often subjected to hardships and injustice. If the widow of a man killed
in a mine or mill of Pennsylvania lives in Europe, she cannot recover
any damages, although the accident may be entirely due to the neglect
of the company. Because of this ruling, certain strong companies in the
Pittsburgh district seldom pay a cent to the relatives of the deceased
if they dwell beyond the seas. I asked a leader among the Italians,
"Why do you settle the serious cases for a few hundred dollars?" He
replied: "We find it best after much bitter experience. The courts are
against us; a jury will not mulct a corporation to send money to Europe;
the relatives are not here to bewail their loss in court; the average
American cares nothing for the foreigner. Every step of the way we
meet with prejudices and find positive contempt, from those in highest
authority in the courts down to the tip-staff. When I settle for $200, I
can do nothing better."
The influence of the industries reaches still further into the lives of
the immigrants. Each people has a tendency to colonize in one section
of the city and work in some one mill. The Bohemians are strong in
Allegheny City, but few of them are found in Pittsburgh. The Slovaks
predominate in McKees Rocks and Allegheny City, and many of them are
found in the Soho district of Pittsburgh. The Poles are numerous in
many parts of the greater city. The Lithuanians live in large numbers
on the South Side, and near the National Tube Works and the American
Steel and Wire Company. Many Ruthenians work in the Oliver Steel Works,
while the Croatians and Servians have worked for the most part in the
Jones and Laughlin plants. My information is that foremen try to get
one nationality in assigning work to a group of laborers, for they know
that a homogeneous group will give best results. National pride also
enters into selection. In talking to a Lithuanian of the serious loss
of life which occurred when a furnace blew up, I asked, "Were any of
your people killed in that accident?" He answered quickly, "No; catch
our people do such work as that! There you find the Slovak." Of the
grades of unskilled labor, the Slovak, Croatian, Servian and Russian
(Greek Orthodox) may be said to perform the roughest and most risky, and
the most injurious to health. There is, then, a more or less natural
selection of peoples in the neighborhoods of the different great mills.
The geographical contour of the region has also had its influence in
keeping the foreign population within certain limited districts. The two
rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, have cut their beds in the
Allegheny range, leaving a narrow strip of land on either side of their
banks which offers limited sites for dwellings, mills and factories.
The lowlands were preempted long ago, and the contest for parts of them
between the mills and the homes has been intense. There is an advantage
to the employer, however, in having his crude labor force within easy
call, and night work and the cost of carfare help keep the mass of men
employed in common labor near the mills and on the congested lowlands.
The deplorable conditions I found among them I shall describe, but let
me say here that all the houses on the flats are not the same. I visited
homes of Slavs and Lithuanians which were clean, well furnished, and
equal in comfort to those of Americans of the same economic level. These
foreigners have been in the country many years and their children have
risen to the American standard. But our first concern is with the recent
comers, who too often live in lodgings that are filthy; whose peasant
habits seem to us uncouth; and whose practices are fatal to decency and
morality in a thickly settled district.
Yet the foreigner pays a higher rent than does the "white man." In
Bass street, Allegheny City, I found English-speaking tenants paying
fifteen dollars a month for four rooms, where Slavs were charged twenty
dollars. Landlords who received ten dollars and twelve dollars a month
for houses rented to the English-speaking, were getting seventeen and
eighteen dollars from the Slavs. On Penn avenue a Slav paid seventeen
dollars for three rooms, while a family renting eight rooms in the
front of the building paid but thirty-three dollars a month. As nearly
as I could estimate, the average monthly rent paid by the foreigner
in Pittsburgh is more than four dollars a room. I found one family
paying nine dollars and a half for one large room in an old residence
on the South Side; another paid ten dollars for two rooms, another
sixteen dollars for three; and on Brandt street I found a man who paid
twenty-two dollars a month for four. The rent is not always fixed by
the landlord. Where lodgers are taken, it is sometimes regulated by
the number the "boarding-boss" can crowd in, the landlord getting one
dollar a month extra for each boarder. Houses of from eight to twelve
rooms have in them to-day anywhere from three to six families. They were
built for one family, and until the owners are forced by the Bureau
of Health to install sanitary appliances, have equipment for but one.
