914 or so, many people believe the world could be changed and a new and more just society was in some undefined way just around the corner but then something happened that shattered those dreams, the First World War which not only killed some 9 million soldiers and untold millions of civilians but also shattered the radical dream that the working classes a Different Countries would never fight each other. As you know, when the war began the United States was not part of it. American socialist and other radicals agitated for the us to stay out of the war, rose and many other friends joined the womens peace party and took part in demonstrations like this one. Then of course in april of 1917 Woodrow Wilson went before congress and asked congress to declare war. By the next year large numbers of american troops were going to france even show only by the millions and in 1918 heavily involved in the fiercest fighting of the war. The coming of the war brought an upsurge of war fever and government propaganda, with the recruiting poster. The tremendous paranoia about spies, not just government propaganda but in most of the press a tremendous push against radicals and dissenters, anybody question the war in any form, the caption in this cartoon in very small type at the top. Now for a roundup that shows uncle sam rounding up assorted radicals. Many people in this country and not just those on the far left felt strongly it was a huge mistake that the United States entered the war. The government cracked down harshly on dissent, both agents of the Justice Department and local police raided the offices all over the country, this is what the office of the iww in new york city looked after a raid. This is where rose was many times. The First World War created a rift between rose and Graham Stokes. He was enthusiastic about the war and enlisted in the military, wherein the uniform was too old to be sent overseas but was in new york National Guard for several years, never got closer to combat marching in parades down fifth avenue. Something else happened in 1917, the russian revolution, second stage of the revolution when the bolsheviks took over. Rose was in favor of this, Graham Stokes was against it, and now in favor of the russian revolution, this true the anger of many people including grahams uncle, the hotel owner. Here is a report about him from the bureau of investigation, the predecessor of the fbi that says asian received word from stokes at various times, held meetings with socialists and if a search was made of the premises some valuable information could be secured. A few days later we know from the records of the bureau he called the bureau, said that rose and graham would be out of town and it was a chance to search the house. The investigation kept a close eye on rose, agents, they transcribed her speeches which turned out to be useful for me and kept close track of her. In 1918 she was arrested and put on trial for speaking against the war and sentenced to ten years under the espionage act under the stringent law that criminalized all forms of dissent in the country. Graham put up bail money, they appealed the case, the sentence was overturned on appeal and she didnt have to go to jail but the marriage was on the rocks. They remained together for 7 more years but very uneasily because they went in radically Different Directions in politics. Rose joined the communist party, went to russia in 1922 as an american delegate, just like far too many people, later she thought in soviet russia she thought she had found paradise. Graham looked for paradise in a different direction, returned to an interest he had early in his life and religion particularly bringing to gather the traditions of hinduism and christianity. They got divorced very bitterly in 1925. This put them back on the front page one last time and as soon as they are no longer a couple the press completely lost interest in them but happily for me they saved all their letters. Rose kept a diary. They wrote dueling unpublished memoirs, roses was published 15 years later not to mention recollections of the lives of their friends. So there was rich material to work from and i urge all of you to save your letters, keep diaries, give historians something to work from. After their divorce, rose, as a matter of principle, refused alimony and she was reduced to poverty again. She remarried but to someone as poor as she was, very soon came down with cancer and died at the age of 53. Graham also remarried but without a leap out of his class, lived to the age of 88, dying in 1960. That is the story. I wish i could say they changed the world, they didnt but perhaps we could see a world that needed changing and still could use some changing today. I hope you enjoy getting to know them as much as i did. Why dont i stop right there and if you have questions or comments i would be glad to hear them. [applause] come to the microphone if you have something you want to ask. Here is someone coming. Can you make it to the microphone up here . I thank you for coming. I was interested as to the storytelling approach you talk to tell your story, what made you want to take that type of approach rather than a generalist historian approach. You mean write a sort of boring book the way too many professional historians do . I dont know. To me history is filled with people whose stories are inherently much more human and much more interesting than professional historians tell them, i see no reason you cant apply techniques of good narrative or good storytelling to history or biography of the way you would anything else. Is curious in storytelling in history there is sort of a tradition of lively narrative writing about certain subjects. Look at the vast plethora of books about world war ii for instance but also the less familiar figures of our history and other parts of history people are not accustomed to approaching them in a narrative way but why not . I believe you can be true to the fact, be accurate as hell, have everything footnoted. And still tell a lively story. And these people from extraordinarily different backgrounds who fell in love and letters and diaries to see inside that relationship. Im amazed there and more people, few but not many. For somebody like rose, politics activism, supporting her husband, never thought about running into or running for a position . They both ran for office several times each of them but unsuccessfully. Rose, graham ran once for the legislature in new york and then for a time they were living in connecticut, ran for a school board position. Rose ran for borough president of manhattan and once for congress but this was on the socialist ticket and they got very few votes. She definitely took part in politics herself and really, for the last decade of their marriage she was a more public person on the public stage when he was. I was wondering if rose had any relationship with William Trotter who was a contemporary of w e b du bois . Not that i know