conditions, in spite of laws and efforts to ameliorate the worst evils,
are well nigh unbelievable. The cellar population, the blind alley
population, the swarming masses in buildings that are little better than
rat-traps, the herding of whole families in single rooms, in which the
miserable beings sleep, eat, cook, and make clothing for contractors, or
cigars that would never go into men's mouths if the men saw where they
were made--these things seem almost impossible in a civilized and
Christian land. It is horrible to be obliged to think of the human
misery and hopelessness and grind to which hundreds of thousands are
subjected in the city of New York day in and out, without rest or
change. It is no wonder that criminals and degenerates come from these
districts; it is a marvel, rather, that so few result, and that so much
of human kindness and goodness exists in spite of crushing conditions.
There is a bright as well as dark side even to the most disgraceful
districts; but there is no denying that the dark vastly predominates,
and that the struggle for righteousness is too hard for the average
human being. Nearly everything is against the peasant immigrant thrust
into the throng which has no welcome for him, no decent room, and yet
from which he has little chance to get away. He is commonly cleaner
morally when he lands than after six months of the life here. Why should
he not be? What has American Christianity done to safeguard or help him?
[Sidenote: Immigrants Not Responsible]
The existence of the tenement-house evils, it must be borne in mind, is
chargeable primarily to the owner and landlord, not to the foreign
occupant. The landlords are especially to blame for the ill
consequences. The immigrant cannot dictate terms or conditions. He has
to go where he can. The prices charged for rent are exorbitant, and
should secure decency and healthful quarters. No property is so
remunerative. This rent money is literally blood money in thousands of
instances, and yet every effort to improve things is bitterly fought.
Why should not socialism and anarchism grow in such environment? Of
course many of the immigrants are familiar with poor surroundings and do
not apparently object to dirt and crowding. But that does not make these
conditions less perilous to American life. Self-respect has a hard
struggle for survival in these sections, and if the immigrant does not
possess or loses that, he is of the undesirable class. Mr. Robert Hunter
makes the statement that no other city in the world has so many dark and
windowless rooms, or so many persons crowded on the acre, or so many
families deprived of light and air as New York. He says there are
360,000 dark rooms in Greater New York. And these are almost entirely
occupied by the foreigners. But unsanitary conditions prevail also in
all the cities, large and small, and especially in the mine and mill and
factory towns, wherever large masses of the poorest workers live.
[Sidenote: Legal Remedies Possible]
Concerning possible legislation to correct these city evils of
environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city
tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities
prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under
penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give
each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether
such a plan could be brought into existence through the efforts of our
general government, or whether the Congress could itself legislate
directly, upon sanitary and moral grounds, against the notorious
practice of housing aliens with less regard for health and comfort than
is shown in placing brute animals in pens, the Bureau is unprepared to
say.
[Sidenote: Demands Immediate Remedy]
It is, however, convinced that no feature of the immigration question so
insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to
be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its
removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty,
disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely
supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources
of our country."[71]
[Sidenote: Little Italy]
Not to draw the picture all in the darker shades, let us look at the
best type of Italian tenement life. We are not left to guesswork in the
matter. Settlement workers and students of social questions are actually
living in the tenement and slum sections, so as to know by experience
and not hearsay. One of these investigators, Mrs. Lillian W. Betts,
author of two enlightening books,[72] has lived for a year in one of the
most crowded tenements in one of the most densely populated sections of
the Italian quarter. We condense some of her statements, which reveal
the foreign life of to-day in New York's Little Italy, with its 400,000
souls.
[Sidenote: Immigrant Isolation]
"A year's residence in an Italian tenement taught me first of all the
isolation of a foreign quarter; how completely cut off one may be from
everything that makes New York New York. The necessities of life can be
bought without leaving the square that is your home. After a little it
occasioned no surprise to meet grandparents whose own children were born
in New York, who had never crossed to the east side of the Bowery, never
seen Broadway, nor ever been south of Houston Street. There was no
reason why they should go. Every interest in their life centered within
four blocks. I went with a neighbor to Saint Vincent's Hospital, where
her husband had been taken. I had to hold her hand in the cars, she was
so terrified. She had lived sixteen years in this ward and never been on
a street-car before. Of a family of five sons and two daughters, besides
the parents, in this country fifteen years, none spoke English but the
youngest, born here, and she indifferently. Little Italy was all of
America they knew, and of curiosity they had none.
[Sidenote: Children American in Spirit]
"The house in which we lived was built for twenty-eight families and
occupied by fifty-six. One man who had been in the country twenty-eight
years could not speak or understand a word of English. Nothing but
compulsion made his children use Italian, and the result was pathetic.
