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ANYTHING like an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem presented by the Tenth Ward [1] is beset by difficulties that increase in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them. I have too vivid a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those stewing tenements, trying to get to the bottom of the vexatious question only to find myself in the end as far from the truth as at the beginning, asking with rising wrath Pilate's question, "What is truth?" to attempt to weary the reader by dragging him with me over that sterile and unprofitable ground. Nor are these pages the place for such a discussion. In it, let me confess it at once and have done with it, I should be like the blind leading the |
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blind; between the real and apparent poverty, the hidden hoards and the unhesitating mendacity of these people, where they conceive their interests to be concerned in one way or another, the reader and I would fall together into the ditch of doubt and conjecture in which I have found company before. The facts that lie on the surface indicate the causes
as clearly as the nature of the trouble. In effect
both have been already stated. A friend of mine who
manufactures cloth once boasted to me that nowadays,
on cheap clothing, New York "beats the world."
"To what," I asked, "do you attribute
it?" "To the cutter's long knife [2] and the Polish Jew," he said. Which of the two
has cut deepest into the workman's wages is not a
doubtful question. Practically the Jew has monopolized
the business since the battle between East Broadway
and Broadway ended in a complete victory for the East
Side and cheap labor, and transferred to it the control
of the trade in cheap clothing. Yet, not satisfied
with having won the field, he strives as hotly with
his own for the profit of half a cent as he fought
with his Christian competitor for the dollar. If the
victory is a barren one, the blame is his own. His
price is not what he can get, but the lowest he can
live for and underbid his neighbor. Just what that
means we shall see. The manufacturer knows it, and
is not slow to take advantage of his knowledge. He
makes him hungry for work by keeping it from him as
long as possible; then drives the closest bargain
he can with the sweater.
Many harsh things have been said of the "sweater,"
that really apply to the system in which he is a necessary,
logical link. It can at least be said of him that
he is no worse than the conditions that created him.
The sweater is simply the middleman, the sub-contractor,
a workman like his fellows, perhaps with the single
distinction from the rest that he knows a little English;
perhaps not even that, but with the accidental possession
of two or three sewing machines, or of credit enough
to hire them, as his capital, who drums up work among
the clothing-houses. Of workmen he can always get
enough. Every ship-load from German ports brings them
to his door in droves, clamoring for work. The sun
sets upon the day of the arrival of many a Polish
Jew, finding him at work in an East Side tenement,
treading the machine and "learning the trade."
Often there are two, sometimes three, sets of sweaters
on one job. They work with the rest when they are
not drumming up trade, driving their "hands"
as they drive their machine, for all they are worth,
and making a profit on their work, of course, though
in most cases not nearly as extravagant a percentage,
probably, as is often supposed. If it resolves itself
into a margin of five or six cents, or even less,
on a dozen pairs of boys' trousers, for instance,
it is nevertheless enough to make the contractor with
his thrifty instincts independent. The workman growls,
not at the hard labor, or poor pay, but over the pennies
another is coining out of his sweat, and on the first
opportunity turns sweater himself, and takes his revenge
by driving an even closer bargain than his rival tyrant,
thus reducing his profits. |
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The sweater knows well
that the isolation of the workman in his helpless
ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done
what he could--with merciless severity where he
could--to smother every symptom of awakening intelligence
in his slaves. In this effort to perpetuate his
despotism he has had the effectual assistance
of his own system and the sharp competition that
keep the men on starvation wages; of their constitutional
greed, that will not permit the sacrifice of temporary
advantage, however slight, for permanent good,
and above all, of the hungry hordes of immigrants
to whom no argument appeals save the cry for bread.
Within very recent times he has, however, been
forced to partial surrender by the organization
of the men to a considerable extent into trades
unions, and by experiments in co-operation, under
intelligent leadership, that presage the sweater's
doom. But as long as the ignorant crowds continue
to come and to herd in these tenements, his grip
can never be shaken off. And the supply across
the seas is apparently inexhaustible. Every fresh
persecution of the |
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Russian or Polish Jew on his
native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to
confound economical problems, and recruit the
sweater's phalanx. The curse of bigotry and ignorance
reaches halfway across the world, to sow its bitter
seed in fertile soil in the East Side tenements.
If the Jew himself was to blame for the resentment
he aroused over there, he is amply punished. He
gathers the first-fruits of the harvest here. The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements,
which the law that regulates factory labor does not
reach. To the factories themselves that are taking
the place of the rear tenements in rapidly growing
numbers, letting in bigger day-crowds than those the
health officers banished, the tenement shops serve
as a supplement through which the law is successfully
evaded. Ten hours is the legal work-day in the factories,
and nine o'clock the closing hour at the latest. Forty-five
minutes at least must be allowed for dinner, and children
under sixteen must not be employed unless they can
read and write English; none at all under fourteen.
