By all accounts he was a very serious young man. Born in Cleveland in 1882, Charles Emil Ruthenberg was the son of German immigrants and the youngest of nine children--the first and only child in the family to be born in America. He grew up in a working class neighborhood of Germans and Bohemians on the west side, in a house on W. 85th Street which is still standing today. As a boy, Charles was a model student who aspired to become a Lutheran minister. But his studies led him to question the fairness of capitalism to the working class in America, and as a young man he became active in politics, running for Ohio Governor in 1910 as a Socialist, when he was just 28 years old.
Described by one reporter as "tall, blonde [and] good-looking," Ruthenberg ran for a number of other political offices in Ohio in the 1910s decade, including several runs at mayor of Cleveland. In the city's 1917 municipal elections, as the Socialist Party's candidate, he received more than 27,000 of the 100,000 votes cast in the five-man race.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Ruthenberg protested against America's entry into that war, which he contended benefited the wealthy at the expense--and very lives, of the working class. He became embittered--some might instead say that he became hardened, when America nonetheless entered the War. He became even more so later by the treatment he received at the hands of police, politicians and the general public when he continued to speak out against the War. In 1917, Ruthenberg was convicted in a federal court for obstructing the draft, and spent a year in prison, where he was tortured by prison officials. He emerged a radicalized man.
Just months after his release, Ruthenberg led a peaceful march in downtown Cleveland on May 1, 1919, in celebration of the working class and the Russian Revolution. Red was the theme of the day, as red banners and red flags were carried. Some even wore red ribbons. It all turned violent when enraged war veterans, who literally saw red, attacked the marchers. Then the police joined in the melee. Dozens of people were injured, and two killed. Ruthenberg and 124 other marchers were arrested, and he was inexplicably charged with assault with intent to kill, although the charges were later dismissed.
After this event, Ruthenberg spent little additional time in Cleveland. In September 1919, in Chicago, he co-founded the American Communist Party, becoming its first Executive Secretary. Already a targeted individual, this new office insured that Ruthenberg would be constantly harassed by law enforcement officials who were fearful of the "Red Scare" to the point of panic. For the next eight years, there was never a time, according to a biographical article written in 1937 by his son Daniel, that he was not either under indictment or in jail, earning him the sobriquet of "America's Most Arrested Man."
In March 1927, at the age of just 44 years, Ruthenberg died suddenly of a ruptured appendix, while his appeal to the United States Supreme Court from his latest conviction in a Michigan court was still pending. Ruthenberg was cremated and his ashes carried overseas to Russia where he was interred in the Kremlin Wall, becoming one of only a handful of Americans to have ever been accorded this honor.
]]>If your ancestor was a Czech or Italian immigrant who lived on the west side of Cleveland, there's a good chance he or she worked at the Joseph & Feiss Company, or at least had a relative or close friend who worked there. A Cleveland business since the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph & Feiss was by 1930 the oldest garment manufacturer in the United States. It employed thousands of immigrants and second and third generation Americans at its mammoth plant on West 53rd Street. They worked there until Hugo Boss, the large German concern which had purchased the company in 1989, closed the Cleveland plant in 1998, transferring the remaining workers to another plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn.
Joseph & Feiss was founded in 1841 by Caufman Koch, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who moved his clothing business from Meadville, Pennsylvania to Cleveland in 1845--at a time when a lot of merchants, following the completion of the Ohio Erie canal a decade earlier, were moving to the fast-growing city on Lake Erie. In the early years, he operated a small shop at various locations downtown, procuring the garments he sold from immigrant tailors who worked out of their homes in nearby Cleveland neighborhoods.
One of those early contract workers was Frank Jindrak (1850-1926), a Bohemian immigrant who came to Cleveland with his parents in 1854 when he was just 4 years old. In 1860, when he was 10, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at home making garments for Mr. Koch's business. This was the beginning of Jindrak's 60-year association with Joseph & Feiss. For the first ten years he worked out of his house, and, then when the company began to transition to the factory method of operation in 1870, Frank became a cutter in a factory for the next 50 years. The company honored him with a dinner in 1920, and there he told those present a story about the early years of the company. During the Civil War, when he was just a little boy, Frank would travel downtown to the company's offices then on Superior Avenue near West 6th Street, bringing with him clothing that he and his father had made. Caufman Koch would greet him at the door, take the clothing from him and say: "Well, Frank, what do you want now?" "All the money," young Frank would respond. Koch would then laugh and feign indignation: "Oh, no! You can't have it all. We need some of it for ourselves."
Frank Jindrak's story probably got some good laughs at that 1920 dinner. But, in addition to being humorous, it was allegorical for one of the most important issues for industrial businesses like Joseph & Feiss in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Labor-Management relations. Prior to 1909, Joseph & Feiss was a typical garment manufacturer of that era, paying its employees as little as possible and working them for as many hours as hard it reasonably could. But in that year, Richard Feiss, son of Julius Feiss (the "Feiss" in Joseph & Feiss), became factory manager. While living in Boston from 1897-1904 and obtaining his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, Feiss had become a disciple of Frederick Taylor, the well-known industrial efficiency engineer of the late nineteenth century. When Feiss returned to Cleveland, he set out to manage the company's work force in a manner that would maximize productivity but at the same time create a humane work environment that would keep workers healthy and happy. According to Cleveland State University historian David Goldberg, Feiss accomplished this by joining together Taylor's principles of scientific management with Progressive era welfare capitalism, establishing a work environment at Joseph & Feiss that many at the time viewed as the most progressive in America.