The eldest child was an enthusiastic American, and the two civilizations
were always at war. This boy knew more of American history, its heroes
and poetry, than anyone of his age I ever met. This boy had never been
five blocks from the house in which we lived. He removed his hat and
shoes when he went to bed in winter; in summer he took off his coat. A
brother and two sisters shared the folding bed with him. His father
hired the three rooms and sublet to a man with a wife and three
children. The women quarreled all the time, but worked in the same room,
finishing trousers and earning about forty-five cents a day each.
[Sidenote: Evils of Overcrowding]
"How do they live? One widow, with three in her own family, took nine
men boarders in her three rooms. A nephew and his wife also kept house
there, the rent being $18 a month. Another neighbor, whose family
consisted of four adults and two children, had seven lodgers or boarders
at one time. These men owned mattresses, rolled up by day, spread on the
floor at night. One of them had a bride coming from Italy. Two men with
their mattresses were ejected and space made for the ornate brass and
green bedstead. The wedding was the occasion of great rejoicing. Next
day the bride was put to work sewing 'pants.' At the end of a month I
found she had not left those rooms from the moment she entered them, and
that she worked, Sundays included, fourteen hours a day. She was a mere
child, at that. The Italian woman is not a good housekeeper, but she is
a homemaker; she does not fret; dirt, disorder, noise, company, never
disturb her. She must share everything with those about her. She cooks
one meal a day and that at night. Pot or pan may be placed in the
middle of the table and each may help himself from it, but the food is
what her husband wants.
[Sidenote: Family Coöperation]
"Together they will wash the dishes or he will take the baby out. The
mother, who has sewed all day, will wash till midnight, while the
husband sits dozing, smoking, talking. But he hangs out the clothes.
They work together, these Italian husbands and wives. Their wants are
the barren necessaries of life; shelter, food, clothing to cover
nakedness. The children's clothes are washed when they go to bed. Life
is reduced to its lowest terms. They can move as silently as do the
Arabs and do so in the night watches. But they are rarely penniless;
they have a little fund always in the bank. They put their young
children in institutions from weaning-time until they are old enough to
work, then bring them home to swell the family income. Recently a
father, whose children had thus been cared for by the state, bought a
three-story tenement. This is typical thrift. There was never a day when
all the children of school age were in school. School was a prison house
to most of them. There was not room for them, even if they wanted to go.
[Sidenote: City Neglect]
"The streets in which the Italians live are the most neglected. It is
claimed that cleanliness is impossible where the Italian lives. The
truth is that preparation for cleanliness in our foreign colonies is
wholly inadequate. The police despise the Italian except for his voting
power. He feels the contempt, but with the wisdom of his race he keeps
his crimes foreign, and defies this department more successfully than
the public generally knows. He is a peaceable citizen in spite of the
peculiar race crimes which startle the public. The criminals are as one
to a thousand of these people. On Sundays watch these colonies. The
streets are literally packed with crowds from house line to house line,
as far as the eye can see, but not a policeman in sight, nor occasion
for one. Laughter, song, discussion, exchange of epithet, but no
disturbance. They mind their own business as no other nation, and carry
it to the point of crime when they protect the criminal."[73]
[Sidenote: Possibilities of Uplifting]
This is testimony directly from life and has especial value. It reveals
the difficulties, and at the same time the possibilities, of reaching
and Americanizing these immigrants, who are better than their
surroundings, and promising if properly cared for.
[Sidenote: Sources of Degradation]
The impression that steadily deepens with observation and study is that
of the evil and degrading surroundings. Not only are there the evil
moral influences of overcrowding, but also the contact with elements of
population already deteriorated by a generation of tenement house life.
The fresh arrivals are thrown into contact with the corrupt remnants of
Irish immigration which now make up the beggars, drunkards, thugs, and
thieves of those quarters. The results can easily be predicted. The
Italian laboring population is temperate when it comes to this country;
but under the evil conditions and influences of the tenement district
disorderly resorts have been opened, and drinking and other vices are
spreading. The Hebrews show tendencies to vices from which formerly they
were free. The law does not protect these immigrants, and it is charged
that the city permits every kind of inducement for the extension of
immorality, drunkenness, and crime. Thus the immigrant is likely to
deteriorate and degenerate in the process of Americanization, instead of
becoming better in this new world. He has indeed little chance. If he
does not become a pauper or criminal or drunkard, it will be because he
is superior to his environment.
_III. The Sweat-shop Peril_
[Sidenote: An Awful Peril]
An immigrant peril is the sweat-shop labor which this class performs.