The very fact that such a law should stand on the
statute book, shows how desperate the plight of these
people. But the tenement has defeated its benevolent
purpose. In it the child works unchallenged from the
day he is old enough to pull a thread. There is no
such thing as a dinner hour; men and women eat while
they work, and the "day" is lengthened at
both ends far into the night. Factory hands take their
work with them at the close of the lawful day to eke
out their scanty earnings by working overtime at home.
Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education
that alone can bring the needed relief; small wonder
that there are whole settlements on this East Side
where English is practically an unknown tongue, though
the people be both willing and anxious to learn. "When
shall we find time to learn?" asked one of them
of me once. I owe him the answer yet.
Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham
Square and ride up half a mile through the sweaters'
district. Every open window of the big tenements,
that stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides
of the way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops
as the train speeds by. Men and women bending over
their machines, or ironing clothes at the window,
half-naked. Proprieties do not count on the East Side;
nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard
cash. The road is like a big gangway through an endless
workroom where vast multitudes are forever laboring.
Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference; the
scene is always the same. At Rivington Street let
us get off and continue our trip on foot. It is Sunday
evening west of the Bowery. Here, under the rule of
Mosaic law, the week of work is under full headway,
its first day far spent. The hucksters' wagons are
absent or stand idle at the curb; the saloons admit
the thirsty crowds through the side-door labelled
"Family Entrance;" a tin sign in a store-window
announces that a "Sunday School" gathers
in stray children of the new dispensation; but beyond
these things there is little to suggest the Christian
Sabbath. Men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under
heavy burdens of unsewn garments, or enormous black
bags stuffed full of finished coats and trousers.
Let us follow one to his home and see how Sunday passes
in a Ludlow Street tenement.
Up two fights of dark stairs, three, four, with new:
smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every,
landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors
betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens
to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this,
in a small way. Five men and a woman, two young girls,
not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is
fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines
sewing knickerbockers, "knee-pants" in the
Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle-deep
with half-sewn garments In the alcove, on a couch
of many dozens of "pants" ready for the
finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is
asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from
rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms
to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with
the color of the cloth on which they are working.
The boy and the woman alone look up at our entrance.
The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning
look from the man with the bundle they tread their
machines more energetically than ever. The men do
not appear to be aware even of the presence of a stranger. |
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They are "learners,"
all of them, says the woman, who proves to be
the wife of the boss, and have "come over"
only a few weeks ago. She is disinclined to talk
at first, but a few words in her own tongue from
our guide [3] set her fears,
whatever they are, at rest, and she grows almost
talkative. The learners work for week's wages,
she says. How much do they earn? She shrugs her
shoulders with an expressive gesture. The workers
themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently,
as though the question were of no interest: from
two to five dollars. The children--there are four
of them--are not old enough to work. The oldest
is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty
dozen "knee-pants" a week, for which
the manufacturer pays seventy cents a dozen. Five
cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own
and her husband's work brings the family earnings
up to twenty-five dollars a week, when they have
work all the time. But often half the time is
put in looking for it. They work no longer than
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nine o'clock at night, from daybreak. There
are ten machines in the room; six are hired at
two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed
rooms, one somewhat larger than ordinary, they
pay twenty dollars a month. She does not complain,
though "times are not what they were, and
it costs a good deal to live." Eight dollars
a week for the family of six and two boarders.
How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes
over the bill of fare, at the silly; question: Bread,
fifteen cents a day, of milk two quarts a day at four
cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at twelve
cents, butter one pound a week at "eight cents
a quarter of a pound." Coffee, potatoes, and pickles
complete the list. At the least calculation, probably,
this sweater's family hoards up thirty dollars a month,
and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and
profit by the example set by their landlord in rent-collecting.
It is the way the savings of Jewtown are universally
invested, and with the natural talent of its people
for commercial speculation the investment is enormously
profitable.
On the next floor, in a dimly lighted room with a
big red-hot stove to keep the pressing irons ready
for use, is a family of man, wife, three children,
and a boarder. "Knee-pants" are made there
too, of a still lower grade. Three cents and a half
is all he clears, says the man, and lies probably
out of at least two cents. The wife makes a dollar
and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at
the machine. The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week.
He is really only a lodger, getting his meals outside.
The rent is two dollars and twenty-five cents a week,
cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at least
two, sometimes four, such shops. Here is one with
a young family for which life is bright with promise.
Husband and wife work together; just now the latter,
a comely young woman, is eating her dinner of dry
bread and green pickles. Pickles are favorite food
in Jewtown. They are filling, and keep the children
from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like
ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong--plan
proof that they are good to eat. The rest? "Well,
they die," says our guide, dryly. No thought
of untimely death comes to disturb this family with
life all before it. In a few years the man. will be
a prosperous sweater. Already he employs an old man
as ironer at three dollars a week, and a sweet-faced
little Italian girl as finisher at a dollar and a
half. She is twelve, she says, and can neither read
nor write; will probably never learn. How should she?