Too many landlords when they rent to foreigners have apparently one
dominating passion,--rent. They make no repairs, and with the crowded
condition above described the houses soon bear marks of ill usage.
Whenever foreigners invade a neighborhood occupied by English-speaking
tenants, property depreciates. The former occupants get out, the
invaders multiply, and very often the properties pass into the hands of
speculators. Houses once occupied by Slavs can seldom be rented again to
Anglo-Saxons. Foreigners under stress for room use cellars as bed rooms,
and it is against these that the health bureau within the last year has
taken action. I saw one of these beside which a common stable would have
been a parlor.
[Illustration: NIGHT SCENE IN A SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE.
Three men in the far bed, two in the others, twelve in the room. In some
of these lodgings day workers sleep nights in beds occupied by night
workers in the daytime.]
But it is in the immigrant lodging houses that conditions are worst.
These conditions are not always the choice of the men. The Croatians,
Servians, Roumanians and Greeks have only from five to ten per cent of
women among them; hence the men of these nationalities have but few
boarding houses conducted by their own people to go to, and crowding is
inevitable. English-speaking and German families will not open their
doors to them. Single men in groups of from six to twenty go into one
house in charge of a boarding-boss and his wife. Each man pays from
seventy-five cents to a dollar a week for room to sleep in and the
little cooking and washing that are to be done. Food for the company is
bought on one book, and every two weeks the sum total is divided equally
among the boarders, each man paying his _pro rata_ share. The bill for
two weeks will hardly amount to three dollars a man, so that the average
boarder will spend ten dollars a month on room rent and maintenance. The
mania for saving results in many cases in skimping the necessaries of
life. A priest told me of a Lithuanian who lived on ten cents a day, and
by helping the landlady in her house work, the man saved room rent. I
found Russians (Greek Orthodox) on Tustine street who were paying three
dollars a month for room rent. They buy bread made by Russian Jews, get
a herring and a pot of beer, and live,--not always,--in peace. When they
pay three dollars and fifty cents for room rent, soup is included in the
contract. Domestic tragedies sometimes invade these communal households,
such as a case of assault and battery which came up in an alderman's
office. The complainant was a single man who appeared with a ghastly
scalp wound. When this boarding-boss presented his bill at the end of
two weeks, the charges were five dollars more than the man thought
they ought to be. He protested and the boarding-boss took a hatchet
to silence him. The Italians are close livers; but possibly the worst
conditions I saw were among the Armenians in the neighborhood of Basin
alley.
In these boarding establishments as a general rule, the kitchen is
commonly used as a bedroom. When the boarding boss rents two rooms, he
and his wife sleep in the kitchen, and the boarders take the other room.
It is not unusual for a boarding-boss to rent but one room. He and his
wife put their bed in one corner; the stove in another; and the boarders
take the remainder. Sometimes the rooms are so crowded that the boss
and his wife sleep on the floor; and I repeatedly found cases where
beds were being worked double shift,--night and day. The city Bureau of
Health has endeavored to reduce the number of beds in a room, but it
does not follow that the people occupying that room get out,--they sleep
on the floor minus the bed. Here as elsewhere the problem is one of the
hardest for sanitary inspectors to cope with.
[Illustration: SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE ON THE SOUTH SIDE.
Four beds; two in a bed. The young fellow at the table was writing home.
Before him were pictures of his mother and sisters in immaculate peasant
costumes.]
Sometimes four or six men rent a house and run it themselves, doing
their own cooking and washing and occasionally bringing in a woman to
do a little cleaning. They may stand this for about six months and then
get out when the room is past the cleaning stage. Such crowding is very
prevalent in the low lying parts of the South Side, in the neighborhood
of Penn avenue in the city proper, and in sections of Allegheny. Among
the Russians of Tustine street I found thirty-three persons living in
one house in six rooms and an attic. These were distributed among three
families. The Croatians also are bad crowders. A milk dealer told me of
twenty-eight who lived in a house in Carey alley. When I asked, "How
do they live?" his reply was, "I don't know and don't care if I get
my money for my milk." In Pork House row and near Eckert street in
Allegheny, things were no better, and some blocks of houses under the
California avenue bridge were as bad as any thing I saw.
