instinctive groping toward orderly arrangement which I have observed so
many times, and take to be evidence that in better surroundings much
might be made of these people. Clothes were hung to dry on a line strung
the whole length of the room. Upon couches by the wall some men were
snoring. They were the boarders. The "man" was out shoveling snow with
the midnight shift. By a lamp with brown paper shade, over at the
window, sat two women sewing. One had a baby on her lap. Two sweet
little cherubs, nearly naked, slept on a pile of unfinished "pants," and
smiled in their sleep. A girl of six or seven dozed in a child's rocker
between the two workers, with her head hanging down on one side; the
mother propped it up with her elbow as she sewed. They were all there,
and happy in being together even in such a place. On a corner shelf
burned a night lamp before a print of the Mother of God, flanked by two
green bottles, which, seen at a certain angle, made quite a festive
show.
Complaint is made that the Italian promotes child labor. His children
work at home on "pants" and flowers at an hour when they ought to have
been long in bed. Their sore eyes betray the little flower-makers when
they come tardily to school. Doubtless there are such cases, and quite
too many of them; yet, in the very block which I have spoken of, the
investigation conducted for the Tenement House Committee by the
University Department of Sociology of Columbia College, under Professor
Franklin H. Giddings, discovered of 196 children of school age only 23
at work or at home, and in the next block only 27 out of 215. That was
the showing of the foreign population all the way through. Of 225
Russian Jewish children only 15 were missing from school, and of 354
little Bohemians only 21. The overcrowding of the schools and their long
waiting lists occasionally furnished the explanation why they were not
there. Professor Giddings reported, after considering all the evidence:
"The foreign-born population of the city is not, to any great extent,
forcing children of legal school age into money-earning occupations. On
the contrary, this population shows a strong desire to have its
children acquire the common rudiments of education. If the city does not
provide liberally and wisely for the satisfaction of this desire, the
blame for the civic and moral dangers that will threaten our community,
because of ignorance, vice, and poverty, must rest on the whole public,
not on our foreign-born residents." It is satisfactory to know that the
warning has been heeded, and that soon there will be schools enough to
hold all the children who come. Now, since September 1, 1899, the new
factory law reaches also the Italian flowermaker in his home, and that
source of waste will be stopped.
He is clannish, this Italian; he gambles and uses a knife, though rarely
on anybody not of his own people; he "takes what he can get," wherever
anything is free, as who would not, coming to the feast like a starved
wolf? There was nothing free where he came from. Even the salt was taxed
past a poor man's getting any of it. Lastly, he buys fraudulent
naturalization papers, and uses them. I shall plead guilty for him to
every one of these counts. They are all proven. Gambling is his
besetting sin. He is sober, industrious, frugal, enduring beyond
belief, but he will gamble on Sunday and quarrel over his cards, and
when he sticks his partner in the heat of the quarrel, the partner is
not apt to tell. He prefers to bide his time. Yet there has lately been
evidence once or twice in the surrender of an assassin by his countrymen
that the old vendetta is being shelved, and a new idea of law and
justice is breaking through. As to the last charge: our Italian is not
dull. With his intense admiration for the land where a dollar a day
waits upon the man with a shovel, he can see no reason why he should not
accept the whole "American plan" with ready enthusiasm. It is a good
plan. To him it sums itself up in the statement: a dollar a day for the
shovel; two dollars for the shovel with a citizen behind it. And he
takes the papers and the two dollars.
He came here for a chance to live. Of politics, social ethics, he knows
nothing. Government in his old home existed only for his oppression. Why
should he not attach himself with his whole loyal soul to the plan of
government in his new home that offers to boost him into the place of
his wildest ambition, a "job on the streets,"--that is, in the
Street-Cleaning Department,--and asks no other return than that he shall
vote as directed? Vote! Not only he, but his cousins and brothers and
uncles will vote as they are told, to get Pietro the job he covets. If
it pleases the other man, what is it to him for whom he votes? He is
after the job. Here, ready-made to the hand of the politician, is such
material as he never saw before. For Pietro's loyalty is great. As a
police detective, one of his own people, once put it to me: "He got a
kind of an idea, or an old rule: an eye for an eye; do to another as
you'd be done by; if he don't squeal on you, you stick by him, no matter
what the consequences." This "kind of an idea" is all he has to draw
upon for an answer to the question if the thing is right. But the
question does not arise. Why should it? Was he not told by the agitators
whom the police jailed at home that in a republic all men are made happy
by means of the vote? And is there not proof of it? It has made him
happy, has it not? And the man who bought his vote seems to like it.