The family clears from ten to eleven dollars a week
in brisk times, more than half of which goes into
the bank.
A companion picture from across the hall. The man
works on the machine for his sweater twelve hours
a day, turning out three dozen "knee-pants,"
for which he receives forty-two cents a dozen. The
finisher who works with him gets ten, and the ironer
eight cents a dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight
to ten cents a hundred. This operator has four children
at his home in Stanton Street, none old enough to
work, and a sick wife. His rent is twelve dollars
a month; his wages for a hard week's work less than
eight dollars. Such as he, with their consuming desire
for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks of the
anarchists, won over by the promise of a general "divide;"
and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose
at the vicious foreigner for whose perverted notions
there is no room in this land of plenty.
Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble
upon a nest of cloak-makers in their busy season.
Six months of the year the cloak-maker is idle, or
nearly so. Now is his harvest. Seventy-five cents
a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop.
The cloak is of cheap plush, and might sell for eight
or nine dollars over the store-counter. Seven dollars
is the weekly wage of this man with wife and two children,
and nine dollars and a half rent to pay per month.
A boarder pays about a third of it. There was a time
when he made ten dollars a week and thought himself
rich. But wages have come down fearfully in the last
two years. Think of it: "comedown" to this.
The other cloak-makers aver that they can make as
much as twelve dollars a week, when they are employed,
by taking their work home and sewing till midnight.
One exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street
sweater. It shows that he and his partner, working
on first-class garments for a Broadway house in the
four busiest weeks of the season, made together from
$15.15 to $19.20 a week by striving from 6 A.M. to
11 P.M., that is to say, from $7.58 to $9.60 each. [4] The sweater on this work probably made as much as fifty
per cent. at least on their labor. Not far away is
a factory in a rear yard where the factory inspector
reports teams of tailors making men's coats at an
average of twenty-seven cents a coat, all complete
except buttons and button-holes. |
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Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement
in Ludlow Street, owned by a well-known Jewish
liquor dealer and politician, a triple combination
that bodes ill for his tenants. As a matter
of fact, the cheapest "apartment,"
three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one
of which deserves the name, is rented for $13
a month. Here is a reminder of the Bend, a hallway
turned into a shoemaker's shop. Two hallways
side by side in adjoining tenements, would be
sinful waste in Jewtown, when one would do as
well by knocking a hole in the wall. But this
shoemaker knows a trick the Italian's ingenuity
did not suggest. He has his "flat"
as well as his shop there. A curtain hung back
of his stool in the narrow passage half conceals
his bed that fills it entirely from wall to
wall. To get into it he has to crawl over the
footboard, and he must come out the same way.
Expedients more odd than this are born of the
East Side crowding. In one of the houses we
left, the coal-bin of a family on the fourth
floor was on the roof of the adjoining tenement.
A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped
there while we talked with the people. |
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We have reached Broome Street. The hum of industry
in this six-story tenement on the corner leaves
no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears within it.
One fight up, we knock at the nearest door. The
grocer, who keeps the store, lives on the "stoop,"
the first floor in East Side parlance. In this
room a suspender-maker sleeps and works with his
family of wife and four children; For a wonder
there are no boarders. His wife and eighteen years
old daughter share in the work, but the girl's
eyes are giving out from the strain. Three months
in the year, when work is very brisk, the family
makes by united efforts as high as fourteen and
fifteen dollars a week. The other nine months
it averages from three to four dollars The oldest
boy, a young man, earns from four to six dollars
in an Orchard Street factory, when he has work.
The rent is ten dollars a month for the room and
a miserable little coop of a bedroom where the
old folks sleep. The girl makes her bed on the lounge in the front
room; the big boys and the children sleep on the Door.
Coal at ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents
a pound, one and a half pound of butter a week at thirty-six
cents, and a quarter of a pound of tea in the same space
of time, are items of their house-keeping account as
given by the daughter. Milk at four and five cents a
quart, "according to quality." The sanitary
authorities know what that means, know how miserably
inadequate is the fine of fifty or a hundred dollars
for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches who
poison the babes of these tenements with the stuff that
is half water, or swill. Their defence is that the demand
is for "cheap milk." Scarcely a wonder that
this suspender-maker will hardly be able to save up
the dot for his daughter, without which she stands no
chance of marrying in Jewtown, even with her face that
would be pretty had it a healthier tinge.
