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Rebel Cinderella
By Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
303 pages, $30
BYCHRISTOPHIRMSCHERG
ROWN MEN wept
when Rose Pastor
Stokes spoke. “Her
clouds of red-brown hair
shook loose,” remem-
bered fellow radical Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, “forming a lovely frame for her
large expressive brown eyes.” Firing
up the crowds, switching comfortably
from English to Yiddish when needed,
Rose would paint for them, in a vi-
brant and buoyant voice, a future
when “all the wealth belongs to the
men and women who create it.”
In June 1912, at New York’s
Amsterdam Opera House, where she
addressed 3,000 striking waiters,
with another 2,000 standing outside,
someone interrupted her long enough
to bestow on her two bouquets of
flowers—a lovely, if unusual, tribute
to a labor leader. Like the strikers,
Rose had experienced abject poverty;
but, as everyone knew, she was by
now living in another world, a world
that included a mansion on a private
island in Long Island Sound as well
as a husband who had certainly not
created the wealth he possessed.
The story of how Rose Pastor,
an indomitable immigrant from
Augustów in czarist Russia, came
to share some of her life with patri-
cian James Graham Phelps Stokes
of Madison Avenue is the subject of
“Rebel Cinderella,” Adam Hochschild’s
thoroughly engrossing, meticulously
researched and well-illustrated biog-raphy. The wealth of the Phelps
Stokeses—a result of the canny man-
agement of houses, mines and
money—was legendary. Their 100-
room summer home in the Berkshires
was so enormous that the children
could supposedly ride their bikes in
the attic when it rained.
At Yale, Graham Phelps Stokes
danced, ran track and trained in the
cadet program. And as a cavalryman
during the Spanish-American War
(he never saw action), he played on
his squadron’s polo team. But soon
after, seized with an un-Phelps-Stokes-
like desire to do good, he began volun-
teering in a New York City settlement
house, which is where, in 1903, Rose
Pastor, a cigar-factory worker turned
journalist, came to interview him.
To Rose, her future husband, thin
to the point of emaciation, seemed as
handsome as young Abe Lincoln. And
while Graham left no record of his
feelings for her, he let Rose upend his
life: With her, he joined the Socialist
Party, began writing letters to his
“dear comrades,” and ran, unsuccess-
fully, as the Lower East Side’s Social-
ist candidate for the New York state
assembly. His family was predictably
alarmed by the mésalliance, and no
one more so than Graham’s choleric
uncle W.E.D. Stokes (“Uncle Will”), the
owner of the Ansonia, New York’s
biggest residential hotel. The author
of a screed titled “The Right to Be
Well Born,” Uncle Will would spend
the next two decades railing about the
damage that Rose was doing to the
family (some of those striking waiters
had worked for him) and peppering
the police with ideas about what
should happen to her (send her back,
with all the other “socialistic Jews,”to Russia). Which did not, Mr. Hoch-
schild notes, prevent Uncle Will from
asking for Rose’s assistance in one
area that interested him, namely birth
control—how else to stem the tide of
degeneracy washing over the country?
Rose would later claim that, for
much of her marriage, she and her
husband were only friends. But this is
not how Graham saw their relation-
ship: When Rose went on tour, he
would send plaintive notes to his
“dear Girlie,” imploring her to return
home soon. What Graham lacked in
decisiveness, Rose possessed in cour-
age: When the Kansas City Star
quoted her in 1918 having expressed
support for the government’s war
efforts, she wrote in to clarify that she
had said no such thing. “I am for the
people, while the government is for
the profiteers,” she asserted, giving
that government a succinctly worded
reason to prosecute her under the
Espionage Act: She was arrested
(Uncle Will was ecstatic), tried and
convicted, and it was likely only Gra-
ham’s influence that spared her from
having to serve her 10-year sentence.
Despite the book’s title, there are
no fairy-tale heroes in it, which tes-
tifies to the subtlety of Mr. Hoch-
schild’s narrative imagination. A
Cinderella story customarily requires
the interventions of Prince Charming,
and Graham Phelps Stokes, with his
family’s immense assets, initially
looked as if made for the part. Yet no
one who met him appears to have
found him particularly charming;
in general, people were struck more
by his height than by any outstanding
personal qualities.
And Rose likewise was not cut out
for the role of compliant Cinderella.younger than she, hailing from a
shtetl not far from where she was
born. When she was diagnosed with
breast cancer, Graham declined to
help, yet Rose still benefited from
her former marriage: A prominent
surgeon in Frankfurt, Germany, sus-
pending his anti-Semitic prejudices
for the sake of his well-known patient,
agreed to treat her without charge.