Well, then?
Very early Pietro discovered that it was every man for himself, in the
chase of the happiness which this powerful vote had in keeping. He was
robbed by the padrone--that is, the boss--when he came over, fleeced on
his steamship fare, made to pay for getting a job, and charged three
prices for board and lodging and extras while working in the railroad
gang. The boss had a monopoly, and Pietro was told that it was
maintained by his "divvying" with some railroad official. Rumor said, a
very high-up official, and that the railroad was in politics in the
city; that is to say, dealt in votes. When the job gave out, the boss
packed him into the tenement he had bought with his profits on the
contract; and if Pietro had a family, told him to take in lodgers and
crowd his flat, as the Elizabeth Street tenements were crowded, so as to
make out the rent, and to never mind the law. The padrone was a
politician, and had a pull. He was bigger than the law, and it was the
votes he traded in that did it all. Now it was Pietro's turn. With his
vote he could buy what to him seemed wealth. In the muddle of ideas,
that was the one which stood out. When citizen papers were offered him
for $12.50, he bought them quickly, and got his job on the street.
It was the custom of the country. If there was any doubt about it, the
proof was furnished when Pietro was arrested through the envy and
plotting of the opposition boss last fall. Distinguished counsel,
employed by the machine, pleaded his case in court. Pietro felt himself
to be quite a personage, and he was told that he was safe from harm,
though a good deal of dust might be kicked up; because, when it came
down to that, both the bosses were doing the same kind of business. I
quote from the report of the State Superintendent of Elections of
January, 1899: "In nearly every case of illegal registration, the
defendant was represented by eminent counsel who were identified with
the Democratic organization, among them being three assistants to the
Corporation counsel. My deputies arrested Rosario Calecione and Giuseppe
Marrone, both of whom appeared to vote at the fifth election district of
the Sixth Assembly District; Marrone being the Democratic captain of the
district, and, it was charged, himself engaged in the business of
securing fraudulent naturalization papers. In both of these cases
Farriello had procured the naturalization papers for the men for a
consideration. They were subsequently indicted. Marrone and Calecione
were bailed by the Democratic leader of the Sixth Assembly District."
The business, says the State Superintendent, is carried on "to an
enormous extent." It appears, then, that Pietro has already "got on to"
the American plan as the slum presented it to him, and has in good
earnest become a problem. I guessed as much from the statement of a
Tammany politician to me, a year ago, that every Italian voter in his
district got his "old two" on election day. He ought to know, for he
held the purse. Suppose, now, we speak our minds as frankly, for once,
and put the blame where it belongs. Will it be on Pietro? And upon this
showing, who ought to be excluded, when it comes to that?
The slum census taker did not cross the Bowery. Had he done so, he would
have come upon the refugee Jew, the other economic marplot of whom
complaint is made with reason. If his Nemesis has overtaken him in the
Italian, certainly he challenged that fate. He did cut wages by his
coming. He was starving, and he came in shoals. In fourteen years more
than 400,000 Jewish immigrants have landed in New York.[3] They had to
have work and food, and they got both as they could. In the strife they
developed qualities that were anything but pleasing. They herded like
cattle. They had been so herded by Christian rulers, a despised and
persecuted race, through the centuries. Their very coming was to escape
from their last inhuman captivity in a Christian state. They lied, they
were greedy, they were charged with bad faith. They brought
nothing,--neither money nor artisan skill,--nothing but their consuming
energy, to our land, and their one gift was their greatest offense. One
might have pointed out that they had been trained to lie, for their
safety; had been forbidden to work at trades, to own land; had been
taught for a thousand years, with the scourge and the stake, that only
gold could buy them freedom from torture. But what was the use? The
charges were true. The Jew was--he still is--a problem of our slum.