of. Not that i know of. I wish i could say more than that. His name doesnt show up in her papers. I know a little about him but his name does not show up. I know they were involved with the Niagara Movement around it was later du bois, that they knew him in 1908, 1910 but not farther than i know of. I was just wondering, her husbands parents, part of their wealth came from coal mining if their workers were unionized and if rose ever made an attempt to influence them . Not coal mining but gold and silver mining is originally going back a generation, copper mining. Rose was never involved with the mine Workers Union because all of the actual labor organizing, speaking to striking workers and so on was mostly in or around new york city, not much mining there but now. The answer is no. Would have made it a better story if that had been the case but unfortunately not. You talk about a cinderella story for rose and i was wondering what hidden message or untold truth about rose you hope to convey in your book . In a way, i would pay tribute to both of them for making leaps out of the world they were born in. For graham to do something as radical for someone in his class asked to marry a factory worker who was not only a factory worker but a russian jewish immigrant was quite extraordinary and took a certain boldness. Rose what i admire about her is that she seemed to grow intellectually through most of her life. I would say that she shrank intellectually at the point she became overly enamored of the soviet union but up until that point you can see in the records that she left, letters, diaries, so on, a sense of her world expanding. And i admire that and i admire her ability to adjust to a very different world than the one she grew up in, to get along with grahams family, she actually became close friends, a friendship that continued after the divorce with the sister of grahams who shared her politics and she was at ease with people at every class and occupational level. You can sense that in the tone of voice of voters she writes, what people write to her, what they say about her, she had a wide network of friends and to navigate in the world that way especially the highly stratified world of that time and we still live in a stratified society, it takes real human warmth and imagination and she had those qualities. Thank you. I was wondering to what extent do you think rose had an influence on graham, what their life after marriage, joining the socialist movement and running for office . I wouldnt say she had an influence on him. In some ways i wish he had had more influence on him. One of the peculiar and intriguing things about this relationship is that even though they were ostensibly radical in their politics, joining the socialist party, appearing on the platform with eugene debs and so forth, when they married i think they both went into it expecting a very traditional marriage. Graham was 7 years older, rose had had only two years of schooling, he had multiple graduate degrees, she very much looked up to him, admired his learning, the books he had read, the writers he knew and so forth and i think it took her 10 or 12 years to realize that she was at least as smart as he was so they both began with a kind of traditional expectation of the marriage, rose got frustrated with that and i think graham got frustrated that she wasnt the more subservient traditional wife that he had expected. We have time for two more questions. With democratic socialists running for the democratic nomination as well as a multibillionaire, what can you say this story tells us about the current day and how can we take something out of that and bring it into now . A lot of things havent changed. Even though bernie calls himself a democratic socialist, socialists at that time would not use those words to describe him. He advocates of western european welfare state but more importantly i think that the problems with the United States had been which seem so stark to us when we look back at the pictures of people in tenements and so forth we still have with us today in the visuals are different, it looks a little different but the income disparity between the top one and the remainder of the population today is greater than it was when rose and graham got married in 1905. The other disparities are enormous and glaring. It is outrageous the tens of millions of people dont have medical insurance. This is something taken for granted throughout western europe. There are many things like that we could point to that illustrate in different forms the same things that outraged people then should outrageous today. What would you say was the hardest part of starting the writing process . Starting the writing process. Getting that first word on the page. The first draft is always the hardest for me whether it is a first draft of the chapter or the whole book or whatever. I find every possible excuse to find things that need fixing around the house, find people to call that i have been out of touch with for too long, every possible excuse. And i have learned if youre interested in this process that actually once you get that first draft done it becomes a lot easier especially when you are doing these research heavy works of history where there is a huge amount of information, thousands of letters, enormous quantities of newspaper stories and other raw material. If you have a first draft done and i think this applies with you are writing a book or College Paper or anything else, once youve got that first draft done, then when you discover tidbits of material, you know where you can stick them in. Or you see where the blank spaces are and you know what to look for in the library. This was, in a way, and easier book for me to write than some of the others i have done because it was so focused on two people in the basic raw material was their memoirs, their letters, the diary rose kept, that was the core of it. Filling in the material around the edges of what was happening in the country at that time was easy enough to do and very enjoyable to do. When you are dealing with a larger structure of history, a cast of characters of many people, then it becomes much harder. But it is never easy. Thank you. We will have a signing in a few minutes and there are Copies Available of the book at the register. Also make sure to fold up your chair as you leave, thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] we are watching a special edition of booktv now airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, life in america. First, American EnterpriseInstitute Scholar michael strain argues the future is bright for those who want to become successful in the United States. The Washington Examiner offers his thoughts on why the American Dream is less attainable today. Later, feel is a prizewinning journalist Nicholas Kristof reporting on the issues facing the workingclass in rural america. Enjoy booktv now and over the weekend on cspan2. Television has changed since cspan