Feiss, with the assistance of Progressive era reformer Mary Barnett Gilson whom Feiss made head of the company's employment and services department, redesigned the chairs employees sat on and the tables they worked upon to reduce injury and fatigue; provided employees with well-lit and well-ventilated work areas; sponsored employee dances, picnics, choral societies, clubs, orchestras, and athletic programs; provided medical and counseling services; established employee savings programs; awarded promotions based on performance; and increased wages. In addition, in 1917, Feiss introduced the five-day work week for employees at the company's plant, several years before Henry Ford, often cited as the first industrial employer in the United States to do so.
Perhaps it was progressive policies like the above that kept Joseph & Feiss a non-union shop in the decades of the 1910s and 1920s--a time when garment manufacturers in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere were fast becoming union shops. It wasn't until 1934, during the Great Depression and almost a decade after Richard Feiss was forced out of the company in 1925 by his father and older brother, that the American Clothing Workers of America, finally won the right to bargain for and represent the garment workers of Joseph & Feiss.
Joseph & Feiss would remain one of Cleveland's largest employers for another five decades, employing over 2,000 employees at its West 53rd Street plant throughout this period. Eventually, however, new plant technology, cheaper labor sources, and changing markets ended the company's 150-year run in Cleveland. In 2003-2004, several years after the plant closed operations, the main factory building was razed, leaving on the site today only the company's office building on West 53rd Street and its massive warehouse building near the intersection of Walworth Avenue and Junction Road. In 2015, the warehouse received new life when it was purchased with the intent to make it the new home of Menlo Park Academy, a public charter school for gifted children. After $17 million in repairs and renovations, the school opened its doors in the historic building in the Fall of 2017.
]]>According to one website, it was for years one of Cleveland's most popular places for urban exploring. In a building where world wars were once won, young people crept through dark hallways, clambered up rusted metal stairways, and walked carefully through debris-filled rooms.
Well, perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to say that wars were won in this building. But it is a fact that, in the long-vacant Warner & Swasey building at 5701 Carnegie Avenue, critical armament parts were once manufactured that helped the United States and its allies win two world wars during the twentieth century.
The five-story building made of reddish-brown stone was constructed over a six-year period from 1904 to 1910. It replaced the original Warner & Swasey building that had been erected on the site in the early 1880s. That was just shortly after Worcester Warner and Ambrose Swasey, two young New England machinists, had come to Cleveland to build a machine shop — to Cleveland, because they thought Chicago was just too far west.
Warner & Swasey built telescopes and machine lathes in the new, as well as the old, building on Carnegie Avenue. And in wartime, when the company built those armament parts that helped America win two world wars, thousands of Clevelanders worked there. They built parts for tommy guns in World War I. And in World War II, when 7,000 Clevelanders worked for Warner & Swasey, they built parts for planes, ships, and tanks.
From World War I, through World War II, and into the 1950s and the 1960s, the building on Carnegie Avenue was one of Cleveland's most important workplaces. People talked about Warner & Swasey in the same breath and in the same way that they talked about the city's other big employers, like Republic Steel, TRW, and Ford Motor. But then the building on Carnegie Avenue began its downward slide, much like the city of Cleveland did in the same period. In the end it was a victim of high technology, and when it closed its doors for good in 1985, only a few hundred employees were still left to be sent elsewhere.
Decades passed after Warner & Swasey left Cleveland. Its iconic early twentieth-century industrial building was owned for much of that period of time by the City of Cleveland, which looked to put the building to a new use. In 1988, Cuyahoga County had considered the building as a possible site for its Department of Human Services and Child Support Enforcement Agency. That fell through. In 1992, Cleveland officials talked about making it the Charles V. Carr Municipal Center. That never happened either.
In 2010, yet another proposal was put on the table. Fred and Greg Geis, sons of German immigrants who came to Cleveland in the 1960s, proposed to convert the Warner & Swasey building into a high-tech office, lab and manufacturing facility. However, after several years of planning, the Geis Brothers ultimately decided that the Warner & Swasey Building would not suit their purpose, and they developed their Tech Park instead on a large piece of land located between Euclid and Carnegie Avenues, several blocks east of the Warner & Swasey Building.
And so the historic building stood vacant and deteriorating on Carnegie Avenue for several more years. And then, in 2018, a new redevelopment proposal was put forward by Pennrose, a housing developer from Philadelphia. Its proposal was to convert the Warner & Swasey Building into an apartment building with some affordable housing units, some units for seniors, and some market-rate units. The proposal included a possible roof deck which, according to the developer, would offer tenants amazing views of downtown Cleveland.
In 2025, Pennrose completed its acquisition of the Warner & Swasey Building and, in early 2026, it began its redevelopment and restoration of the historic building. It is likely hoped by all who know the historic nature of the Warner & Swasey Building that soon it will be filled with residents who will not only enjoy the benefits of living in an historic building, but will, as well, enjoy the benefits of living in Cleveland's fast-developing Midtown neighborhood.
]]>In 1919, the United States was experiencing its first "Red Scare." Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, public sentiment against Socialists — who maintained a strong presence in Cleveland during this era — was high. Many viewed the Socialists and their sympathizers as a threat to American society.
The 1919 Cleveland May Day Riot began when a World War I veteran took offense at the red flags being proudly waved by Socialist demonstrators as they marched toward Public Square. A fight broke out, and soon enough a melee between Socialist and anti-Socialist citizens ensued. The violence was only quelled after the intervention of police and military units. At one point during the widespread rioting, a mob stormed and ransacked the Socialist Party headquarters on Prospect Avenue. The riots injured dozens and resulted in two deaths. The event highlighted the simmering tensions that existed in Cleveland after World War I.
This tension would continue well into the 1930s when unionists, leftists, and unemployed workers joined together in a series of strikes and protests under the banner of the Unemployed Council. Although Communist and Socialist movements in the US have waned since World War II, Public Square continues to serve as a setting for protests of all types.
For more (including 8 images & 4 audio files) view the original article
]]>