and such scraps of their harsh jargon as I had picked up, I found out
that they were seeking their lost child--little Yette, who had strayed
away from the Essex Street tenement and disappeared as utterly as if
the earth had swallowed her up. Indeed, I often thought of that in the
weeks and months of weary search that followed. For there was
absolutely no trace to be found of the child, though the tardy police
machinery was set in motion and worked to the uttermost. It was not
until two years later, when we had long given up the quest, that
little Yette was found by the merest accident in the turning over of
the affairs of an orphan asylum. Some one had picked her up in the
street and brought her in. She could not tell her name, and, with one
given to her there, and garbed in the uniform of the place, she was so
effectually lost in the crowd that the police alarm failed to identify
her. In fact, her people had no little trouble in "proving property,"
and but for the mother love that had refused to part with a little
gingham slip her lost baby had worn, it might have proved impossible.
It was the mate of the one which Yette had on when she was brought
into the asylum, and which they had kept there. So the child was
restored, and her humble home made happy.
That was my first meeting with the Russian Jew. In after years my path
crossed his often. I saw him herded with his fellows like cattle in
the poorest tenements, slaving sullenly in the sweat-shop, or rising
in anger against his tyrant in strikes that meant starvation as the
price of his vengeance. And always I had a sense of groping in the
memories of the past for a lost key to something. The other day I met
him once more. It was at sunset, upon a country road in southern New
Jersey. I was returning with Superintendent Sabsovich from an
inspection of the Jewish colonies in that region. The cattle were
lowing in the fields. The evening breathed peace. Down the sandy road
came a creaking farm wagon loaded with cedar posts for a vineyard hard
by. Beside it walked a sunburned, bearded man with an axe on his
shoulder, in earnest conversation with his boy, a strapping young
fellow in overalls. The man walked as one who is tired after a hard
day's work, but his back was straight and he held his head high. He
greeted us with a frank nod, as one who meets an equal.
The superintendent looked after him with a smile. To me there came
suddenly the vision of the couple under the lamp, friendless and
shrinking, waiting for a hearing, always waiting; and, as in a flash,
I understood. I had found the key. The farmer there had it. It was the
Jew who had found himself.
It is eighteen years since the first of the south Jersey colonies was
started.[4] There had been a sudden, unprecedented immigration of
refugees from Russia, where Jew-baiting was then the orthodox pastime.
They lay in heaps in Castle Garden, helpless and penniless, and their
people in New York feared prescriptive measures. What to do with them
became a burning question. To turn those starving multitudes loose on
the labor market of the metropolis would make trouble of the gravest
kind. The alternative of putting them back on the land, and so of
making producers of them, suggested itself to the Emigrant Aid
Society. Land was offered cheap in south Jersey, and the experiment
was made with some hundreds of families.
[Footnote 4: This was written in 1900.]
It was well meant; but the projectors experienced the not unfamiliar
fact that cheap land is sometimes very dear land. They learned, too,
that you cannot make farmers in a day out of men who have been denied
access to the soil for generations. That was the set purpose of
Russia, and the legacy of feudalism in western Europe, which of
necessity made the Jew a trader, a town dweller. With such a history,
a man is not logically a pioneer. The soil of south Jersey is sandy,
has to be coaxed into bearing paying crops. The colonists had not the
patient skill needed for the task. Neither had they the means. Above
all, they lacked the market where to dispose of their crops when once
raised. Discouragements beset them. Debts threatened to engulf them.
The trustees of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, entering the field eleven
years later, in 1891, found of three hundred families only two-thirds
remaining on their farms. In 1897, when they went to their relief,
there were seventy-six families left. The rest had gone back to the
city and to the Ghetto. So far, the experiment had failed.
