[Long-time readers of LHB know that each year I research and write a biographical essay for my legal history exam. If you'd like to read prior ones, start here. This year's follows. DRE]
Anna Moscowitz Kross (1891-1979) was born in what is now Belarus but at the time was part of Russia, to a tailor and his wife, Maier and Esther Moscowitz. To avoid escalating violence and discrimination, the family emigrated to the United States in 1893. Her two sisters died during the Atlantic crossing. The family settled in a crowded neighborhood in the Lower East Side of New York City. Every member of her family worked to supplement Maier’s meager wages. After school,” a journalist later reported, “Anna came home and sewed on dresses or made buttons.” In high school she tutored other immigrants in English and worked nights in a suspender factory, although she never worked on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. She enrolled in New York City’s leading teachers’ college but quit when the instruction bored her. Instead, in 1907, at the age of 16, she enrolled in the NYU Law School, where, after her first year, she won a scholarship. When she entered her first class, Ashe chose a seat near the door, so she would not have to pass through rows of men, who stared at her as if she were some strange being.” She continued to teach English to immigrants by day but studied law by night. AI was in a strange land, a foreigner,” she explained. “I had to show Americans that Russian Jews have stuff in them worth developing.”
When Moscowitz received the second of two law degrees in 1912, she was still so young that she had to wait another six months to be admitted to the bar. After she was, no law firm she approached would hire her, even though she advertised in a legal newspaper that she would accept any salary. For two years, she clerked in the law office of a friend for no pay and then struck out on her own. She also promptly joined the precursor to the National Association of Women Lawyers.
“She had worked and mingled with men all her life,” reported a journalist who profiled her in 1917, “so it was not a strange thing for her to be in the law profession with them.” “Let woman go about her business, dress sensibly, and appear rational,” she once said, “and she will receive nothing but courtesy.” Yet at the start of her career, lawyers and judges often exasperated her. “You went into court with your mind full of your case. You knew you had prepared it as carefully as would a man,” she explained. “But the manner of the judge immediately became one of relaxed toleration. You could almost hear him say, ‘Oh, a woman. Well, we must bear with her as best we can.’” Some lawyers were ostentatiously polite, calling her “my fair adversary” and “our feminine opponent,” but then discovered to their sorrow that they had underestimated her. “I love to match my wits against men,” she told the journalist. “It is great fun, and I just love to beat them. You ought to see how foolish men feel when I win a case.” In 1915, after a week-long trial, she won a verdict on behalf of a carpenter wrongfully excluded from his trade union—the first such judgment in twenty years. Deeply impressed, several trade unions promptly retained her services.
Her desire for a career, a journalist wrote, “did not prevent her from marrying.” On April 5, 1917, she wed Isidor Kross, a surgeon two years her senior, the day before he sailed to Europe to serve in World War I. Thereafter, she usually used “Anna M. Kross” as her professional name. Kross considered herself fortunate to have married a professional who accepted her desire for a career. “My husband says he is perfectly happy and does not feel neglected,” she said. Presumably, the couple practiced family limitation, because they had only three children (one of whom died at age five). Presumably, too they hired childcare: judging from a description of Isidor as “a prosperous physician,” they could afford it. But a journalist went out of his way to report that Anna was “an excellent mother and guide to two young children” and that Isidor considered her “a mighty swell cook.”
While still a law student, Kross campaigned for woman suffrage. After New York State gave women the vote in November 1917, she became head of the women's division of the speakers’ bureau of Tammany Hall, the nickname of the Democratic Party in New York City. Alfred Smith, who serve four terms as governor of New York, adopted her as a protégé. In 1919, she was appointed New York City’s first female Assistant Corporation Counsel. Her caseload was before the city's Domestic Relations Court, which handled such matters as child support and paternity. She thought her sex allowed her to make a distinctive contribution to the legal process. “It is much easier for a woman to understand the psychology of another woman in distress,” she explained. She also continued to pay due regard to the politicians who got her her job. In one widely reported “women’s debate” in 1921, for example, she spoke on behalf of Tammany Hall’s candidate for mayor.
