The New York City Overalls Parade, 1920

By Jonathan Goldman

"Overalls Parade," Bain News Service, April 24, 1920. Library of Congress.

New York City's "Overalls Parade," held on April 24, 1920 was, viewed generously, an inspired if quixotic attempt to inaugurate a new, labor-conscious political movement. From a more critical perspective, it was a neutered form of activism that undermined the progressive movements that had flourished over the previous two decades, now under threat at the start of the 1920s. In some respects, it even worked against the interests of labor. The "Economy Parade" – its official name never caught on – aimed to protest the rising cost of clothing as one instance of the rising cost of living in the postwar United States. Marchers, representing civic organizations and private clubs from multiple strata, wore overalls, a recent sartorial innovation, as a show of allegiance to democratic principles. Organized by the Cheese Club, a private social group whose members worked in theater, entertainment journalism, and publicity, the parade drew far fewer participants than predicted by its leaders and friendly journalists, and became a byword for failure.

The Overalls Movement

The demonstration was inspired by the "Overalls Clubs" that had been forming around the country, mostly in southern states, deploying overalls as an insignia of protest against profiteering. One of the first of these appeared in Tampa, Florida, whose group held a demonstration on April 4th, Easter Sunday, with the participation of the local Fire Department, ­­military base, and high school girls.[1] The “strikes” ­­­­reached New York City's collective consciousness soon after. On April 15th, the Cheese Club announced a demonstration in front of its midtown headquarters the following day, while in Queens, students of Jamaica High School resolved to join the national movement.[2]  In that evening's Evening World, Marguerite Dean writes, with only some irony: "Fashion note: Have you bought your spring overalls yet? … Everybody's doing it." She predicts that John Rockefeller Jr. would soon be seen "entering his office at No. 26 Broadway all dressed up in a brown denim overall costume." The accompanying picture, captioned as Rockefeller "wearing miner's overalls" is faked, perhaps meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek; the Times would report some days later that Rockefeller (apparently seen as someone whose position on this topic mattered) approved of the Overalls Clubs but would not participate.

The demonstration underwhelmed when the group's overalls order failed to arrive on time leaving only the leadership dressing the part. Regardless, for the next week NYC dailies were abuzz with the arrival of overalls "strikes," and with news of civic organizations, private clubs, and individuals – including white collar workers, government officials, and student groups – that were donning the getup. In overalls, judges heard cases, bankers strolled on Wall Street, the staff at Reisenweber's nightclub at Columbus Circle waited on tables, and railway officials stepped in for striking workers to perform emergency repairs.[3]

Doctored photos imagining J. Pierpont Morgan, John Hylan, and Chauncey Depew in overalls. The Evening World, April 17, 1920, p. 3.

During its ten days in the NYC spotlight, the overalls movement's dress and rhetoric shifted. Calico, blue jean, “old clothes,” patches, and lunchboxes were all suggested as legitimate accouterments of protest. Profiteering remained the focus (the Tribune noting that some manufacturers were turning 16 cents of denim into three dollars of profit), but for a commentator in the same journal the salient point was the re-centering of thrift replacing “the highest-price-or-nothing spirit in the daily life of the American people.” It was the consumer’s responsibility to navigate the market, in other words, an interpretation that highlights the campaign’s firm roots in consumerism.[4] 

The elephants leading the parade, 8th Avenue and 48th Street. "Overalls [Circus Parade]," Bain News Service, April 24, 1920. Library of Congress.

Erasmus High School, Brooklyn, students participating. Daily News, April 26, 1920, p. 11.

By April 20th, a date had been set for a mass parade. The Sun and New York Herald bruited the idea that it might even be led by the Mayor, while the Tribune reported participation (in custom-fitted overalls) by both Queens Borough President Maurice Connolly and the Hippodrome's circus elephants.[5] Not to be outdone, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus announced that its animals would be marching as well. The press doled out stories of other participants and sponsors. The US Army and the NYC Police Department would partner as marshals and security. The parade would be led by mounted police officers, followed by B.F. Keith's Boys Band (one of several marching bands, another of which would be the House of David band that comprised members of a religious sect who never cut their hair or beards and believed themselves descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel). The postal workers would send a contingent, as would the Poetry Society, the Colony Club, the Rotary Club, the Century Road Club, the Knights of Columbus, the Serbian Child Welfare Association, the Manhattan Navy Club, and the Wholesale Cleaners and Dyers Association. Broadway dance troupes, chorus girls, and orchestras were coming, including Al Jolson and the Winter Garden Band. “A picturesque Chinese delegation from Mott Street” would represent Chinatown. The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and high schools including DeWitt Clinton and Erasmus would represent NYC's youth. Columbia, Fordham, City College, and NYU would show up. Thousands were expected to march from Columbus Circle down 8th Avenue as far as 34th Street, over to Broadway, and then back up to the starting point, a route that happened to not trouble the locations of the city’s garment industry.[6]