The Hirsch Fund people had been watching it attentively. They were not
discouraged. In the midst of the outcry that the Jew could not be made
a farmer, they settled a tract of unbroken land in the northwest part
of Cape May County, within easy reach of the older colonies. They
called their settlement Woodbine. Taught by the experience of the
older colonists, they brought their market with them. They persuaded
several manufacturing firms to remove their plants from the city to
Woodbine, agreeing to furnish their employees with homes. Thus an
industrial community was created to absorb the farmer's surplus
products. The means they had in abundance in the large revenues of
Baron de Hirsch's princely charity, which for all purposes amounts to
over $6,000,000. There was still lacking necessary skill at husbandry,
and this they set about supplying without long delay. In the second
year of the colony, a barn built for horses was turned into a
lecture-hall for the young men, and became the nucleus of the Hirsch
Agricultural School, which to-day has nearly a hundred pupils.
Woodbine, for which the site was cleared half a dozen years before in
woods so dense that the children had to be corralled and kept under
guard lest they should be lost, was a thriving community by the time
the crisis came in the affairs of the older colonies.
The settlers were threatened with eviction. The Jewish Colonization
Association, upon the recommendation of the Hirsch Fund trustees, and
with their coöperation, came to their rescue. It paid off the
mortgages under which they groaned, brought out factories, and turned
the tide that was setting back toward the cities. The carpenter's
hammer was heard again, after years of silence and decay, in
Rosenhayn, Alliance, and Carmel. They built new houses there. Nearly
$500,000 invested in the villages was paying a healthy interest, where
before general ruin was impending. As for Woodbine, Jewish industry
had raised the town taxes upon its 5300 acres of land from $72 to
$1800, and only the slow country ways kept it from becoming the
county-seat, as it is already the county's centre of industrial and
mental activity.
It was to see for myself what the movement of which this is the brief
historical outline was like that I had gone down from Philadelphia to
Woodbine, some twenty-five miles from Atlantic City. I saw a
straggling village, hedged in by stunted woods, with many freshly
painted frame-houses lining broad streets, some of them with gardens
around in which jonquil and spiderwort were growing, and the peach and
gooseberry budding into leaf; some of them standing in dreary,
unfenced wastes, in which the clay was trodden hard between the stumps
of last year's felling. In these lived the latest graduates from the
slum. I had just come from the clothing factory hard by the depot, in
which a hundred of them or more were at work, and had compared the
bright, clean rooms with the traditional sweat-shop of the city,
wholly to the disadvantage of the latter. I had noticed the absence of
the sullen looks that used to oppress me. Now as I walked along,
stopping to chat with the women in the houses, it interested me to
class the settlers as those of the first, the second, and the third
year's stay and beyond. The signs were unmistakable. The first year
was, apparently, taken up in contemplation of the house. The lot had
no possibilities. In the second, it was dug up. A few potato-vines
were planted, perhaps a peach tree. There were the preliminary signs
of a fence. In the third, under the stimulus of a price offered by the
management, a garden was evolved, with, necessarily, a fence. At this
point the potato became suddenly an element. It had fed the family the
winter before without other outlay than a little scratching of the
ground. Its possibilities loomed large. The garden became a farm on a
small scale. Its owner applied for more land and got it. That was the
very purpose of the colony.
A woman, with a strong face and shrewd, brown eyes, rose from an onion
bed she had been weeding to open the gate.
"Come in," she said, "and be welcome." Upon a wall of the best room
hung a picture of Michael Bakounine, the nihilist. I found it in these
colonies everywhere side by side with Washington's, Lincoln's, and
Baron de Hirsch's. Mrs. Breslow and her husband left home for cause.
He was a carpenter. Nine months they starved in a Forsyth Street
tenement, paying $15 a month for three rooms. This cottage is their
own. They have paid for it ($800) since they came out with the first
settlers. The lot was given to them, but they bought the adjoining one
to raise truck in.
"_Gott sei dank_," says the woman, with shining eyes, "we owe nothing
and pay no rent, and are never more hungry."
Down the street a little way is the cottage of one who received the
first prize for her garden last year. Fragrant box hedges in the plot.
A cow with crumpled horn stands munching corncobs at the barn. Four
hens are sitting in as many barrels, eying the stranger with
half-anxious, half-hostile looks. A topknot, tied by the leg to the
fence, struggles madly to escape. The children bring dandelions and
clover to soothe its captivity.
