THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN.
Anything like an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem
presented by the Tenth Ward[13] is beset by difficulties that increase
in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them. I have
too vivid a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those
stewing tenements, trying to get to the bottom of the vexatious
question only to find myself in the end as far from the truth as at
the beginning, asking with rising wrath Pilate's question, "What is
truth?" to attempt to weary the reader by dragging him with me over
that sterile and unprofitable ground. Nor are these pages the place for
such a discussion. In it, let me confess it at once and have done with
it, I should be like the blind leading the blind; between the real and
apparent poverty, the hidden hoards and the unhesitating mendacity of
these people, where they conceive their interests to be concerned in
one way or another, the reader and I would fall together into the ditch
of doubt and conjecture in which I have found company before.
[Footnote 13: I refer to the Tenth Ward always as typical. The district
embraced in the discussion really includes the Thirteenth Ward, and in
a growing sense large portions of the Seventh and contiguous wards as
well.]
The facts that lie on the surface indicate the causes as clearly as
the nature of the trouble. In effect both have been already stated. A
friend of mine who manufactures cloth once boasted to me that nowadays,
on cheap clothing, New York "beats the world." "To what," I asked, "do
you attribute it?" "To the cutter's long knife[14] and the Polish Jew,"
he said. Which of the two has cut deepest into the workman's wages
is not a doubtful question. Practically the Jew has monopolized the
business since the battle between East Broadway and Broadway ended in a
complete victory for the East Side and cheap labor, and transferred to
it the control of the trade in cheap clothing. Yet, not satisfied with
having won the field, he strives as hotly with his own for the profit
of half a cent as he fought with his Christian competitor for the
dollar. If the victory is a barren one, the blame is his own. His price
is not what he can get, but the lowest he can live for and underbid his
neighbor. Just what that means we shall see. The manufacturer knows it,
and is not slow to take advantage of his knowledge. He makes him hungry
for work by keeping it from him as long as possible; then drives the
closest bargain he can with the sweater.
[Footnote 14: An invention that cuts many garments at once, where the
scissors could cut only a few.]
Many harsh things have been said of the "sweater," that really apply to
the system in which he is a necessary, logical link. It can at least be
said of him that he is no worse than the conditions that created him.
The sweater is simply the middleman, the sub-contractor, a workman like
his fellows, perhaps with the single distinction from the rest that he
knows a little English; perhaps not even that, but with the accidental
possession of two or three sewing-machines, or of credit enough to hire
them, as his capital, who drums up work among the clothing-houses.
Of workmen he can always get enough. Every ship-load from German
ports brings them to his door in droves, clamoring for work. The sun
sets upon the day of the arrival of many a Polish Jew, finding him
at work in an East Side tenement, treading the machine and "learning
the trade." Often there are two, sometimes three, sets of sweaters on
one job. They work with the rest when they are not drumming up trade,
driving their "hands" as they drive their machine, for all they are
worth, and making a profit on their work, of course, though in most
cases not nearly as extravagant a percentage, probably, as is often
supposed. If it resolves itself into a margin of five or six cents,
or even less, on a dozen pairs of boys' trousers, for instance, it is
nevertheless enough to make the contractor with his thrifty instincts
independent. The workman growls, not at the hard labor, or poor pay,
but over the pennies another is coining out of his sweat, and on the
first opportunity turns sweater himself, and takes his revenge by
driving an even closer bargain than his rival tyrant, thus reducing his
profits.
The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his
helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done what he
could--with merciless severity where he could--to smother every symptom
of awakening intelligence in his slaves. In this effort to perpetuate
his despotism he has had the effectual assistance of his own system and
the sharp competition that keep the men on starvation wages; of their
constitutional greed, that will not permit the sacrifice of temporary
advantage, however slight, for permanent good, and above all, of the
hungry hordes of immigrants to whom no argument appeals save the cry
for bread. Within very recent times he has, however, been forced to
partial surrender by the organization of the men to a considerable
extent into trades unions, and by experiments in co-operation, under
intelligent leadership, that presage the sweater's doom. But as long as
the ignorant crowds continue to come and to herd in these tenements,
his grip can never be shaken off. And the supply across the seas is
apparently inexhaustible. Every fresh persecution of the Russian or
Polish Jew on his native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to
confound economical problems, and recruit the sweater's phalanx. The
curse of bigotry and ignorance reaches halfway across the world, to sow
its bitter seed in fertile soil in the East Side tenements. If the Jew
himself was to blame for the resentment he aroused over there, he is
amply punished. He gathers the first-fruits of the harvest here.