[Footnote 3: According to the register of the United Hebrew Charities,
between October 1, 1884, and March 1, 1899, the number was 402,181.]
And yet, if ever there was material for citizenship, this Jew is such
material. Alone of all our immigrants he comes to us without a past. He
has no country to renounce, no ties to forget. Within him there burns a
passionate longing for a home to call his, a country which will own him,
that waits only for the spark of such another love to spring into flame
which nothing can quench. Waiting for it, all his energies are turned
into his business. He is not always choice in method; he often offends.
But he succeeds. He is the yeast of any slum, if given time. If it will
not let him go, it must rise with him. The charity managers in London
said it, when we looked through their slums some years ago: "The Jews
have renovated Whitechapel." I, for one, am a firm believer in this Jew,
and in his boy. Ignorant they are, but with a thirst for knowledge that
surmounts any barrier. The boy takes all the prizes in the school. His
comrades sneer that he will not fight. Neither will he when there is
nothing to be gained by it. But I believe that, should the time come
when the country needs fighting men, the son of the despised immigrant
Jew will resurrect on American soil, the first that bade him welcome,
the old Maccabee type, and set an example for all the rest of us to
follow.
For fifteen years he has been in the public eye as the vehicle and
promoter of sweating, and much severe condemnation has been visited upon
him with good cause. He had to do something, and he took to the
clothes-maker's trade as that which was most quickly learned. The
increasing crowds, the tenement, and his grinding poverty made the soil,
wherein the evil thing grew rank. Yet the real sweater is the
manufacturer, not the workman. It is just a question of expense to the
manufacturer. By letting out his work on contract, he can save the
expense of running his factory and delay longer making his choice of
styles. The Jew is the victim of the mischief quite as much as he has
helped it on. Back of the manufacturer there is still another
sweater,--the public. Only by its sufferance of the bargain counter and
of sweatshop-made goods has the nuisance existed as long as it has. I
am glad to believe that its time is passing away. The law has driven the
sweatshops out of the tenements, and so deprived them of one of their
chief props: there was no rent at all to pay there. Child labor, which
only four years ago the Reinhard Committee characterized as "one of the
most extensive evils now existing in the city of New York, a constant
and grave menace to the welfare of its people," has been practically
banished from the tailoring trade. What organization among the workers
had failed to effect is apparently going to be accomplished by direct
pressure of an outraged public opinion. Already manufacturers are
returning to their own factories, and making capital of the fact among
their customers. The new law, which greatly extends the factory
inspector's power over sweatshops, is an expression of this enlightened
sentiment. It will put New York a long stride ahead, and quite up to
Massachusetts. The inspector's tag has proved, where the law was
violated, an effective weapon. It suspends all operation of the shop and
removal of the goods until the orders of the inspector have been obeyed.
But the tag which shall finally put an end to sweating, and restore
decent conditions, is not the factory inspector's, I am persuaded, but a
trades union label, which shall deserve public confidence and receive
it. We have much to learn yet, all of us. I think I can see the end of
this trouble, however, when the Italian's triumph in the sweatshop shall
have proved but a barren victory, to his own gain.
In all I have said so far, in these papers, I have not gone beyond the
limits of the old city,--of Manhattan Island, in fact. I want now to
glance for a moment at the several attempts made at colonizing refugee
Jews in this part of the country. Brownsville was one of the earliest.