The shadows lengthen. The shop gives up its workers. There is no
overtime here. A ten-hour day rules. Families gather upon porches--the
mother with the sleeping babe at her breast, the grandfather smoking a
peaceful pipe, while father and the boys take a turn tending the
garden. Theirs is not paradise. It is a little world full of hard
work, but a world in which the work has ceased to be a curse. Ludlow
Street, with its sweltering tenements, is but a few hours' journey
away. For these, at all events, the problem of life has been solved.
Strolling over the outlying farms, we came to one with every mark of
thrift and prosperity about it. The vineyard was pruned and trimmed,
the fields ready for their crops, the outbuildings well kept, and the
woodpile stout and trim. A girl with a long braid of black hair came
from the house to greet us. An hour before, I had seen her sewing on
buttons in the factory. She recognized me, and looked questioningly at
the superintendent. When he spoke my name, she held out her hand with
frank dignity, and bade me welcome on her father's farm. He was a
clothing-cutter in New York, explained my guide as we went our way,
but tired of the business and moved out upon the land. His thirty-acre
farm is to-day one of the finest in that neighborhood. The man is on
the road to substantial wealth.
Labor or lumber--both, perhaps--must be cheaper even than land in
south Jersey. This five-room cottage, one of half a hundred such, was
sold to the tenant for $500; the Hirsch Fund taking a first mortgage
of $300, the manufacturer, or the occupant, if able, paying the rest
The mortgage is paid off in monthly instalments of $3.75. Even if he
had not a cent to start with, by paying less than one-half the rent
for the Forsyth Street flat of three cramped rooms, dark and stuffy,
the tenant becomes the absolute owner of his home in a little over
eight years. I looked in upon a score of them. The rooms were large by
comparison, and airy; oil-painted, clean. The hopeless disorder, the
discouragement of the slum, were nowhere. The children were stout and
rosy. They played under the trees, safe from the shop till the school
gives up its claim to them. Superintendent Sabsovich sees to it that
it is not too early. He is himself a school trustee, elected after a
fight on the "Woodbine ticket," which gave notice to the farmers of
the town that the aliens of that settlement are getting naturalized
to the point of demanding their rights. The opposition retaliated by
nicknaming the leader of the victorious faction the "Czar of
Woodbine." He in turn invited them to hear the lectures at the
Agricultural School. His text went home.
"The American is wasteful of food, energies--of everything," he said.
"We teach here that farming can be made to pay by saving expenses."
They knew it to be true. The Woodbine farm products, its flowers and
chickens, took the prizes at the county fair. Yet in practice they did
not compete. The Woodbine milk was dearer than the neighboring
farmers'. If in spite of that it was preferred because it was better,
that was their lookout. The rest must come up to it then. So with the
output of the hennery, the apiary, the blacksmith-shop in the place.
On that plan Woodbine has won the respect of the neighborhood. The
good-will will follow, says its Czar, confidently.
He, too, was a nihilist, who dreamed with the young of his people for
a better day. He has lived to see it dawn on a far-away shore.
Concerning his task, he has no illusions. There is no higher
education, no "frills," at Woodbine. Its scheme is intensely
practical. It is to make, if possible, a Jewish yeomanry fit to take
their place with the native tillers of the soil, as good citizens as
they. With that end in view, everything is "for present purposes, with
an eye on the future." The lad is taught dairying with scientific
precision, because on that road lies the profit in keeping cows. He is
taught the commercial value of extreme cleanliness in handling milk
and making butter. He learns the management of the poultry-yard, of
bees, of pigeons, and of field crops. He works in the nursery, the
greenhouse, and the blacksmith-shop. If he does not get to know the
blacksmith's trade, he learns how to mend a broken farm wagon and
"save expense." So he shall be able to make farming pay, to keep his
grip on the land. His native shrewdness will teach him the rest.
The vineyards were budding, and the robins sang joyously as we drove
over the twenty-four-mile stretch through the colonies of Carmel,
Rosenhayn, Alliance, and Brotmansville. Everywhere there were signs of
reawakened thrift. Fields and gardens were being got ready for their
crops; fence-corners were being cleaned, roofs repaired, and houses
painted. In Rosenhayn they were building half a dozen new houses. A
clothing factory there that employs seventy hands brought out
twenty-four families from New York and Philadelphia, for whom shelter
had to be found. Some distance beyond the village we halted to inspect
the forty-acre farm of a Jew who some years ago kept a street stand
in Philadelphia. He bought the land and went back to his stand to earn
the money with which to run it. In three years he moved his family
out.
