in 17 years from 9000 to 74,000 gives anybody pause, it is not at
least without its compensation. The very need of the immigrant to
which objection is made, plus the energy that will not let him sit
still and starve, make a way for him that opens it at the same time
for others. In New York he _made_ the needle industry, which he
monopolized. He brought its product up from $30,000,000 to
$300,000,000 a year, that he might live, and founded many a great
fortune by his midnight toil. In New England, while peopling its
abandoned farms, in self-defence he takes up on occasion abandoned
manufacturing plants to make the work he wants. At Colchester,
Connecticut, 120 Jewish families settled about the great rubber-works.
The workings of a trust shut it down after 40 years' successful
operation, causing loss of wages and much suffering to 1500 hands. The
Christian employees, who must have been in overwhelming majority,
probably took it out in denouncing trusts. I didn't hear that they did
much else, except go away, I suppose, in search of another job. The
Jews did not go away. Perhaps they couldn't. They cast about for some
concern to supply the place of the rubber-works. At last accounts I
heard of them negotiating with a large woollen concern in Leeds to
move its plant across the Atlantic to Colchester. How it came out, I
do not know.
The attempt to colonize Jewish immigrants had two objects: to relieve
the man and to drain the Ghetto. In this last it failed. In 18 years
1200 families had been moved out. In five months just before I wrote
this 12,000 came to stay in New York City. The number of immigrant
Jews during those months was 15,233, of whom only 3881 went farther.
The population of the Ghetto passed already 250,000. It was like
trying to bail out the ocean. The Hirsch Fund people saw it and took
another tack. Instead of arguing with unwilling employees to take the
step they dreaded, they tried to persuade manufacturers to move out of
the city, depending upon the workers to follow their work.
They did bring out one, and built homes for his hands. The argument
was briefly that the clothing industry makes the Ghetto by lending
itself most easily to tenement manufacture. The Ghetto, with its
crowds and unhealthy competition, makes the sweat-shop in turn, with
all the bad conditions that disturb the trade. To move the crowds out
is at once to kill the Ghetto and the sweat-shops, and to restore the
industry to healthy ways. The argument is correct. The economic gains
by such an exodus are equally clear, provided the philanthropy that
starts it will maintain a careful watch to prevent the old slum
conditions being reproduced in the new places and unscrupulous
employers from taking advantage of the isolation of their workers.
With this chance removed, strikes are not so readily fomented by
home-owners. The manufacturer secures steady labor, the worker a
steady job. The young are removed from the contamination of the
tenement. The experiment was interesting, but the fraction of a cent
that was added by the freight to the cost of manufacture killed it.
The factory moved back and the crowds with it.
Very recently, the B'nai B'rith has taken the lead in a movement that
goes straight to the heart of the matter. It is now proposed to head
off the Ghetto. Places are found for the immigrants all over the
country, and they are not allowed to stop in New York on coming over,
but are sent out at once. Where they go others follow instead of
plunging into the city maelstrom and being swallowed up by it. Soon,
it is argued, a rut will have been made for so much of the immigration
to follow to the new places, and so much will have been diverted from
the cities. To that extent, then, a real "way out" of the slum will
have been found.
End of Project Gutenberg's Children of the Tenements, by Jacob A. Riis