In April 1920, John Patrick O’Brien, a graduate of Holy Cross and the Georgetown Law School and a loyal Tammany Hall member, became her boss as Corporation Counsel of New York City. Journalists sometimes made fun of his “O’Brienisms,” but one revealed him to be a well-intentioned Catholic layman fumbling his way toward feminism. “I'm a champion of women,” he declared. “I’m a home man and a well-trained husband and have always been for anything women wanted.”
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| Anna Moscowitz Kross (DRE) |
A new phase in Kross’s career commenced in January 1934. In 1933, the corrupt mayor of New York had been forced from office, and Tammany nominated O’Brien to compete in a special election to serve out the ousted mayor’s term. After O’Brien won, Kross raised funds for his campaign for a full term with a “tea” for O’Brien’s wife attended by the spouses of various Democratic luminaries. In November 1933, O’Brien lost to a progressive candidate, Fiorello La Guardia (who happened to have been Kross’s law school classmate), but on his last day as mayor, O’Brien named Kross to fill the unexpired term of a judge of the Magistrate’s Court. Such judges occupied the lowest rung in the city’s judiciary, but collectively they processed a half million cases, mostly minor criminal offenses, annually. Kross considered Magistrate’s Court “the greatest social force for the correcting of individual maladjustments.” She was promptly assigned to a branch known as the Women’s Court.
(Continued after the jump.)
Created in 1907, the Women’s Court handled cases involving women charged with prostitution and sat from 9:00 PM until the early hours of the morning. As a law student, Kross monitored its work and argued that male clients as well as female sex workers ought to be prosecuted. On one occasion, she ensured that one man was. While she was waiting for a streetcar to take her to the Women’s Court at 2:00 AM, a man sidled up to her and asked if she wanted “to come out for a good time.” Moscowitz agreed and suggested a hotel where they could have one. But when the pair passed a police officer, she had the man arrested. She testified against him and saw him convicted that same night.
After she graduated from law school, Kross recruited women lawyers to represent female defendants in the Women’s Court and charged that its judges, in league with corrupt police officers and bail bondsmen, threatened women with substantial sentences unless they obtained bonds at exorbitant prices. By 1915, she decided that the problem with the Women’s Court was still more fundamental. “Each case must be brought under some statute [and] called by some legal name,” she explained. “The strictly legal procedure is more or less antagonistic to and in conflict with a healthy treatment of the social evil” of prostitution, which required “a more scientific” approach that considered women’s mental health and the collapse of social and familial ties in the metropolis.
With Kross’s own appointment to the Women’s Court in 1934, she finally got the chance to act on the convictions she acquired decades earlier. “I am more than ever convinced that the court is not the method whereby you can hope to solve this problem,” Kross declared after her first week on the bench. “The viewpoint and equipment of a scientific age” had to replace “the old vindictive spirit of the moral reformers.” Her first proposal, advanced in 1935, was to replace the Women’s Court with a three-person, administrative “medical-social tribunal” consisting of a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a lawyer and staffed with trained investigators, doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists. Kross predicted that such a board would produce “a liberal and modern scientific and social code” to supplant the present “archaic, unsound, and chaotic” law of prostitution.
When she failed to convince others of, in her words, “the stupidity of handling a social question by criminal-legal procedures,” Kross tried a different approach. The probation officers assigned to the Women’s Court were patronage appointees, lacked social expertise, and could supervise defendants only after their conviction. Rather than use them, Kross persuaded female reformers and philanthropists to fund a “Social Services Bureau,” a volunteer, private, non-profit body auxiliary to the Women’s Court consisting of social workers, doctors, and psychologists. It would work principally with a subset of Kross’s docket, females between sixteen and twenty-one years of age. Kross offered to suspend their prosecutions before trial if they submitted themselves to supervision by the Social Service Bureau. The bureau’s social workers compiled detailed case histories of the defendants who did, met with them regularly, and scheduled their appearances before Kross so that the judge could monitor their progress. Compliant defendants had their charges dismissed without a finding of guilt; noncompliant defendants were sentenced to a juvenile corrective facility. In 1939, the Social Services Bureau supervised 1,275 defendants with its nine paid staff and scores of volunteers.