"I couldn't raise the children in the city," he explained. A son and
two daughters now run the adjoining farm. Two boys were helping him
look after a berry patch that alone would "make expenses" this year.
The wife minded the seven cows. The farm is free and clear save for
$400 lent by the Hirsch people to pay off an onerous mortgage. Some
comment was made upon the light soil. The farmer pointed significantly
to the barnyard.
"I make him good," he said. Across the road was a large house with a
pretentious dooryard and evergreen hedges. A Gentile farmer with many
acres lived in it. The lean fields promised but poor crops. The
neighborhood knew that he never paid anything on his mortgage;
claimed, in fact, that he could not.
"Ah!" said Mr. Sabsovich, emerging from a wrangle with his client
about matters agricultural, "he has not learned to 'make him good.'
Come over to the school, and I will show you stock. You can't afford
to keep poor cows. They cost too much."
The other shook his head energetically. "Them's the seven finest cows
in the country," he yelled after us as we started. The superintendent
laughed a little.
"You see what they are--stubborn; will have their way in an argument.
But that fellow will be over to Woodbine before the week is out, to
see what he can learn. He is not going to let me crow if he can help
it. Not to be driven, they can be led, though it is not always easy.
Suspicious, hard at driving a bargain as the Russian Jew is, I
sometimes think I can see his better nature coming out already."
As we drove along, I thought so, too, more than once. From every farm
and byway came men to have a word with the superintendent. For me they
had a sidelong look, and a question, put in Hebrew. To the answer they
often shook their heads, demanding another. After such a conference, I
asked what it was about.
"You," said Mr. Sabsovich. "They are asking, 'Who is he?' I tell them
that you are not a Jew. This is the answer they give: 'I don't care if
he is a Jew. Is he a good man?'"
Over the supper table that night, I caught the burning eyes of a young
nihilist fixed upon me with a look I have not yet got over. I had been
telling of my affection for the Princess Dagmar, whom I knew at
Copenhagen in my youth. I meant it as something we had in common; she
became Empress of Russia in after years. I forgot that it was by
virtue of marrying Alexander III. I heard afterward that he protested
vehemently that I could not possibly be a good man. Well for me I did
not tell him my opinion of the Czar himself! It was gleaned from
Copenhagen, where they thought him the prince of good fellows.
At Carmel I found the hands in the clothing factory making from $10 to
$13 a week at human hours, and the population growing. Forty families
had come from Philadelphia, where the authorities were helping the
colonies by rigidly enforcing the sweat-shop ordinances. Inquiries I
made as to the relative cost of living in the city and in the country
brought out the following facts: A contractor with a family of eight
paid shop rent in Sheriff Street, New York, $20 per month; for four
rooms in a Monroe Street tenement, $15; household expenses, $60. Here
he pays shop rent (whole house), $6; dwelling on farm, $4; household,
$35. This family enjoys greater comfort in the country for $50 a month
less. A working family of eight paid $11 for three rooms in an Essex
Street tenement, $35 for the household; here the rent is $5, and the
household expenses $24--better living for $17 less a month.
Near the village a Jewish farmer who had tracked us from one of the
other villages caught up with us to put before Mr. Sabsovich his
request for more land. We halted to debate it in the road beside a
seven-acre farm worked by a Lithuanian brickmaker. The old man in his
peaked cap and sheepskin jacket was hoeing in the back lot. His wife,
crippled and half blind, sat in the sunshine with a smile upon her
wrinkled face, and listened to the birds. They came down together,
when they heard our voices, to say that four of the seven acres were
worked up. The other three would come. They had plenty, and were
happy. Only their boy, who should help, was gone.
It was the one note of disappointment I heard: the boys would not stay
on the farm. To the aged it gave a new purpose, new zest in life.