The Politics of the Cheese Club

The New York Times's coverage of the plans was particularly effusive, its April 23 front page predicting: "OVERALLS PARADE TO OPEN A REVOLT; Tomorrow's Demonstration to be Turned into Continuous Fight on Profiteering." The Cheese Club, it explained, would make the price of clothing and everyday materials an issue of the upcoming presidential election. At an open meeting at the end of the parade, marchers would create "a national plank so worded as to carry definite commitment of definite action against the high cost of living… to be put squarely up to every presidential aspirant." The article quotes the critic Walter J. Kingsley, Parade Chairman, as saying that the Cheese Club would not "let this thing die with the parade," but rather, would form a "permanent organization" led by "persons of unquestioned earnestness and responsibility."[7] All week, the Times had been a particular mouthpiece for the Cheese Club leaders such as Kingsley and the club’s President, critic and dramatist Thomas Oliphant.

The Club had been formed in 1919, with no apparent political mission, no apparent interest in cheese, and no apparent connection to the more famous "Bread and Cheese Club" formed by James Fennimore Cooper in the previous century. It met in the National Vaudeville Artists Clubhouse at 229 West 46th Street, presided over by Oliphant, vice-president Turley Lillon, treasurer Frank Hughes, and secretary Benjamin Holzman.[8] The group made its first foray into public service in November, hosting a benefit that raised $3,500 for the Actors Fund, featuring performances by Eddie Cantor, Fred and Adele Astaire, Irving Berlin, and Rube Goldberg – the last of whom seems to have been a club member, appearing in overalls in The Daily News's April 19 photo feature about the campaign.[9]

The Evening World described the Cheese Club, “made up in large part of past masters of publicity” as an odd group to be spearheading the movement: “The populace suspected them of kidding. Clubmen protest their innocence." It seems likely that it was the media-savvy and media-connected members who facilitated the tremendous press buildup for the parade, while their theater associations led to a song composed just for the moment, "Overalls and Calico," lyrics by Gus Kahn, music by Jean (no pun intended) Schwartz.[10]

Cover of the sheet music for "Overalls and Calico: dedicated to the Cheese Club." Schwartz, Jean (Composer) / Kahn, Gus (Lyricist) / Jerome H. Remick & Co. (Publisher). Arizona State University Digital Respository.

Though the Club's announced political stance was short on depth, the group made a display of being responsive to criticism from the left. It reached out to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (and apparently won his approval), and to the International Garment Workers Union.[11] There was some concern the crusade might drive up the price of the garment, needed by manual laborers of numerous industries. The new trend was making overalls more expensive, working against the very purpose of the movement. Though there was indeed evidence of rising costs, as the Tribune reported as early as April 11th, most newspapers were quick to brush this idea aside, insisting that there was plenty of denim to go around.[12]

Absent from these stories is the issue of garment worker wages. It is all well and good to rail against profiteers, but to insist that the cost of clothing be reined in without simultaneously demanding that the workers' pay be maintained was to invite the possibility that labor would be scapegoated or targeted, especially in light of the very public and unpopular national railroad strike taking place that month. That the overalls movement treated labor as an obstacle is the position taken by Mark Robbins, the historian engaging most with the campaign. Finding no support for labor, Robbins reads the overalls clubs as anti-labor, pitting consumers against garment workers. He argues that the protesters wore the overalls “ironically… to show that the working class was not living up to the values of diligent production and thrift.”[13]

Fizzle

Photo feature in the New York Times, May 2, 1920, p. 51.

The weather forecast for April 24th had temperatures reaching the upper 60s, but the day unfolded damp and cool, 54 degrees the high – a minor disappointment compared with the parade itself. The press had been so taken with its own narrative that the Evening World reported that "thousands" marched that day in a piece obviously written before the event and rushed into publication.[14] But the next day's Times and Sun and Herald each reported a turnout of only 249, while the Tribune, in a particularly scathing writeup, counted 180. What was clear is that the press’s predictions were some combination of exaggeration, fabrication, and fantasy. The words "fizzle" and “fliv” figure repeatedly in the reports.

Anti-profiteering signs. The Evening World, April 24, 1920, p. 2.

Cheese Club Photo
Daily News photo of the Cheese Club marching and headline about how the parade "shrunk." Daily News, April 26, 1920, p. 11.