Up under the roof three men are making boys' jackets
at twenty cents a piece, of which the sewer takes
eight the ironer three, the finisher five cents, and
the button hole-maker two and a quarter, leaving a
cent and three-quarters to pay for the drumming up,
the fetching and bringing back of the goods. They
bunk together in a room for which they pay eight dollars
a month. A11 three are single here, that is: their
wives are on the other side yet, waiting for them
to earn enough to send for them. Their breakfast,
eaten at the work-bench, consists of a couple of rolls
at a cent a piece, and a draught of water, milk when
business has been very good, a square meal at noon
in a restaurant, and the morning meal over again at
night. This square meal, that is the evidence of a
very liberal disposition on the part of the consumer,
is an affair of more than ordinary note; it may be
justly called an institution. I know of a couple of
restaurants at the lower end of Orchard Street that
are favorite resorts for the Polish Jews, who remember
the injunction that the ox that treadeth out the corn
shall not be muzzled. Being neighbors, they are rivals of course, and cutting under. When I was last there
one gave a dinner of soup, meat-stew, bread, pie,
pickles, and a "schooner" of beer for thirteen
cents; the other charged fifteen cents for a similar
dinner, but with two schooners of beer and a cigar,
or a cigarette, as the extra inducement. The two cents
had won the day, however, and the thirteen-cent restaurant
did such a thriving business that it was about to
spread out into the adjoining store to accommodate
the crowds of customers. At this rate the lodger of
Jewtown can "live like a lord," as he says
himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the
price of his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty
to forty and fifty cents a week, and save money, no
matter what his earnings. Be does it, too, so long
as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard
he sets up Jewtown must abide.
It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help
to pay its extortionate rents. At night there is scarce
a room in-all the district that has not one or more
of them, some above half a score, sleeping on cots.
or on the floor. It is idle to speak of. privacy in
these "homes." The term carries no more
meaning with it than would a lecture on social ethics
to an audience of Hottentots. The picture is not overdrawn.
In fact, in presenting the home life of these people
I have been at some pains to avoid the extreme of
privation, taking the cases just as they came to hand
on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. Yet
even the direst apparent poverty in Jewtown, unless
dependent on absolute lack of work, would, were the
truth known, in nine cases out of ten have a silver
lining in the shape of a margin in bank.
These are the economical conditions that enable my
manufacturing friend to boast that New York can "beat
the world" on cheap clothing In support of his
claim he told me that a single Bowery firm last year
sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged
in cost $1.12 1/2. With the material at fifteen cents
a yard, he said, children's suits of assorted sizes
can be sold at wholesale for seventy-five cents, and
boys' cape overcoats at the same price. They are the
same conditions that have perplexed the committee
of benevolent Hebrews in charge of Baron de Hirsch's
munificent gift of ten thousand dollars a month for
the relief of the Jewish poor in New York To find
proper channels through which to pour this money so
that it shall effect its purpose without pauperizing
and without perpetuating the problem it is sought
to solve, by attracting still greater swarms, is indeed
no easy task. Colonization has not in the past been
a success with these people. The great mass of them
are too gregarious to take kindly to farming, and
their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment.
To herd them in model tenements, though it relieve
the physical suffering in a measure, would be to treat
a symptom of the disease rather than strike at its
root, even if land could be got cheap enough where
they gather to build on a sufficiently large scale to make the plan a success. Trade schools for manual
training could hardly be made to reach the adults,
who in addition would have to be supported for months
while learning. For the young this device has proved
most excellent under the wise management of the United
Hebrew Charities, an organization that gathers to
its work the best thought and effort of many of our
most public-spirited citizens. One, or all, of these
plans may be tried, probably will. I state but the misgivings as to the
result of some of the practical minds that have
busied themselves with the problem. Its keynote
evidently is the ignorance of the immigrants.
They must be taught the language of the country
they have chosen as their home, as the first and
most necessary step. Whatever may follow, that
is essential, absolutely vital. That done, it
may well be that the case in its new aspect will
not be nearly so hard to deal with. |
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Evening has worn into night as we take up our
homeward journey through the streets, now no longer
silent. The thousands of lighted windows in the
tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone
wall. From every door multitudes of tired men
and women pour forth for a half-hour's rest in
the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary
with incessant working. Crowds of half-naked children
tumble in the street and on the sidewalk, or doze
fretfully on the stone steps. As we stop in front
of a tenement to watch one of these groups, a
dirty baby in a single brief garment--yet a sweet,
human little baby despite its dirt and tatters--tumbles
off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches
my leg with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep
on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on
my boot. |
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Go to Chapter
12 |
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[1] I refer to the
Tenth Ward always as typical. The district embraced
in the discussion really includes the Thirteenth Ward,
and in a growing sense large portions of the Seventh
and contiguous wards as well.
[2] An invention that cuts many
garments at once, where the scissors could cut only
a few.
[3] I was always accompanied
on these tours of inquiry by one. of their own people
who knew of and sympathized with my mission. Without;
that precaution my errand would have bean fruitless;
even with him it was often nearly so.
[4] The strike of the cloakmakers
last summer, that ended in victory, raised their wages
considerably, at least for the time being. |
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