There was a place for them, whereas the tenement had none. The young
could not be made to stay. It was the old story. I had heard it in New
England in explanation of its abandoned farms; the work was too hard,
was without a break. The good sense of the Jew recognizes the issue
and meets it squarely. In Woodbine strenuous efforts were being made
to develop the social life by every available means. No opportunity is
allowed to pass that will "give the boy a chance." Here on the farms
there were wiser fathers than the Lithuanian. Let one of them speak
for himself.
His was one of a little settlement of fifteen families that had fought
it out alone, being some distance from any of the villages. In the
summer they farmed, and in the winter tailoring for the Philadelphia
shops helped them out. Radetzky was a presser in the city ten years.
There were nine in his house. "Seven to work on the farm," said the
father, proudly, surveying the brown, muscular troop, "but the two
little ones are good in summer at berry-picking." They had just then
come in from the lima-bean field, where they had planted poles. Even
the baby had helped.
"I put two beans in a hill instead of four. I tell you why," said the
farmer; "I wait three days, and see if they come up. If they do not, I
put down two more. Most of them come up, and I save two beans. A
farmer has got to make money on saving expenses."
The sound of a piano interrupted him. "It is my daughter," he said.
"They help me, and I let them have in turn what young people
want--piano, music lessons, a good horse to drive. It pays. They are
all here yet. In the beginning we starved together, had to eat corn
with the cows, but the winter tailoring pulled us through. Now I want
to give it up. I want to buy the next farm. With our 34 acres, it will
make 60, and we can live like men, and let those that need the
tailoring get it. I wouldn't exchange this farm for the best property
in the city."
His two eldest sons nodded assent to his words.
Late that night, when we were returning to Woodbine, we came suddenly
upon a crowd of boys filling the road. They wore the uniform of the
Hirsch School. It was within ten minutes of closing-time, and they
were half a mile from home. The superintendent pulled up and asked
them where they were going. There was a brief silence, then the
hesitating answer:--
"It is a surprise party."
Mr. Sabsovich eyed the crowd sharply and thought awhile.
"Oh," he said, remembering all at once, "it is Mr. Billings and his
new wife. Go ahead, boys!"
To me, trying vainly to sleep in the village hotel in the midnight
hour with a tin-pan serenade to the newly married teacher going on
under the window, there came in a lull, with the challenge of the
loudest boy, "Mr. Billings! If you don't come down, we will never go
home," an appreciation of the Woodbine system of discipline which I
had lacked till then. It was the Radetzky plan over again, of giving
the boys a chance, to make them stay on the farm.
If it is difficult to make the boy stay, it is sometimes even harder
to make the father go. Out of a hundred families picked on New York's
East Side as in especial need of transplanting to the land, just seven
consented when it came to the journey. They didn't relish the "society
of the stumps." The Jews' colonies need many things before they can
hope to rival the attraction of the city to the man whom the slum has
robbed of all resources. They sum themselves up in the social life of
which the tenement has such unsuspected stores in the closest of touch
with one's fellows. The colonies need business opportunities to boom
them, facilities for marketing produce in the cities, canning-factories,
store cellars for the product of the vineyards--all of which time must
supply. Though they have given to hundreds the chance of life, it
cannot be said for them that they have demonstrated yet the Jews'
ability to stand alone upon the land, backed as they are by the Hirsch
Fund millions. In fact, I have heard no such claim advanced. But it
can at least be said that for these they have solved the problem of
life and of the slum. And that is something!
Nor is it all. Because of its being a concerted movement, this of
south Jersey, it has been, so to speak, easier to make out. But
already, upon the experience gained there, 700 families, with some
previous training and fitness for farming, have been settled upon New
England farms and are generally doing well. More than $2,000,000 worth
of property in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and their sister states is
owned by Jewish husbandmen. They are mostly dairy-farmers, poultrymen,
sheep breeders. The Russian Jew will not in this generation be fit for
what might be called long-range farming. He needs crops that turn his
money over quickly. With that in sight, he works hard and faithfully.
The Yankee, as a rule, welcomes him. He has the sagacity to see that
his coming will improve economic conditions, now none too good. As
shrewd traders, the two are well matched. The public school brings the
children together on equal terms, levelling out any roughness that
might remain.