Before we condemn immigrants for the filth of their lodgings, we must
remember that they are largely rural peoples unused to such city
barracks. This fact is illustrated especially in their ignorance
regarding that terror which has waited upon foreigners in the Pittsburgh
district,--typhoid fever. Dr. Leon Sadowski estimated that as high as
fifty per cent of all young foreigners who come to Pittsburgh contract
typhoid fever within two years of their coming. Dr. Maracovick told me
that in four years no less than 100 Croatians in the neighborhood of
Smallman street had come down with the fever, and that most of them
died. "You cannot make the foreigner believe that Pittsburgh water
is unwholesome," said Dr. Welsh of Bellevue. "He comes from rural
communities where contamination of water is unknown." Physicians told
me of men who had been warned, deliberately going to the Allegheny to
quench their thirst.
Where so many single men are huddled together the laws of decency
and morality are hard to observe. The boarding boss seldom has a
family and, in going the round of these houses, the absence of
children is conspicuous. A physician among them told me, "The average
boarding-boss's wife cannot get any,--the moral condition makes it a
physical impossibility." This stands in striking contrast with the
average Slavic woman who in her natural environment, is the mother
of children. These mid-European peoples are not so passionate as the
Italians, but many of the single men, as the case is in all barracks
life, fall into vice. A physician told me that gonorrhea is very
prevalent among the Croatians and Servians. Another physician said of
the Slavs in general, "They frequent cheap houses and come out diseased
and robbed." Many bawdy houses are known in Pittsburgh as "Johnny
Houses," for the reason that they are frequented by foreigners whose
proper names are unpronounceable and who go by the name of "John." The
number entering these on a "wide-awake" (pay) Saturday night is large.
A man who knows this section fairly well, said, "Sometimes these men
have to wait their turn." These are houses of the cheapest kind given
over to prostitutes in the last stage.
The presence of young immigrant women in the immigrant lodging houses
adds to the seriousness of the situation. Here again it is a question
of wages that brings them to this country. They do the drudgery in
the hotels and restaurants which English-speaking girls will not do;
and they are to be found in factories working under conditions their
English-speaking sisters would resent. If any persons need protection,
these young women do. There is no adequate inspection of the labor
employment agencies in Pittsburgh which solicit patronage among them,
often to wrong them. Not only do some of these agencies take their money
but they send girls to places unfit for them. An innocent girl may learn
the character of the house only when it is too late. And even in the
boarding houses their lot is a hard one, especially when the men of the
place are on a carouse.
The Slavs and Lithuanians are fond of drink and spend their money
freely on it. Some spend more money on beer than they do on food. The
evidences of drink in the homes are apparent on all sides; and not only
do national customs and national tastes and usages make for drunkenness,
but the undeniable fact that the liquor interests are the only American
institutions which effectively reach the great mass of the non-English
speaking immigrants. Where else does the stranger find opportunity for
recreation at his very hand? Empty beer kegs and bottles are to be
seen everywhere among the houses of the immigrant lodgers. In Latimore
alley, on a September morning, I counted twenty empty kegs in the yard;
and in another corner there was a pile of empty bottles. It is nothing
unusual for a beer wagon on Saturday to deliver into one of these
boarding houses from eight to twelve cases of beer. When a keg is open
the boarders feel that they must drain it. "It won't keep," they say.
Sunday is the day for drinking. One man often drinks from fifteen to
twenty bottles; while he who drinks from the keg does away with from
two to three gallons. No social gathering is complete without drink.