In
1938, Kross ran for a seat on the state supreme court—a trial court of
general jurisdiction, in with frequent jury trials and both sides
represented by legal counsel. The author of a sympathetic campaign
profile probably thought he was helping her when, after observing her in
the Women’s Court, he wrote, “Precedent seemed to her a thing to be
respected only if it were good. Otherwise, out the window it went.”
Tammany declined to nominate her, perhaps because its leaders doubted
she would distribute the patronage that came with the job as they
wished, but a political party composed of liberals of various stripes
did, and so did Mayor Fiorella La Guardia. The rival candidate
nominated by Tammany, La Guardia implied, was the kind of fellow who
hung “around a political club for fifteen or twenty years.” When the
time was right, he would enter a roomful of party chieftains, “hat in
hand, cringing and pleading.” If he emerged with the judicial
nomination, it was only because he had left his “soul behind.” For her
part, Kross celebrated the judicial system she had earlier castigated
for being insufficiently mindful of the social aspects of law. At one
campaign stop, she contrasted “the impartial administration of justice”
in the United States “with that of some European countries.” At
another, she claimed that although nations need militaries to defend
their territory, they needed courts to “safeguard democracy.”
Even
with the backing of La Guardia, the National Lawyers Guild, and the
National Association of Women Lawyers, Kross lost. She remained on the
Magistrate Court, spinning out more innovations, including special
dockets for domestic violence and for substance abuse, until her
appointment as New York City’s Commissioner of Corrections in 1954.
From the 1920s onward, Kross gave much of her time to any number of “Jewish social and welfare organizations,” including those promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine. For a time, while serving on the Magistrate Court, she also sat on the so-called Jewish Court of Arbitration, a body created by Russian Jewish immigrants to arbitrate family-law disputes in accordance with “the Jewish tradition.” During her campaign for the supreme court in 1938, she started using her middle name to ensure that even anti-Semitic voters knew she was Jewish. “I am simply trying to go along without any hint of false colors—purely on my record as a judge,” she told a reporter. Asked how Jews could best avoid intolerance, she replied, “They should be conscious that they are Jews, but not conscious that being Jews makes them a race apart or different.” If they saw a wrong, “they should strive to right it quite apart from the fact that they are Jews.”
Sources. The leading scholar of Anna Moscowitz Kross is Mae Quinn, Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson Law. I consulted two of her articles on Kross: “Revisiting Anna Moscowitz Kross’s Critique of New York City’s Women’s Court: The Continued Problem of Solving the ‘Problem’ of Prostitution with Specialized Courts,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 33 (January 2006); and “Anna Moscowitz Kross and the Home Term Part: A Second Look at the Nation’s First Criminal Domestic Violence Court,” Akron Law Review 41 (2008). Contemporary reportage on Kross includes “A Woman Lawyer who Has Made Good,” American Magazine 83 (May 1917): 55; “New York Employs a Woman Legal Advisor,” New York Evening World, November 25, 1918; "Like Tabasco, Sharp and Biting are Women in Political Debate," New York Evening World, October 28, 1921; “70,00 Work People Clients for Woman,” NYT, July 22, 1923; “Courts Held Basis for All Democracy,” NYT, September 23, 1938; and Howard Whitman, "Annie, The Poor Man's Judge,” Collier’s, March 1, 1947. On O’Brien, see “John P. O’Brien Names Corporation Counsel,” New-York Herald, April 9, 1920, 10; and AO=Brienisms,@ Time Magazine, January 9, 1933. I learned of Kross’s service on the Jewish Arbitration Court from Amalia Kessler’s forthcoming book, The Quest for Modern American Democracy: Arbitration, Governance, and the Jewish Question, 1900-1950, which is under contract with the Yale University Press.