Over the following weeks, the Overalls Parade served as a byword for failure. When the News reported on plans for an unrelated rent strike, it explained that while some city officials took the possibility seriously, others “believe that a May Day rent strike will take second only to the Overalls Parade.” Even Billboard, reporting on circus news, got in on the act: "The Ringling elephants and camels led the recent ‘overalls parade’ in New York, and turned out to be about all there was of it."[15] Not surprisingly, clothing trade magazine The Haberdasher crowed about the failure of not just the NYC parade but the entire campaign, which it called a “senseless movement,” the editors sensing vindication for industry bosses. Its analysis includes a pointed detail: on the eve of the parade, the garment cutters union demanded a raise of $9 a week, which manufacturers claimed would add $4 million per year in wholesale costs. Haberdasher argued that ordinary people lost interest in the movement when they perceived it as insufficiently concerned with rising labor costs. It is an unconvincing assessment, but nonetheless highlights the Cheese Club’s superficial address of working-class issues.

April 1920 was a moment for bold actions and real struggle. Striking railway workers in the northeastern United States were under fire for slowing the economy. Socialist leader Louise Bryant was demanding the release of Eugene V. Debs from prison in a rally at Brownsville Lyceum, a site that had been a target of the 1919 Palmer Raids. Indeed, that campaign was still going on, the Justice Department imprisoning and deporting hundreds of political dissidents, despite legal challenges based on constitutionality. (The ACLU was born in response to the raids.) A few days after the Overalls Parade, while in custody of the Bureau of Investigation, anarchist Andrea Salcedo would be killed – probably murdered ­– by falling from a window. In the following months, Marcus Garvey's U.N.I.A. rally would take over Madison Square Garden, and an anarchist bomb would explode on Wall Street.

Against this backdrop, the Overalls Parade assumed the methods of political action for a demonstration that put the onus on consumer thrift and laborers to keep costs down. Its most striking feature was a sartorial practice which threatened to cause a price hike undermining its stated goals. After promising a lasting public good, it faded into nothing, a footnote in the history of consumer movements, only distantly related to consumer rights campaigns such as those against the automotive and food industries. The event's closest recent parallels may be the 2010 "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," which seems downright laughable in relation to subsequent developments in US politics; and the 2017 Women's March, which, as much as it allowed citizens to style themselves as political opposition, and as much as it inspired engagement in electoral politics, is at least partly remembered for the sight of pink hats – including men wearing pink hats knitted for them by women who were not paid for their labor.

Jonathan Goldman (Professor, New York Institute of Technology) is author of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity and editor of Joyce and the Law. He has published widely about 20th-century literature and popular culture. His current project is the archival website "New York 1920: 100 Years Ago Today (When We Became Modern)" which features daily posts chronicling the 1920 cultural life of NYC.

[1] Tampa Tribune, April 4, 1920, p. 25.

[2] The New York Times, April 16, 1920, p.21.

[3] The Sun and New York Herald, April 16, 1920, p. 17.

[4] New York Tribune, April 18, 1920, p. 6. New York Tribune, April 22, 1920, p. 20.

[5] “Entire Nation in Overalls if Demin Holds Up.” The Sun and New York Herald, April 20, 1920, p. 1.

[6] The Sun and New York Herald, April 21, 1920, p. 24; The Sun and New York Herald, April 24, 1920, p. 16. New York Tribune, April 22, 1920, p. 20.

[7] "OVERALLS PARADE TO OPEN A REVOLT; Tomorrow's Demonstration to be Turned into Continuous Fight on Profiteering." The New York Times, April 23, 1920, p.1.

[8] “Gathered at Random.” Editor and Publisher 52:1, 1919, p. 21.

[9] Variety 57.2 December 5, 1919, p. 8.

[10] The Evening World, April 17, 1920, p.1. The magazine Women’s Wear insisted that the Cheese Club started their campaign on a lark, according to The New York Times, April 20, 1920, p. 1, 3.

[11] “Overalls to Invade John D. Jr.’s Office.” The Sun and New York Herald, April 19, 1920, p. 18.

[12] New York Tribune, April 11, 1920, p. 3. The New York Times, April 20, 1920, p.17.

[13] P. 76. “Making a Middle-Class ‘public,’ in Shopping for Change: Consumer Activism and the Possibilities of Purchasing Power. Edited by Louis Hyman & Joseph Tohill, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2017, p. 73-82. Robbins also critiques the Overalls Movement for its insistence on a masculinist form of protest that devalued women’s role in consumerism.

[14] “Thousands in Old Clothes Jam Streets and Almost Swamp Economy Parade.” The Evening World, April 24, 1920, p.1.

[15] Billboard, May 8, 1920. Quoted https://classic.circushistory.org/History/Billboard1920.htm.