Its projector was a manufacturer, and its motive profit. The result was
the familiar one,--as nasty a little slum as ever the East Side had to
show. We have it on our hands now in the Greater City,--it came in with
Brooklyn,--and it is not a gain. Down in southern New Jersey several
colonies were started, likewise by speculators, in the persecution of
the early eighties, and these also failed. The soil was sandy and poor,
and, thrown upon their own resources in a strange and unfriendly
neighborhood, with unfamiliar and unremunerative toil, the colonists
grew discouraged and gave up in despair. The colonies were approaching
final collapse, when the managers of the Baron de Hirsch Fund in New
York, who had started and maintained a successful colony at Woodbine, in
the same neighborhood, took them under the arms and inaugurated a new
plan. They persuaded several large clothing contractors in this city to
move their plants down to the villages, where they would be assured of
steady hands, not so easily affected by strikes. For strikes in
sweatshops are often enough the alternative of starvation. Upon the land
there would be no starvation. The managers of the Fund built factories,
bought the old mortgages on the farms, and put up houses for the
families which the contractors brought down with them. This effort at
transplanting the crowd from the Ghetto to the soil has now been going
on for a year. At latest account, eight contractors and two hundred and
fifty families had been moved out. The colonies had taken on a new lease
of life and apparent prosperity. While it is yet too early to pass sober
judgment, there seems to be good ground for hoping that a real way out
has been found that shall restore the Jew, at least in a measure, to the
soil from which he was barred so long. The experiment is of exceeding
interest. The hopes of its projectors that a purely farming community
might be established have not been realized. Perhaps it was too much to
expect. By bringing to the farmers their missing market, and work to the
surplus population, the mixed settlement plan bids fair to prove a step
in the desired direction.
Some 18,500 acres are now held by Jewish colonists in New Jersey. In the
New England States, in the last eight years, 600 abandoned farms have
been occupied and are cultivated by refugees from Russia. As a dairy
farmer and a poultry raiser, the Jew has more of an immediate commercial
grip on the situation and works with more courage. At Woodbine,
sixty-five boys and girls are being trained in an agricultural school
that has won the whole settlement the friendly regard of the
neighborhood. Of its pupils, eleven came out of tailor shops, and ten
had been office boys, messengers, or newsboys. To these, and to the
trade schools now successfully operated by the de Hirsch Fund, we are
to look in the next generation for the answer to the old taunt that the
Jew is a trader, and not fit to be either farmer or craftsman, and for
the solution of the problem which he now presents in the slum.
I have spoken at length of the Jew and the Italian, because they are our
present problem. Yesterday it was the Irishman and the Bohemian.
To-morrow it may be the Greek, who already undersells the Italian from
his pushcart in the Fourth Ward, and the Syrian, who can give Greek,
Italian, and Jew points at a trade. From Dalmatia a new immigration has
begun to come, and there are signs of its working further east in the
Balkan states, where there is no telling what is in store for us. How to
absorb them all safely is the question. Doubtless the Irishman, having
absorbed us politically, would be glad to free us from all concern on
that score by doing a like favor for them. But we should not get the
best of the slum that way; it would get the best of us, instead. Would I
shut out the newcomers? Sometimes, looking at it from the point of view
of the Barge Office and the sweatshop, I think I would. Then there
comes up the recollection of a picture of the city of Prague that hangs
in a Bohemian friend's parlor, here in New York. I stood looking at it
one day, and noticed in the foreground cannon that pointed in over the
city. I spoke of it, unthinking, and said to my host that they should be
trained, if against an enemy, the other way. The man's eye flashed fire.
"Ha!" he cried, "here, yes!" When I think of that, I do not want to shut
the door.
Again, there occurs to me an experience the police had last summer in
Mulberry Street. They were looking for a murderer, and came upon a nest
of Italian thugs who lived by blackmailing their countrymen. They were
curious about them, and sent their names to Naples with a request for
information. There came back such a record as none of the detectives had
ever seen or heard of before. All of them were notorious criminals, who
had been charged with every conceivable crime, from burglary to
kidnapping and "maiming," and some not to be conceived of by the
American mind. Five of them together had been sixty-three times in
jail, and one no less than twenty-one times. Yet, though they were all
"under special surveillance," they had come here without let or
hindrance within a year. When I recall that, I want to shut the door
quick. I sent the exhibit to Washington at the time. But then, again,
when I think of Mrs. Michelangelo in her poor mourning for one child run
over and killed, wiping her tears away and going bravely to work to keep
the home together for the other five until the oldest shall be old
enough to take her father's place; and when, as now, there strays into
my hand the letter from my good friend, the "woman doctor" in the slum,
when her father had died, in which she wrote: "The little scamps of the
street have been positively pathetic; they have made such shy, boyish
attempts at friendliness. One little chap offered to let me hold his top
while it was spinning, in token of affection,"--when I read that, I have
not the heart to shut anybody out.
