Obituaries
Reclaiming Legacy Of Slain, Forgotten Labor Leader
Penny Schwartz
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
A
ny student of American labor
history knows the name Samuel
Gompers, founder of the
American Federation of Labor in 1886.
Not so familiar is Edward Cohen, a fel-
low Jewish immigrant cigar maker from
London and Gompers' friend and protege.
Cohen served as president of the
Massachusetts branch of the American
Federation of Labor during its forma-
tive years in the early 1900s, gaining the
admiration of his fellow workers and
a host of prominent figures, including
Louis Brandeis, who later went on to
become the first Jewish U. S. Supreme
Court justice.
Now, a century after his death, Cohen's
place in American labor history is being
recognized.
A large, intricately carved bronze plaque
commemorating Cohen and acknowledg-
ing his contributions as an influential
labor leader soon will be permanently
installed at the historic Massachusetts
State House. The president of the
Massachusetts AFL-CIO, Robert Haynes,
who rediscovered Cohen's story about a
decade ago while looking through old
union records, called the installation of
the plaque one of the greatest moments in
the history of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
Cohen fought for a wide variety of
causes, including worker safety and child
labor restrictions. He also supported the
cause of women's suffrage and, accord-
ing to Brandeis, was instrumental in the
adoption of the nation's first savings bank
life insurance program.
Cohen's steady rise was tragically cut
short when he was killed in a bizarre
shooting accident at the Beacon Hill
office of the Massachusetts governor at
the time, Curtis Guild. On Dec. 5, 1907,
Cohen, then 47, was sitting with two of
his union allies in the anteroom of the
governor's office at the state house when
James Steele, a man who recently had
been released from a mental institution,
began shooting at random. Cohen was
killed and one of his union allies was
seriously injured.
Cohen's murder dominated Boston
news headlines for days. Some 12,000
people turned out to mourn his death,
with a dignitary-led funeral procession
through the streets of Boston.
Over the ensuing decades, however,
Cohen largely was forgotten — no more
so than in the Jewish community, even in
sectors active in the labor movement.
On a Sunday morning last spring,
Phyllis Cohen Feltzer, one of Cohen's
granddaughters, sat with JTA in New York
and shared one of two old family scrap-
books containing unpublished letters and
telegrams relating to Cohen.
Among the dozens of letters and tele-
grams sent to Cohen's widow are notes
from Gompers, the governor and Boston
Mayor John "Honey" Fitzgerald, grandfa-
ther of John F Kennedy.
"It is quite a significant accomplish-
ment that a Jewish person would become
the head of a major organization in
Massachusetts" in the early 1900s,
said James Green, professor of history
and labor studies at the University of
Massachusetts-Boston.
After immigrating to New York from
London in 1880 at age of 22, Cohen
and his wife settled in Lynn, Mass. In
1906, he was elected president of the
Massachusetts branch of the AFL.
In that post, Cohen served on the state's
Commission on Commerce and Industry
alongside Brandeis, who, before joining
the Supreme Court in 1916, was gain-
ing prominence as a lawyer and social
reformer. ❑
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September 11 a 2008