Word: cahan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Abraham Cahan, 91, author (The Rise of David Levinsky), co-founder and editor (1897-1950) of Manhattan's Jewish Daily Forward (circ. 150,000), one of the most influential foreign-language (Yiddish) papers in the U.S. At 21, because of his radical political sympathies, he left Czarist Russia for Manhattan's lower East Side. Through the columns of the Forward, he presented democratic socialism as well as lighter reading in terms that ill-educated immigrants could understand, fought to ameliorate sweatshop conditions in the garment trades, became a leading anti-Communist in the Jewish world...
After a spell as a reporter for City Editor Lincoln Steffens of the Commercial Advertiser and for the New York Sun, Cahan in 1902 became editor of the then struggling Forward, which he had helped found five years before. Cahan found a paper with a picayunish circulation of 6,000, full of tedious, dust-dry Socialist polemics, written in jabberwocky that few garment workers could understand...
...Cahan substituted lively feature stories. To make his writers stop using long words, Ab would call in the elevator operator to see if he could understand their stories. He gave his readers such homely advice as urging mothers to see that their children carried handkerchiefs. When his sponsors protested such trivialities, Ab asked: "Since when is Socialism opposed to clean noses...
Shrinking Success. By 1922, the Forward was selling 225,000 copies a day, its circulation peak. But Cahan's own measurement of success was the rapidity with which Jewish immigrants were absorbed into American life and turned to non-Yiddish papers. In effect, the paper's success could be measured by its drop in circulation. How well Cahan has succeeded may be gauged by the fact that the Forward, though still the biggest Yiddish daily, has dwindled to 83,226 daily and 94,390 Sunday. One of Cahan's favorite jokes is that for every $4 made...
...Editor Cahan, whose Socialism long ago simmered down to a British type of gradualism, fought the Soviet system and the U.S. Communist Party from the start, got read out of the Socialist Party for good in 1933 for supporting Roosevelt. At Cahan's celebration last week, Union Boss David Dubinsky and others praised him as the man who had done more than anyone else to keep the garment workers' union free of Communist influence. When everyone else had finished, old Ab rose to respond, murmured: "I am happier than I ever was in my life. Brothers and sisters...