Except, of course, the unfit, the criminal and the pauper, cast off by
their own, and the man brought over here merely to put money into the
pockets of the steamship agent, the padrone, and the mine owner. We
have laws to bar these out. Suppose we begin by being honest with
ourselves and the immigrant, and enforcing our own laws. In spite of a
healthy effort at the port of New York,--I can only speak for
that,--under the present administration, that has not yet been done.
When the door has been shut and locked against the man who left his
country for his country's good, whether by its "assistance" or not, and
when trafficking in the immigrant for private profit has been stopped,
then, perhaps, we shall be better able to decide what degree of
ignorance in him constitutes unfitness for citizenship and cause for
shutting him out. Perchance then, also, we shall hear less of the cant
about his being a peril to the republic. Doubtless ignorance is a peril,
but the selfishness that trades upon ignorance is a much greater. He
came to us without a country, ready to adopt such a standard of
patriotism as he found, at its face value, and we gave him the rear
tenement and slum politics. If he accepted the standard, whose fault was
it? His being in such a hurry to vote that he could not wait till the
law made him a citizen was no worse, to my mind, than the treachery of
the "upper class" native, who refuses to go to the polls for fear he may
rub up against him there. This last let us settle with first, and see
what remains of our problem. We can approach it honestly, then, at all
events.
When the country was in the throes of the silver campaign, the
newspapers told the story of an old laborer who went to the sub-treasury
and demanded to see the "boss." He undid the strings of an old leathern
purse with fumbling fingers, and counted out more than two hundred
dollars in gold eagles, the hoard of a lifetime of toil and self-denial.
They were for the government, he said. He had not the head to understand
all the talk that was going, but he gathered from what he heard that the
government was in trouble, and that somehow it was about not having gold
enough. So he had brought what he had. He owed it all to the country,
and now that she needed it he had come to give it back. The man was an
Irishman. Very likely he was enrolled in Tammany and voted her ticket. I
remember a tenement at the bottom of a back alley over on the East
Side, where I once went visiting with the pastor of a mission chapel. Up
in the attic there was a family of father and daughter in two rooms that
had been made out of one by dividing off the deep dormer window. It was
midwinter, and they had no fire. He was a peddler, but the snow had
stalled his pushcart and robbed them of their only other source of
income, a lodger who hired cot room in the attic for a few cents a
night. The daughter was not able to work. But she said, cheerfully, that
they were "getting along." When it came out that she had not tasted
solid food for many days, was starving, in fact,--indeed, she died
within a year, of the slow starvation of the tenements that parades in
the mortality returns under a variety of scientific names which all mean
the same thing,--she met her pastor's gentle chiding with the excuse,
"Oh, your church has many poorer than I. I don't want to take your
money."
These were Germans, ordinarily held to be close-fisted; but I found that
in their dire distress they had taken in a poor old man who was past
working, and had kept him all winter, sharing with him what they had.
He was none of theirs; they hardly even knew him, as it appeared. It
was enough that he was "poorer than they," and lonely and hungry and
cold.
It was over here that the children of Dr. Elsing's Sunday school gave
out of the depth of their poverty fifty-four dollars in pennies to be
hung on the Christmas tree as their offering to the persecuted
Armenians. One of their teachers told me of a Bohemian family that let
the holiday dinner she brought them stand and wait, while they sent out
to bid to the feast four little ragamuffins of the neighborhood who else
would have gone hungry. I remember well a teacher in one of the
Children's Aid Society's schools, herself a tenement child, who, with
breaking heart, but brave face, played and sang the children's Christmas
carols with them rather than spoil their pleasure, while her only sister
lay dying at home.