The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements, which the
law that regulates factory labor does not reach. To the factories
themselves that are taking the place of the rear tenements in rapidly
growing numbers, letting in bigger day-crowds than those the health
officers banished, the tenement shops serve as a supplement through
which the law is successfully evaded. Ten hours is the legal work-day
in the factories, and nine o'clock the closing hour at the latest.
Forty-five minutes at least must be allowed for dinner, and children
under sixteen must not be employed unless they can read and write
English; none at all under fourteen. The very fact that such a law
should stand on the statute book, shows how desperate the plight of
these people. But the tenement has defeated its benevolent purpose. In
it the child works unchallenged from the day he is old enough to pull
a thread. There is no such thing as a dinner hour; men and women eat
while they work, and the "day" is lengthened at both ends far into
the night. Factory hands take their work with them at the close of the
lawful day to eke out their scanty earnings by working overtime at
home. Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education that
alone can bring the needed relief; small wonder that there are whole
settlements on this East Side where English is practically an unknown
tongue, though the people be both willing and anxious to learn. "When
shall we find time to learn?" asked one of them of me once. I owe him
the answer yet.
Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham Square and ride up
half a mile through the sweaters' district. Every open window of the
big tenements, that stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of
the way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train speeds
by. Men and women bending over their machines, or ironing clothes at
the window, half-naked. Proprieties do not count on the East Side;
nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash. The road is
like a big gangway through an endless work-room where vast multitudes
are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference;
the scene is always the same. At Rivington Street let us get off and
continue our trip on foot. It is Sunday evening west of the Bowery.
Here, under the rule of Mosaic law, the week of work is under full
headway, its first day far spent. The hucksters' wagons are absent or
stand idle at the curb; the saloons admit the thirsty crowds through
the side-door labelled "Family Entrance;" a tin sign in a store-window
announces that a "Sunday School" gathers in stray children of the new
dispensation; but beyond these things there is little to suggest the
Christian Sabbath. Men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under heavy
burdens of unsewn garments, or enormous black bags stuffed full of
finished coats and trousers. Let us follow one to his home and see how
Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street tenement.
Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage,
of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines
behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that
opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way.
Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says
unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines
sewing knickerbockers, "knee-pants" in the Ludlow Street dialect. The
floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on
a couch of many dozens of "pants" ready for the finisher, a bare-legged
baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps
him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the
elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth
on which they are working. The boy and the woman alone look up at our
entrance. The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from
the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically
than ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the presence of a
stranger.
They are "learners," all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the
wife of the boss, and have "come over" only a few weeks ago. She is
disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from
our guide[15] set her fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows
almost talkative. The learners work for week's wages, she says. How
much do they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture.
The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently,
as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars.
The children--there are four of them--are not old enough to work.
The oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty dozen
"knee-pants" a week, for which the manufacturer pays seventy cents a
dozen. Five cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her
husband's work brings the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a
week, when they have work all the time. But often half the time is put
in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine o'clock at night,
from daybreak. There are ten machines in the room; six are hired at
two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one
somewhat larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month. She
does not complain, though "times are not what they were, and it costs a
good deal to live." Eight dollars a week for the family of six and two
boarders. How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of
fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two
quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at
twelve cents, butter one pound a week at "eight cents a quarter of a
pound." Coffee, potatoes, and pickles complete the list. At the least
calculation, probably, this sweater's family hoards up thirty dollars
a month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit
by the example set by their landlord in rent-collecting. It is the way
the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural
talent of its people for commercial speculation the investment is
enormously profitable.
[Footnote 15: I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by
one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission.
Without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless; even with
him it was often nearly so.]
[Illustration: "KNEE-PANTS" AT FORTY-FIVE CENTS A DOZEN--A LUDLOW
STREET SWEATER'S SHOP.]
On the next floor, in a dimly lighted room with a big red-hot stove
to keep the pressing irons ready for use, is a family of man, wife,
three children, and a boarder. "Knee-pants" are made there too, of a
still lower grade. Three cents and a half is all he clears, says the
man, and lies probably out of at least two cents. The wife makes a
dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine.
