Meyer London - Biography - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

London died on Sunday, June 6, 1926. As he was crossing Second Avenue at 15th Street, he was caught in the middle of heavy automobile traffic passing in both directions. London became confused and when he halted in the middle of the road he was struck by a car, suffering internal injuries. The driver rushed him to Bellevue Hospital, where London’s daughter was an intern. When she saw her father London’s only concern was that the driver not be punished. "It’s not his fault", said London "and he is a poor man." London died at 10 o'clock that night at the age of 56, after physicians had labored for 11 hours to save him.

News immediately began to spread about the death of the beloved Congressman and crowds immediately began to gather in front of the hospital, the Londons' home, and the building of the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. The next day, London's body was taken to the Forward building, where it lay in state while 25,000 men, women, and children filed past the casket, paying their respects. A funeral followed on Wednesday, June 10, one of the greatest mass displays of mourning in New York City's history, witnessed by an estimated 500,000 people. The streets were jammed with a procession of 50,000 people, as hundreds of thousands crowded windows and hung from fire escapes or stood along the procession route in a crowd jammed six people deep.

London's body was interred at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, New York, in the borough of Queens.

In spite of his votes against the previous world war, London became the namesake of a World War II Liberty ship, the USS Meyer London, launched in 1943.

One of the buildings of Hillman Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is named after him. There is also a K-5 elementary school located in the Lower East Side named after Meyer London, also known as P.S. 2.

In an article for The New York Review of Books, historian Tony Judt writes that London is a relative of his: "Our cousin Meyer London had emigrated in 1891 to New York from a nearby village; there he was elected in 1914 as the second Socialist congressman before being ousted by an ignominious alliance of wealthy New York Jews disturbed by his socialism and American Zionists aghast at his well-publicized suspicion of their project."