"Sweating" is the system of sub-contract wherein the work is let out to
contractors to be done in small shops or at home. According to the
Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, "in practice sweating consists of
the farming out by competing manufacturers to competing contractors of
the material for garments, which in turn is distributed among competing
men and women to be made up." This system is opposed to the factory
system, where the manufacturer employs his own workmen, sees the goods
made, and knows the conditions. The sweating system is one of the
iniquities of commercial greed, and the helpless foreigner of certain
classes is its victim. The contractor or sweater in our cities is an
organizer and employer of immigrants. His success depends upon getting
the cheapest help, and life is of no account to him, nor apparently to
the man above him. The clothing may be made in foul and damp and
consumption or fever-infested cellars and tenement-styes, by men, women
and children sick or uncleanly, but the only care of the sweater is that
it be made cheaply and thus his returns be secured. It is a standing
reproach to our Christian civilization that the sweating system and the
slums are still existing sores in American centers of population. So far
the law has been unable to control or check greed, and the plague spots
grow worse. Here is a typical case, taken from the report of the
Industrial Commission:
[Sidenote: A Striking Example]
"A Polish Jew in Chicago, at a time when very few of the Poles were
tailors, opened a shop in a Polish neighborhood. He lost money during
the time he was teaching the people the trade, but finally was a gainer.
Before he opened the shop he studied the neighborhood; he found the
very poorest quarters where most of the immigrant Poles lived. He took
no one to work except the newly arrived Polish women and girls. The more
helpless and dependent they were, the more sure of getting work from
him. In speaking about his plans he said: 'It will take these girls
years to learn English and to learn how to go about and find work. In
that way I will be able to get their labor very cheap.' His theory
turned out to be practical. He has since built several tenement-houses."
[Sidenote: A Foreign Importation]
The cheap tailor business is divided among the Italians, Russians,
Poles, and Swedes, Germans and Bohemians. The women and children are
made to work, and hours are not carefully counted. Long work, poor food,
poor light, foul air, bad sanitation--all make this kind of life far
worse than any life which the immigrants knew in Europe. Better physical
starvation there than the mental and spiritual blight of these modern
conditions here. That so much of hopeful humanity is found in these
unwholesome and congested wards proves the quality worth saving and
elevating.
[Sidenote: Story of a Sweat-shop Girl]
Here is an illustration of the resolute spirit which conditions cannot
crush. A young Polish girl was brought by her widowed mother to America,
in hope of bettering their condition. The mother died soon afterward,
leaving the orphan dependent. Then came the disappointments, one after
another, and finally, the almost inevitable result in such cases, the
fall into the slums and the sweat-shops. By hard work six days in the
week, fourteen or more hours a day, this girl of tender age could make
$4 a week! She had to get up at half past five every morning and make
herself a cup of coffee, which with a bit of bread and sometimes fruit
made her breakfast. Listen to her story:
[Sidenote: Her Own Story]
"The machines go like mad all day, because the faster you work the more
money you get. Sometimes in my haste the finger gets caught and the
needle goes right through it. We all have accidents like that. Sometimes
a finger has to come off.... For the last two winters I have been going
to night school. I have learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. I can
read quite well in English now, and I look at the newspapers every day.
I am going back to night school again this winter. Some of the women in
my class are more than forty years of age. Like me, they did not have a
chance to learn anything in the old country. It is good to have an
education; it makes you feel higher. Ignorant people are all low. People
say now that I am clever and fine in conversation. There is a little
expense for charity, too. If any worker is injured or sick we all give
money to help."[74]
[Sidenote: Possibilities]
Surely this is good material. A changed and Christian environment would
make shining lights out of these poor immigrants, who are kept in the
subways of American life, instead of being given a fair chance out in
the open air and sunlight of decently paid service.
[Sidenote: A Foreign System]
Practically all of the work in tenements is carried on by foreign-born
men and women, and more than that, by the latest arrivals and the lowest
conditioned of the foreign-born. Tenement-house legislation has been
practically forced upon New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, whose
ports of entry receive the first impact of immigration, by two of the
races that have been crowding into the cities--the Italian and Hebrew.
The Italian woman, working in her close tenement, has by her cheap labor
almost driven out all other nationalities from that class of work still
done in the home, the hand sewing on coats and trousers. Of the 20,000
licenses granted by the New York factory inspector for "home finishing"
in New York City, ninety-five per cent. are held by Italians. This work
has to be done because the husband is not making enough to support the
family. These men work mostly as street laborers, hucksters, and
peddlers. To make both ends meet not only the wife but children have to
work.
[Sidenote: A Typical Case]
Here is a typical case of this class of worker and the earnings, from an
inspector's note-book: "Antonia Scarafino, 235 Mulberry Street;
finisher; gets five cents per pair pants, bastes bottoms, puts linings
on; one hour to make; two years at this business; four in this country;
married, with baby; sister works with her; can both together make $4 per
week; husband peddles fish and makes only $1 to $2 a week; got married
here; two rooms, $8.50 rent; kitchen 10 x 12; bedroom 8 x 10; gets all
the work she wants. No sunlight falls into her squalid rooms, and there
is no stopping, from early morning till late at night."