The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week. He is really only a lodger,
getting his meals outside. The rent is two dollars and twenty-five
cents a week, cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at least
two, sometimes four, such shops. Here is one with a young family for
which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife work together;
just now the latter, a comely young woman, is eating her dinner of dry
bread and green pickles. Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. They are
filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have
stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong--plain
proof that they are good to eat. The rest? "Well, they die," says our
guide, dryly. No thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family
with life all before it. In a few years the man will be a prosperous
sweater. Already he employs an old man as ironer at three dollars a
week, and a sweet-faced little Italian girl as finisher at a dollar and
a half. She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor write; will
probably never learn. How should she? The family clears from ten to
eleven dollars a week in brisk times, more than half of which goes into
the bank.
A companion picture from across the hall. The man works on the
machine for his sweater twelve hours a day, turning out three dozen
"knee-pants," for which he receives forty-two cents a dozen. The
finisher who works with him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a
dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred. This
operator has four children at his home in Stanton Street, none old
enough to work, and a sick wife. His rent is twelve dollars a month;
his wages for a hard week's work less than eight dollars. Such as he,
with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks
of the anarchists, won over by the promise of a general "divide;"
and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious
foreigner for whose perverted notions there is no room in this land of
plenty.
Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble upon a nest of
cloak-makers in their busy season. Six months of the year the
cloak-maker is idle, or nearly so. Now is his harvest. Seventy-five
cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. The cloak is
of cheap plush, and might sell for eight or nine dollars over the
store-counter. Seven dollars is the weekly wage of this man with wife
and two children, and nine dollars and a half rent to pay per month.
A boarder pays about a third of it. There was a time when he made ten
dollars a week and thought himself rich. But wages have come down
fearfully in the last two years. Think of it: "come down" to this. The
other cloak-makers aver that they can make as much as twelve dollars a
week, when they are employed, by taking their work home and sewing till
midnight. One exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street sweater.
It shows that he and his partner, working on first-class garments
for a Broadway house in the four busiest weeks of the season, made
together from $15.15 to $19.20 a week by striving from 6 A.M.
to 11 P.M., that is to say, from $7.58 to $9.60 each.[16]
The sweater on this work probably made as much as fifty per cent. at
least on their labor. Not far away is a factory in a rear yard where
the factory inspector reports teams of tailors making men's coats at an
average of twenty-seven cents a coat, all complete except buttons and
button-holes.
[Footnote 16: The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in
victory, raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being.]
Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in Ludlow Street,
owned by a well-known Jewish liquor dealer and politician, a triple
combination that bodes ill for his tenants. As a matter of fact, the
cheapest "apartment," three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one of
which deserves the name, is rented for $13 a month. Here is a reminder
of the Bend, a hallway turned into a shoemaker's shop. Two hallways
side by side in adjoining tenements, would be sinful waste in Jewtown,
when one would do as well by knocking a hole in the wall. But this
shoemaker knows a trick the Italian's ingenuity did not suggest. He has
his "flat" as well as his shop there. A curtain hung back of his stool
in the narrow passage half conceals his bed that fills it entirely from
wall to wall. To get into it he has to crawl over the foot-board, and
he must come out the same way. Expedients more odd than this are born
of the East Side crowding. In one of the houses we left, the coal-bin
of a family on the fourth floor was on the roof of the adjoining
tenement. A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped there while we
talked with the people.
We have reached Broome Street. The hum of industry in this six-story
tenement on the corner leaves no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears
within it. One flight up, we knock at the nearest door. The grocer,
who keeps the store, lives on the "stoop," the first floor in East
Side parlance. In this room a suspender-maker sleeps and works with his
family of wife and four children. For a wonder there are no boarders.
His wife and eighteen years old daughter share in the work, but the
girl's eyes are giving out from the strain. Three months in the year,
when work is very brisk, the family makes by united efforts as high as
fourteen and fifteen dollars a week. The other nine months it averages
from three to four dollars. The oldest boy, a young man, earns from
four to six dollars in an Orchard Street factory, when he has work.
The rent is ten dollars a month for the room and a miserable little
coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep. The girl makes her bed
on the lounge in the front room; the big boys and the children sleep
on the floor. Coal at ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents a
pound, one and a half pound of butter a week at thirty-six cents, and a
quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time, are items of their
house-keeping account as given by the daughter. Milk at four and five
cents a quart, "according to quality." The sanitary authorities know
what that means, know how miserably inadequate is the fine of fifty or
a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches
who poison the babes of these tenements with the stuff that is half
water, or swill. Their defence is that the demand is for "cheap milk."