Marriages, baptisms, social occasions, holidays are all celebrated with
beer and liquor. There is no good time and no friendship without it. The
Slavs usually rent a hall to celebrate their weddings. The scenes of
debauchery with which such festivities sometimes end are discountenanced
by the respectable element among these people. Pool rooms afford loafing
places for the young men of the worst sort. The cheap vaudeville shows,
nickelodeons, and skating rinks are run for profit and not for the sake
of clean recreation such as the community should in some way provide.
But such places cannot be eliminated unless the craving of young people
for amusement is met intelligently and sanely.
[Illustration: SLOVAK GIRL.]
Where the environment of the home is unsanitary and repulsive, and
where opportunities for recreation are limited and sordid, crime is
bound to flourish. Approximately one-fifth of the persons incarcerated
in Allegheny county in recent years have been immigrants from
southeastern Europe. A visit to the police stations of the South Side
on Sunday morning when the police magistrate dispenses justice after a
"wide-awake" Saturday night, is a thing never to be forgotten. In such
a section the foreigners form a majority of the offenders. On one of my
visits to a South Side court, a young Pole was brought up who said he
wanted to be arrested just to find out how it felt. The judge asked him,
"How do you like it?" "All right," he said laughing. He got a full taste
by being sent to jail for ten days. Another young Slav had violated a
city ordinance. He could not speak English. The judge asked him how long
he had been in the country. "Four years," he replied. "And you cannot
talk English?" said the judge. "Don't you know that you ought to learn
English that you may know we have laws and ordinances which must be
obeyed?" In the judge's remark there was more of a commentary on civic
duties unfulfilled than he perhaps realized. But who was to blame? Was
it the Slav boy? Or was it the community which had failed to meet him
halfway?
Here it is well to point out that the public school authorities have not
made any strenuous effort to open evening schools for foreign adults in
the city. The notable exception to this rule has been the work carried
on by Principal Anthony among the Jewish people of the hill district,
which grew out of classes carried on at Columbian Settlement. Another
evening school, in the establishment of which a priest was the prime
mover, met with fair success, but the foreigners dropped out very
quickly. When asked why the school was given up, one of the school
officials said that the pupils did not want it to continue; but their
hours of work and changing shifts are probably still more important
factors. Kingsley House, Woods Run and Columbian Settlement have carried
on successful classes for foreigners, and the Y. M. C. A.'s of the
districts are entering the field of civic and language instruction. The
development of the evening courses of the Carnegie Technical Schools
has been significant, but as yet they do not reach many unskilled
immigrants, who need a nearby elementary help. The camp schools carried
on by the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, at Aspinwall
and Ambridge, have illustrated what could be done, and the response
which comes from the immigrants themselves. More important, they were
the means of securing the passage of legislation enabling local school
authorities to open classes for adults. But in Greater Pittsburgh,
it remains true that the school authorities are not yet awake to the
importance of opening schools for foreign-speaking people and inducing
them to attend. There could be no greater service rendered these young
foreigners (or the city that harbors them) than that of aiding them to
form clubs, and of engaging competent men to teach them English and give
them some idea of the history and laws of the country.
In police station No. 3 on Penn avenue, the cases averaged four hundred
and forty-five a month during the ten months I studied them. Drunkenness
and disorderly conduct formed sixty-eight per cent of these cases, and
the foreigners from southeastern Europe were charged with twenty-seven
per cent of them. Three-quarters of the criminals were single men, and
the large number of single men among the foreigners who lack decent
homes, doubtless partly accounts for the frequency of their arrests.
Similar proportions governed at police station No. 7 on Carson street.
A study of the docket of the Aldermen's Court on the South Side, in
a prescribed area where Slavs and Lithuanians form an essential part
of the population, showed a total of 167, or 39.5 per cent for these
nationalities; but these cases varied greatly from those in the police
stations. 48.3 per cent were cases of assault and battery and 45.6 per
cent of the culprits were foreigners. The cases of fornication and
bastardy, adultery and rape, numbered seventeen, more than half of
which were to be laid at the door of the foreigners. Cases of larceny,
disturbance of the peace, and disorderly conduct were about equally
divided between the English-speaking and the non-English-speaking
of southeastern Europe. Out of thirty-one cases of desertion and
non-support, not a Slav, Lithuanian or Italian was implicated.
