Sigismund Danielewicz

Sigismund Danielewicz (1847–1927) was a Polish-born labor organizer in San Francisco. After an 1885 speech advocating against persecution of Chinese people by the labor movement made him unwelcome in the movement, he worked as an anarchist writer and publisher in San Diego and Chicago as well as San Francisco.

Early life

Danielewicz was born in 1847. He traveled from Congress Poland to San Francisco in the late 1870s, where he held a variety of occupations. Also in the 1870s, he spent time in the Kingdom of Hawaii where he participated in labor organizing. He was Jewish and multilingual, speaking languages including Polish, Yiddish, English and Italian. In 1879, a city directory listed him as a barber near Chinatown, San Francisco; by 1880 he had relocated to the Tenderloin.

Trade organizing

Danielewicz attended a trades' assembly convention in 1881 as a delegate for the Barbers' Union, making him part of a group that would go on to play a central role in trade unionist organizing.

In 1885, a winter depression led to lowered wages for workers in the shipping industry; unlike the similarly affected metalworking trades, the shipping workers were not organized enough to resist the cuts to their pay. In response, the San Francisco International Workingmen's Association (IWA) focused on the industry, and Danielewicz as well as Burnette Haskell led sailors to organize and defend their own union: the Coast Seamen's Union.

Also in 1885, Danielewicz was serving as secretary of the IWA's central committee. At a West Coast conference convened by the Knights of Labor on November 30, 1885, at which many people and groups in the labor movement were expressing anti-Chinese sentiment and one delegate from the recently formed Seamen's Union introduced a resolution to demand the expulsion of all Chinese people from San Francisco within 60 days, Danielewicz attempted to deliver a prepared statement condemning "the persecution of the Chinese". In the beginning of the speech, he expressed the belief that all men were equal and appealed to his own status as one of the persecuted Jewish people. His speech drew laughter from those at the gathering, who heckled him off the stage, and he was eventually ruled out of order by Frank Roney; his appeal to the ruling was defeated in a near-unanimous vote. Other IWA members who were present, including Haskell and Frank Roney, did not come to his defense.

Danielewicz's organizing activity did not continue beyond the mid-1880s. His advocacy against anti-Chinese views and policies in the labor movement, as exemplified by his 1885 speech, made him unwelcome in the local labor movement.

Later activity and death

Between the mid-1880s and 1910, Danielewicz traveled to San Diego and Chicago before returning to San Francisco. During his travels he helped to manage or write multiple anarchist publications including ''Lucifer the Lightbearer''. During this period he additionally met Viroqua Daniels, a woman who became either his close friend or his romantic partner.

On January 4, 1909, Danielewicz patented a "filtrative inhaler" intended to protect the wearer from harmful particles in the air, filing the application under the name "Samuel Danielewicz". Danielewicz was jobless in the winter of 1910 and reported to be relocating to the East Coast of the United States.

In 1921, a city directory for Los Angeles identified Danielewicz as a "grinder," indicating that he may have been working as a polisher. Danielewicz's death date is not known. On October 23, 1927, he was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in eastern Los Angeles, which had a reputation as a Jewish cemetery for poor people.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Danielewicz, Sigismund
1847 births
1927 deaths
American anarchists
Trade unionists
Jewish anarchists
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
Congress Poland emigrants to the United States
Polish anarchists