Scarcely a wonder that this suspender-maker will hardly be able to save
up the _dot_ for his daughter, without which she stands no chance of
marrying in Jewtown, even with her face that would be pretty had it a
healthier tinge.
Up under the roof three men are making boys' jackets at twenty cents a
piece, of which the sewer takes eight, the ironer three, the finisher
five cents, and the button-hole-maker two and a quarter, leaving a
cent and three-quarters to pay for the drumming up, the fetching and
bringing back of the goods. They bunk together in a room for which
they pay eight dollars a month. All three are single here, that is:
their wives are on the other side yet, waiting for them to earn
enough to send for them. Their breakfast, eaten at the work-bench,
consists of a couple of rolls at a cent a piece, and a draught of
water, milk when business has been very good, a square meal at noon in
a restaurant, and the morning meal over again at night. This square
meal, that is the evidence of a very liberal disposition on the part
of the consumer, is an affair of more than ordinary note; it may be
justly called an institution. I know of a couple of restaurants at
the lower end of Orchard Street that are favorite resorts for the
Polish Jews, who remember the injunction that the ox that treadeth
out the corn shall not be muzzled. Being neighbors, they are rivals
of course, and cutting under. When I was last there one gave a dinner
of soup, meat-stew, bread, pie, pickles, and a "schooner" of beer for
thirteen cents; the other charged fifteen cents for a similar dinner,
but with two schooners of beer and a cigar, or a cigarette, as the
extra inducement. The two cents had won the day, however, and the
thirteen-cent restaurant did such a thriving business that it was about
to spread out into the adjoining store to accommodate the crowds of
customers. At this rate the lodger of Jewtown can "live like a lord,"
as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the price of
his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a
week, and save money, no matter what his earnings. He does it, too, so
long as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard he sets up
Jewtown must abide.
It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its
extortionate rents. At night there is scarce a room in all the district
that has not one or more of them, some above half a score, sleeping on
cots, or on the floor. It is idle to speak of privacy in these "homes."
The term carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on social
ethics to an audience of Hottentots. The picture is not overdrawn. In
fact, in presenting the home life of these people I have been at some
pains to avoid the extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they
came to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. Yet even
the direst apparent poverty in Jewtown, unless dependent on absolute
lack of work, would, were the truth known, in nine cases out of ten
have a silver lining in the shape of a margin in bank.
These are the economical conditions that enable my manufacturing friend
to boast that New York can "beat the world" on cheap clothing. In
support of his claim he told me that a single Bowery firm last year
sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12½.
With the material at fifteen cents a yard, he said, children's suits
of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for seventy-five cents, and
boys' cape overcoats at the same price. They are the same conditions
that have perplexed the committee of benevolent Hebrews in charge of
Baron de Hirsch's munificent gift of ten thousand dollars a month for
the relief of the Jewish poor in New York. To find proper channels
through which to pour this money so that it shall effect its purpose
without pauperizing, and without perpetuating the problem it is sought
to solve, by attracting still greater swarms, is indeed no easy task.
Colonization has not in the past been a success with these people.
The great mass of them are too gregarious to take kindly to farming,
and their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment. To herd
them in model tenements, though it relieve the physical suffering in a
measure, would be to treat a symptom of the disease rather than strike
at its root, even if land could be got cheap enough where they gather
to build on a sufficiently large scale to make the plan a success.
Trade schools for manual training could hardly be made to reach the
adults, who in addition would have to be supported for months while
learning. For the young this device has proved most excellent under the
wise management of the United Hebrew Charities, an organization that
gathers to its work the best thought and effort of many of our most
public-spirited citizens. One, or all, of these plans may be tried,
probably will. I state but the misgivings as to the result of some
of the practical minds that have busied themselves with the problem.
Its keynote evidently is the ignorance of the immigrants. They must
be taught the language of the country they have chosen as their home,
as the first and most necessary step. Whatever may follow, that is
essential, absolutely vital. That done, it may well be that the case in
its new aspect will not be nearly so hard to deal with.
Evening has worn into night as we take up our homeward journey through
the streets, now no longer silent. The thousands of lighted windows in
the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall. From every
door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hour's
rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant
working. Crowds of half-naked children tumble in the street and on the
sidewalk, or doze fretfully on the stone steps. As we stop in front
of a tenement to watch one of these groups, a dirty baby in a single
brief garment--yet a sweet, human little baby despite its dirt and
tatters--tumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg
with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly
head pillowed on my boot.