Morris Hillquit
| Morris Hillquit | |
|---|---|
Morris Hillquit (1869-1933).
|
|
| Born |
Moishe Hillkowitz August 1, 1869 Riga, Latvia |
| Died | October 8, 1933 (aged 64) New York City, New York |
| Occupation | Lawyer, political activist |
Morris Hillquit (August 1, 1869 – October 8, 1933) was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the leading public faces of American socialism during the first two decades of the 20th Century.
In November 1917, running on an anti-war platform, Hillquit garnered more than 100,000 votes as the Socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City. Hillquit would again run for Mayor of New York in 1932. He also stood as a candidate for United States Congress a total of five times over the course of his life.
Hillquit was born Moishe Hillkowitz on August 1, 1869, in Riga, Latvia, the second son of German-speaking ethnic Jewish factory owners. From the time he was 13, young Moishe attended a non-Jewish secular school, the Russian language Alexander Gymnasium. At the age of 15, in 1884, Moishe's father, Benjamin Hillkowitz, lost his factory in Riga and decided to leave for America to improve the family's financial situation. Together with his oldest son he set out for New York City, where he procured a two-room apartment in a tenement house.
In 1886, Benjamin sent for the rest of the family and they joined him in New York. The family remained poor in the new world, living in a tenement in a predominately Jewish area of the Lower East Side. Then, he worked on various short-term jobs in the New York city textile industry and as a picture frame maker in a factory. Morris later remembered his family as "frightfully poor," with his older brother and sisters working to help support the family.
Hillquit felt himself compelled to get a job to help alleviate the family's difficult financial situation. Since his English was poor and his body frail, employment options were limited. He joined other young intellectual émigrés from Tsarist Russia a shirt-maker, repetitiously stitching cuffs of garments. In his posthumously-published memoirs, Hillquit recalled that cuff-making was "the simplest part and required least skill and training," involving the simple stitching of square pieces of cut cloth. The young Hillquit never progressed past that entry-level task as a shirtmaker.
...
Wikipedia