It was a fairy-tale wedding that super-charged the gossip circuits of 1905 America.
And Berkeley historian Adam Hochschild, author of the best-selling “King Leopold’s Ghost,” spins the true tale again in “Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes.”
His heroine is the long-forgotten Russian Jewish immigrant sweatshop worker who snagged the heart of Graham Stokes, scion of one of New York’s richest Protestant families. Though largely uneducated, she gradually emerged from his shadow to become a gifted orator, labor organizer and fearless champion of social justice causes.
Q: What do you think motivated Rose?
A: I think she had a very strong sense of justice, which came out of her own life experience of a childhood and young womanhood of extreme poverty. By the end of her dozen years as a cigar factory worker, which started when she was 11, she was the sole support of her widowed mother and six younger siblings — the ne’er-do-well stepfather had abandoned the family, and a couple of them were in foster care. She knew what poverty was like and she wanted a country where that kind of dire poverty didn’t exist.
Q: What do you think were her greatest successes?
A: She, in association with a number of people of that era, helped publicize various ideas that we take for granted today. Access to birth control, for example … Social Security, the idea that you have a right to medical care. These were things that the early 20th-century American socialists put on the table. Even talking about birth control in public was against the law. Her friend Emma Goldman, her friend Margaret Sanger went to jail for this. They didn’t quite dare put her in jail, much to her frustration.
Q: What do you imagine Rose would be doing if she’d been born here 25 years ago?
A: She would be doing everything possible to get Donald Trump out of office and to address some of the same inequalities that motivated people to get involved in radical movements 100 to 125 years ago. You know the spread in the United States today between the share of wealth and income held by the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent is greater than it was when Rose and Graham got married in 1905.
Q: There was a huge storm of publicity when Rose and Graham got engaged. We are much too sophisticated to be as electrified by such a mismatched marriage as theirs, right?
A: Well, what about Harry and Meghan? That’s the example that comes to mind, but there certainly have been plenty of others. Anytime a commoner marries into the British royal family, the papers go wild. And I think that the Cinderella dream is an ancient one.
AUTHOR APPEARANCE
Hochschild will be in discussion with Mother Jones magazine editor Monika Bauerlein at a virtual event hosted by the Bay Area Book Festival at 7 p.m. June 2. Register at www.baybookfest.org/unboundjune for a free link to the YouTube video.
3 PICKS FROM HOCHSCHILD
A companion book: E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime”
Film: Casting Rachel Weisz as Rose in a Hollywood version
Best Bay Area bookstore: Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley
