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Critical journey
National Forum, Summer 1997 by Perry, Elisabeth Israels
Al Smith had been a governor and thus clearly "important," but his name meant little to me. I had no idea why being anyone's campaign manager, much less a woman in that role, should merit a book. Nor did I understand what "papers" were. But, instead of asking my father to explain, I let the matter drop, probably because I was too embarrassed to reveal my ignorance. Years later I learned that during the sixties he had talked about his mother to a few historians - Judith Mara Gutman, who wanted to know why Moskowitz had hired photographer Lewis Hine to record the construction of the Empire State Building, and Robert Caro, who was writing about Robert Moses, a Moskowitz protege. But by then I was on the West Coast working toward a Ph.D. in French history and saw my father even more rarely. When we did visit, the subject of his mother never came up. He died in 1969.
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Several years passed, during which I earned the Ph.D. and married a historian, Lewis Perry (in 1970), with whom I had two children. One day late in 1974, Lew was reading the American Historical Review's obituary of J. Salwyn Schapiro, a Renaissance historian who had been a boyhood friend and settlement work colleague of Henry Moskowitz."You know what would be a fun project?" He called out to me from another room. "Belle and Henry Moskowitz, your grandparents." My grandfather Frank's imperative from almost half my lifetime ago echoed in my brain. I repeated to Lew my father's warning that Belle had not saved her papers. The project seemed hopeless. There the matter rested until I mentioned it to my mother. Despite her having left my father years before, she had a lively interest in the Moskowitzes. She had loved Henry, who, during the last year of his life (he died in 1936), had lived with her and my father, then newlyweds. She told me about Caro's new book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker. "Your grandparents are in it," she said. Indeed, the book contained not only stories about Henry, the Madison House Settlement, and his work as civil service commissioner but an entire chapter on Belle and the early years of her relationship to Al Smith. All of the material was new to me. I thought, If Caro could find all this without even focusing on the Moskowitzes, what might I do? My excitement began to mount.
The project would not take long, I predicted. I would need only a year's research to prepare a small book on Belle and Henry Moskowitz as Progressive-era social reformers. But my early optimism about speed proved unfounded. I needed time to absorb the American history I was reading. My search for primary sources proved time-consuming and difficult. In addition, I had family and career obligations to meet. In the end, twelve years passed between the decision to write the book and its publication.
RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY
As the project took shape, I found my interests focusing more sharply on Belle Moskowitz alone. Henry represented a whole generation of settlement-social workers involved in Progressive-era reform politics, but Belle, as a woman, was the more unusual, and thus intriguing, figure. Also, recent advances in women's history, such as the appearance of the first three volumes of the biographical encyclopedia Notable American Women (1971), had stimulated my interest in women's lives and made my task seem less daunting.