[Illustration: SERVIAN GIRL.]
A closer study of this list indicated that aldermen were giving
preference to cases where the returns were sure. Pittsburgh suffers
under a system of petty aldermen's courts such as Chicago only recently
put an end to, and from which Philadelphia is exempted by constitutional
provision. The aldermen are dependent upon their fees and the
immigrants, ofttimes innocent, are the special prey of such as may be
unscrupulous.
Profits are not what they used to be for those who prey upon ignorance,
as I gathered from the constable who told me, "The foreigner knows too
much now; old times are past." In the good old times he had made from
fifteen to twenty dollars a day. But even if the most flagrant abuses
are now infrequent and if some of the aldermen are of unquestionable
character, the system is wrong and the foreigner is its most grievous
sufferer.
[Illustration: LITHUANIAN GIRL.]
But we must not over-estimate the lawlessness among these people. We
have seen the manner of life of the single men, and the dangers that
beset them. In the Pittsburgh situation what encouragement is there to
the immigrant who seriously wants to get ahead in life? I have it from
a priest that one-tenth of the young men of his race who come to this
district go to the bad; the other nine-tenths may drink more or less,
but they manage to save money and in time acquire property. Of the
Lithuanian families of Pittsburgh more than ten per cent own their own
homes. Many Poles and Slovaks also have purchased their own homes. When
an Italian resolves to stay in this country, he buys a house. But as yet
few Croatians, Ruthenians and Servians own real estate in Pittsburgh.
While the wages of the day laborers in the district are high for the
single man who lives on the boarding boss system, the foreigner who
brings his family here and pays American prices for the necessities of
life, faces a different situation. The father of a family cannot hope
to get accommodations for less than twelve or fifteen dollars a month,
and then he has only two or three rooms. The Slav, as we have seen, has
to pay more than the English-speaking man for the same house. The man
who earns thirty-seven dollars a month and has to pay twelve dollars in
rent has not a large fund on which to raise a family. He belongs to one
or two lodges which means an outlay of a dollar to a dollar and a half
each month. He must pay fifty cents a month to his church, and he is
compelled to send his children to the parochial school at, say, another
fifty cents a head, or three for a dollar. He must buy the school books
needed by the child; this may amount yearly to from three to four
dollars. Is it surprising, then, that the children are sent to work at
an early age and that many are raised in cramped and dirty quarters?
But this question of the children, of their health and education, we
must leave to later issues. When the mills are working regularly and the
father is able to work each day, the family manages to get along. But
when sickness comes or work ceases, then the pinch of hunger is felt.
Mrs. Lippincott of the Society for the Improvement of the Poor tells me
that in good times but few Slavs or Lithuanians apply for aid; that only
when the father is killed or injured, is aid needed, and that then it is
for medicine and proper food for the patient.[4]
[4] A study of the records of the charity department of Pittsburgh and
Allegheny indicated that the percentage of foreign born dependents
exceeds by perhaps ten per cent the percentage of foreign born in the
population. I refer to the city home, the city hospital, the poor
houses, the tuberculosis camp and outdoor relief. In the institutions
for the insane as many as forty-nine per cent were foreign born and of
the $311,470 appropriated for their maintenance on a given year, half
was thus bestowed upon the foreign born.
It must be remembered that influential men among the Slavs and
Lithuanians are prosperous and live in residential sections of
Pittsburgh. Some Poles and Italians are in the professions and some
Lithuanians are well to do business men. All these people, however,
do business among their own countrymen, and as yet their influence
is largely restricted to this circle. Sections of the city where
foreigners live are well supplied with banking facilities, which are
generally conducted by men of those nationalities. The leading banks of
Pittsburgh have learned that the immigrants save their money, and many
of them have a foreign exchange department at the head of which is put a
foreign-speaking man who is a leader among his countrymen.
In this connection, it is interesting to examine more closely what might
be called the personal ledger of the Slavic day laborer in Pittsburgh.
[Illustration: A SLAVIC HOUSEHOLD.]