Lucy Robins Lang

Lang was born on March 30, 1884, in Kyiv, Ukraine and grew up in Korostyshev.[1] Lang's paternal grandfather was a rabbi in Kyiv and was known as Reb Chiam the Hospitable.[2] Lang's father went to America ahead of the family.[3] The family moved to the United States when Lang was nine and they lived for a short time in the Lower East Side of New York City before settling in Chicago.[1] She began to work in a cigar factory, where she was a good enough worker to make $20 a week.[4] She also helped take care of her four younger siblings after work.[1] Lang learned English at night school.[5] She was also invited to start attending an anarchist study group.[6] Lang also attended programs at Hull House and Jane Addams was a big influence on her life.[6] Addams even asked her to work as an assistant dance instructor for Hull House.[1]

When she was 16, she married Bob Robins and the couple set up their marriage as a "limited contract that either party could renew or break."[6] The couple moved to New York City, partly because Lang's family strongly disapproved of the marriage.[6] She and her husband met Emma Goldman in 1905 and both were involved in helping create the Free Speech League.[6] The couple would also follow Goldman to California, where they lived in an anarchist commune.[7] They also opened a vegetarian restaurant.[8] Lang and her husband briefly separated, still viewing their marriage as a limited contract.[9] The separation was considered "scandalous" and there was gossip printed about them in the newspapers in San Francisco.[9] They stayed married for twenty years after their short separation.[1] Lang also designed and used an "auto-house" which combined a portable printing press with a house trailer.[10] Lang and her husband would travel the United States using the auto-house and complete printing jobs wherever they stopped.[10] Lang, who was "mechanically inclined," drove the vehicle, which they called the Adventurer.[1]

In 1916, Lang was involved in working on Tom Mooney's case to support his innocence.[7] She was very involved in his defense case and used her connections with the Chicago labor movement to build political clout to secure Mooney's freedom.[7] Lang and others created a labor defense committee to petition New York Governor Charles Seymour Whitman to stop the extradition of Alexander Berkman.[11] It was believed that Berkman would not get a fair trial if he was extradited to San Francisco.[11] In the end, the efforts of Lang and more than 200 labor leaders who helped petition Whitman ensured that Berkman was not extradited.[12]

Goldman later asked Lang and another friend, Eleanor Fitzgerald, to organize a campaign for general amnesty for those who were convicted under Wartime Emergency Laws.[13] Goldman herself was about to be imprisoned for a violation of the Selective Service Act of 1917.[13] Together, Lang and Fitzgerald founded the League for Amnesty for Political Prisoners.[13] Lang would eventually start working for amnesty for political prisoners through the American Federation of Labor (AFL).[14] In 1919, Lang approached Samuel Gompers to encourage him to support amnesty.[15] During their work, she and Gompers became friends.[16] The first time the national convention of the AFL tried to pass an amnesty resolution, it failed.[17] Lang asked a socialist lawyer, Morris Hillquit, to help her create a new resolution.[17] By 1920, the AFL, through Lang's efforts, endorsed an amnesty resolution for political prisoners.[18] The AFL's endorsement was a "major lift" for the amnesty movement.[19] Lang differentiated her amnesty campaigns from other contemporary ones, by calling hers "constructive" as opposed to the others, which she considered "radical."[17] She also believed that other campaigns for amnesty existed more to raise money than to provide actual aid.[17] Lang ensured that her campaigns were funded by unions, not individual laborers.[17] Lang worked as a mediator between the labor unions and Washington, D.C., officials.[20] Her position at AFL was executive secretary of the amnesty committee.[21] In 1921, Lang focused her energy on amnesty for Eugene Debs.[22]

Lang and her husband began to have differences over her work for AFL and split up in the mid-1920s.[1] On behalf of the AFL, Lang investigated working conditions for laborers in the South.[23] She was also involved in helping during the 1927 Mine Workers Strike.[23] Lang married Harry Lang, who was editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.[1] The couple visited Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East all between 1928 and 1937.[1] Lang became interested in Zionism and became the head of a group which raised funds to establish Kfar Blum, a kibbutz where German and Austrian refugees could safely emigrate.[1]

Lang and her husband settled for a while in Croton, New York, in the mid-1940s, where Lang worked on her autobiography.[1] They moved to Los Angeles later on and eventually lived in Beverly Hills.[1][24] Lang died at Mt. Sinai hospital on January 25, 1962.[24][25]

Lang's autobiography, Tomorrow is Beautiful (1948), tells her life story and also describes a history of the Jewish labor movement in the United States in early half of the twentieth century.[5] Kirkus Reviews called the book an "excellent autobiography, as well as important historically for those interested in the labor movement."[26]

• Tomorrow is Beautiful (1948, special Labor edition, full text)
• War Shadows: A Documental Story of the Struggle for Amnesty (1922, full text)