Alone and in pain, listening to a nurse
play Schubert on the hospital piano,
Rose died in June 1933 in Hitler’s
Germany, at age 53. Graham, grow-
ing more inflexible as the years
went by, lived to be 88, but Mr. Hoch-
schild’s account leads the reader to
believe that his life was over long
before that.
And so, at the end of “Rebel
Cinderella,” we see, in the words of
Bertolt Brecht, the curtains close
while our questions are still open.
Which is a good thing. Mr. Hochschild
reminds us of the continuing disparity
between the rich and the poor in
modern U.S. society. But his book is
not a cautionary tale; if there is any-
thing to be learned from the broken
lives of Rose Pastor and Graham
Phelps Stokes, it’s that being human is
a messy business. Of Mr. Hochschild’s
two main characters, the uncharis-
matic Graham with his unearned
wealth, less prince than princeling,
bold enough to marry Rose but too
conventional to tolerate her indepen-
dence, perhaps seems the more famil-
iar figure today. By contrast, Rose,
more rebel than Cinderella, gloriously
passionate even when she was wrong,
belongs to another, fiercer time.Mr. Irmscher’s books include the
recent “Max Eastman: A Life.”The War Queens
By Jonathan W. Jordan
and Emily Anne Jordan
Diversion, 357 pages, $27.99ons, also known as Boadicea, who took
on the Romans and razed London in
A.D. 60. There was no womanly pity
in Boudica, the Jordans write. “Every
inhabitant who could be found and
dragged from hiding was butchered,
and headless bodies littered Londin-
ium’s dirt streets” by the time her
army moved on—to defeat, it should
be said, at the hands of the Roman
general Suetonius.
There are chapters, also, on Cleo-
patra, whose sexual allure has tended
to shade the bellicosity of her char-
acter; Countess Caterina Sforza of
Renaissance Italy, who spent her life
putting Italian men in their place by
violent means after she was made to
have sexual relations with her husband
when she was only 10; Elizabeth I,
who sank the Spanish Armada; Cathe-
rine the Great, the Pomeranian prin-
cess who set Russia’s empire in train;
India’s Indira Gandhi, who oversaw the
liberation of Bangladesh from a geno-
cidal Pakistan; and Israel’s Golda Meir,
the “babushka” who routed the armies
of the Arab world.
In its conception—and in many of
its warlike women—the Jordans’ book
is not greatly different from “The
Warrior Queens” by Antonia Fraser,
published in 1989. Harsher judges
could be tempted to ask whether we
really need a second survey. To be fair,
the newer text does have a richer
account of Queen Njinga of Angola
(1583-1663) than Ms. Fraser’s; the
Jordans, here, are the beneficiaries of
a fine biography of the African queen
(by Linda Heywood, published in
2017), from which they derive much
of their Angolan detail.
Where the Jordans’ book differs is
in its jaunty, often clamorous, lan-
guage and in its mission to make these
stories come rousingly to life. In an
age when cosmopolitan learning isthat the subsequent revolt of her
Celtic people “pushed to the surface
like belladonna through trodden soil.”
The book teems with simplifica-
tions, some elegant, some not. In the
chapter on Indira Gandhi, the Jordans
observe that Mahatma Gandhi “had
defeated the British Empire’s bayonets
with a walking stick and bag of salt.”
This is a deft encapsulation of fiend-
ishly complex events. Elsewhere, how-
ever, the combing out of important
nuance yields almost fatuous results.
“The land of rajas,” the Jordans write
of India, “had embraced Hinduism
since the time when Homer recounted
the fall of Troy.” You would never
know from such a formulation that
the India of Homer’s time was just as
sophisticated as Greece and that
Hinduism was born in India, not
“embraced” by it.
“The War Queens” is at its most
rewarding in its accounts of women of
whom modern readers will know little,
such as Queen Tamar of Georgia, along
the Black Sea. She faced a jihad
against her kingdom in 1195, convoked
by al-Nasir, the caliph in Baghdad.
Ordered to cease extorting tribute
from Muslim kingdoms and convert to
Islam, the pious Orthodox Christian
Tamar refused to bow. Her forces de-feated their foes, and “Georgia became
the dominant power in the Caucasus.”
The chapter on Queen Manduhai of
the Mongols (1449-1510) offers deli-
cious detail on a subject that should
resonate with readers today—a trade
war with China. Manduhai’s consoli-
dation of power unnerved the Ming
rulers, “who for two centuries had
been raised on bedtime stories of
Mongol savagery.” Seeking to cut her
down to size, China imposed an
embargo on exports of cloth, incense
and tea, “goods that made life on the
steppes palatable.” Manduhai retali-
ated with an embargo of her own: She
banned the sale of prized Mongolian
horses to China, crippling the imperial
cavalry. Soon an excellent horse was
fetching “130chinof tea, a small for-
tune.” China backed down.