_IV. Three Constant Perils_
[Sidenote: The Naturalization Evil]
Illegal and fraudulent naturalization is another evil to which the
foreigner in the city becomes a party, although the blame belongs
chiefly to the ward politicians who make him a _particeps criminis_. The
recognized managers of the foreign vote of various nationalities--almost
always saloonkeepers--hold citizenship cheap, perjury undiscovered as
good as truth, and every vote a clear gain for the party and themselves.
So the naturalization mills are kept running night and day preceding a
national or municipal election. Describing this process, ex-United
States Senator Chandler says that in New York during a single month just
before election about seven thousand naturalization papers were issued,
nearly all by one judge, who examined each applicant and witnesses to
his satisfaction, and signed his orders at the rate of two per minute,
and as many as 618 in one day. Many classes of frauds were committed.
Witnesses were professional perjurers, each swearing in hundreds of
cases, testifying to a five years' residence when they had first met the
applicants only a few hours before. During the past year some of these
professional perjurers and political manipulators were tried and sent to
the penitentiary; but the frauds will go on. Here is an illustration:
[Sidenote: Making Citizens]
"Patrick Hefferman, of a given street in New York, was twenty-one years
old September 2, 1891, and came to this country August 1, 1888. He was
naturalized October 20, 1891. On that day he was introduced by Thomas
Keeler to a stranger, who went with him to court and signed a paper;
they both went before the judge, who asked the stranger something.
Hefferman signed nothing, said nothing, but kissed a book and came out a
citizen, having taken no oath except that of renunciation and
allegiance."
[Sidenote: Fraud Abundant]
Thus are the sacred rights of citizenship obtained by thousands upon
thousands, not in New York alone, but in all our cities. More than that,
fraudulent use is freely made of naturalization papers. The Italian
immigrant, for example, finds his vote is wanted, and obtains a false
paper. He returns to Italy to spend his earnings, and there is offered a
sum of money for the use of his papers. These are given to an emigrant
who probably could not pass the examination at Ellis Island, but who as
a naturalized citizen, if he is not detected in the fraud, cannot be
shut out. Then he sends the papers back to Italy. It is admitted that
there is a regular traffic in naturalization papers. In every way the
alien is put on the wrong track, and his American experiences are such
as would naturally make him lawless and criminal rather than a good
citizen. He needs nothing more than protection against corrupting and
venal agencies, which find their origin in politics and the saloon.
[Sidenote: The Saloon and the Immigrant]
The foreign element furnishes the saloons with victims. In his graphic
book describing tenement life in New York Mr. Riis shows the rapid
multiplication of the saloons in the slums where the foreigners are
crowded into tenements, nine per cent. more densely packed than the most
densely populated districts of London. In the chapter, "The Reign of
Rum,"[75] he says:
[Sidenote: Testimony of Riis]
"'Where God builds a church the devil builds next door a saloon' is an
old saying that has lost its point in New York. Either the devil was on
the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the way of
building. I tried once to find out how the account stood, and counted to
111 Protestant churches, chapels, and places of worship of every kind
below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. The worst half of the tenement
population lives down there, and it has to this day the worst half of
the saloons. Up town the account stands a little better, but there are
easily ten saloons to every church to-day.
[Sidenote: Hunting for an American]
"As to the motley character of the tenement population, when I asked the
agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how many people might be living
in it, I was told: One hundred and forty families--one hundred Irish,
thirty-eight Italian, and two that spoke the German tongue. Barring the
agent herself, there was not a native-born individual in the court. The
answer was characteristic of the cosmopolitan character of lower New
York, very nearly so of the whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and
courts. One may find for the asking an Italian, German, French, African,
Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony.
The one thing you shall ask for in vain in the chief city of America is
a distinctively American community."
[Sidenote: The Peril of Poverty]
The immigrant is nearly always poor, and is thrust into the poverty of
the city. We must distinguish between pauperism and poverty. As Mr.
Hunter points out, in his stirring chapter on this subject,[76]
"pauperism is dependence without shame, poverty is to live miserable we
know not why, to have the dread of hunger, to work sore and yet gain
nothing." Fear of pauperism, of the necessity of accepting charity,
drives the self-respecting poor insane and to suicide. It is to be said
that the majority of the immigrants are not paupers, but self-respecting
poor. Moreover, the new immigration is not nearly so ready to accept
pauperism as are the Irish, who make up the largest percentage of this
class, as already shown. But the poor immigrants are compelled, by
circumstances, to come in contact with, if not to dwell directly among
this pauper element, lost to sense of degradation. The paupers make up
the slums. And because the rents are cheaper in the miserable old
rookeries that still defy public decency, the Italians especially crowd
into these pestilential quarters, which are the hotbeds of disease,
physical and moral filth, drunkenness, and crime. Thus pauperism and
poverty dwell too closely together.
[Sidenote: Some Causes of Poverty]