In the first instance, as the man earns but $9.90 a week, rent must
be kept low if other bills are to be paid and a little provision made
for the future. It is hard enough in a one-room tenement, though the
furniture includes only absolute necessities, to keep all one's crowded
belongings in order. On wash day morning, when this picture was taken,
there are extra complications. On the whole, therefore, the home will
be seen to be as neat as circumstances permit. The bright pictures on
the wall manifest a desire to make it attractive.
The other picture, a "front room" with its leather covered furniture,
is in a five-roomed house which the family owns. The vivid-colored
sacred pictures relieve the severity of the room; and they reveal a
dominant note of Slavic life, for if happiness is to stay with the
family, the priest must come yearly to "bless the home." The family
who came many years ago, has by slow thrift accumulated the means to
obtain this house. And though the mother, who is now a widow, still
takes boarders, the family has in general the standards of Americans.
This instance I introduce because it is well to recognize that low
standards are not necessarily permanent. When Slavs do buy their homes,
the size and attractiveness of them indicates that the unsanitary
surroundings and crowded quarters of early days were simply tolerated
until the ambition could be attained. With a house on the outskirts of
the town, a garden about it, and a glimpse of the larger out-of-doors,
they begin to feel that the dreams of their emigration have come true.
Only the few however have fulfilled the dreams and it is back in the
squalid courts that we find the typical problems of every industrial
center that has felt the tide of immigration. The Homestead community
has so far shown a general indifference to the problems which its
industry creates. The mill demands strong, cheap labor, but concerns
itself little whether that labor is provided with living conditions
that will maintain its efficiency or secure the efficiency of the next
generation. The housing situation is in the hands of men actuated only
by a greed of profit. The community, on the other hand though realizing
the situation, does not take its responsibility for the aliens in its
midst with sufficient seriousness to attempt to limit the power of
these landlords.
The Slavs themselves, moreover, are people used to the limitations of
country life, and are ignorant of the evil effects of transferring the
small rooms, the overcrowding, the insufficient sanitary provisions
which are possible with all outdoors about them, to these crowded
courts under the shadow of the mill. And, as we said, their ambition
to save and buy property, here or in the old country, is a further
incentive to overcrowding.
Summing up the results of the indifference of the community and the
ignorance and ambition of the Slavs, we find a high infant death rate,
an acquaintance with vice among little children, intolerable sanitary
conditions, a low standard of living, a failure of the community to
assimilate the new race.
As we waited in one of the little railroad stations of Homestead,
a Slovak came in and sat down beside a woman with a two year old
child. He made shy advances to the baby, coaxing her in a voice of
heartbreaking loneliness. She would not come to him, and finally her
mother took her away. As they went, the Slovak turned sadly to the rest
of the company, taking us all into his confidence, and said simply,
"Me wife, me babe, Hungar." But were his family in America, it would
mean death for one baby in three; it would mean hard work in a little,
dirty, unsanitary house for the mother; it would mean sickness and
evil. With them in Hungary, it means for him isolation, and loneliness,
and the abnormal life of the crowded lodging house.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._