Trade of a more benighted kind was
at the heart of the conflict between
Queen Njinga and the Portuguese,
whose control of lands that comprise
modern-day Angola was crippling the
queen’s ability to capture and sell
African slaves to Europeans. Njinga,
whom Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called
“the greatest queen in sub-Saharan
African history,” was, the Jordans tell
us, a woman of “unmatched ferocity”
who made her male concubines dress
as women, engaged in infanticide and
drank the blood of her enemies.
Njinga’s wars (and alliances) with
the Portuguese rested on a longing for
political dignity, to be sure. But they
rested also, in perhaps larger measure,
on her need to retain a share of the
lucrative slave trade. The Jordans, to
their credit, do not shy from this
uncomfortable truth, even as they
celebrate her astonishing feats of war.Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor
at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.The Distaff
And the
Spear
IRON LADYMargaret Thatcher in 1986.
ALAMYAs Graham’s political sympathies, un-
der pressure from Woodrow Wilson’s
warmongering, meandered back to
his family’s values, Rose continued to
bring her communist companions
to dinner at their Greenwich Village
residence. After one such occasion, an
angry scene unfolded, with Rose offer-
ing to leave Graham, to which he re-
sponded: “It suits me!” It’s a moment
that could have come straight from a
Virginia Woolf novel. There is indeeda literary intensity to much of “Rebel
Cinderella,” and Mr. Hochschild is as
excellent at invoking such personal
confrontations as he is at summar-
izing, with epigrammatic clarity, com-
plex historical developments.
In October 1925, news about Rose
and Graham’s divorce made the front
page of the New York Times. Post-
marriage, their lives somehow petered
out, with newly penniless Rose hold-
ing on to her belief in world commu-
nism while Graham marched through
New York with his National Guard
regiment. He remarried (the daughter
of a railroad executive, to his family’s
relief) and otherwise lapsed into a life
of exceeding dullness, at least occa-
sionally brightened, one hopes, by his
interest in Hindu mysticism.
Rose found a new partner too, a
reliably communist one, 17 yearsShe protested alongside
striking workers while
maintaining a mansion
on a private island in
Long Island Sound.valued so much less than it used to be,
there is merit in a popular-history
book whose characters come from
around the globe (deservingly, one
should add, and not from modern-day
correctness). That said, there is causeto regret the exclusion of Joan of Arc.
Did she not make the cut because she
was one Western warrior too many?
Or because she wasn’t, in the strictest
sense, the ruler of a realm?
The Jordans’ literary style is unfail-
ingly spirited, and there are places
where it could use some taming. As
soldiers from Rome’s Ninth Legion
whipped Boudica after her capture,
they tell us, her welts “turned pink,
then red, then crimson.” In prose that
turns lavender, then violet, then pur-
ple, the Jordans write elsewhere that
“Boudica’s scars snaked her back like
warpaint engorged with venom” andA father-daughter duo
of military historians
profile 13 women who
‘left a unique footprint
on war’s great map.’BOOKS
‘We should not be independent like millionaires, nor dependent like laborers. My ideal is that we all be interdependent.’—ROSE PASTOR STOKES
I
T IS A GLIBaxiom of history
that war is best seen as a
masculine mission, undertaken
by males who regard warfare
as the peak of manliness.
Battle, in this nutshell, is for blokes.
In parallel, the annals throw up an
equally casual canard: that women
aren’t as good as men at waging war.
In “The War Queens,” a father-
daughter duo charges into combat
against this stubborn convention,
romping its way through “history’s
killer queens.” Jonathan W. Jordan—a
military historian whose forte is World
War II—and Emily Anne Jordan profile
13 “generalissimas” who have “left a
unique footprint on war’s great map.”
The book moves chronologically
from Queen Tomyris in the sixth cen-
tury B.C.—who ruled over the Massa-
getae, a pesky Scythian tribe that made
life tiresome for the Persians—to Mar-
garet Thatcher, who led a seemingly
diminished post-imperial Britain into
war with Argentina. We may remem-
ber that Thatcher earned two nick-
names for this enterprise: “Iron Lady,”
from those who admired her, and
“Attila the Hen” from those who didn’t.
Other warrior-women in the book
include, inevitably, Boudica of the Brit-BYTUNKUVARADARAJANRAGS TO RICHESRose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) had experienced abject poverty in czarist Russia before becoming a journalist, labor leader and feminist in the UnitedStates.
ROSE PASTOR STOKES PAPERS
Between
Two
Worlds