that the recent immigrants are mostly concentrated in great cities, where rent is high, while the native American workmen predominate in small towns with low rents. So when the article produced by immigrant labor in a large city must compete in the market with the article produced by native American labor in a small country town, it is not the recent immigrant that is able to underbid the native American workman, but on the contrary the latter is in a position to accept a cheaper wage.1 D. Food The Immigration Commission has expressed the opinion that "while it [the new immigration] may not have lowered in a marked degree the American standard of living it has introduced a lower standard which has become prevalent in the unskilled industry at large." This conclusion rests solely on the meagre statistics which were collected by the Commission on the subject of housing. The inconclusiveness of these statistics has been shown in the preceding section. The food expenditure which absorbs about two fifths of the workman's income, 3 was not included by the Commission in the regular program of its statistical investigation. Its reports contain but a few budgets picked up here and there in a casual way. It notes, however, "that, generally speaking, the expenditures for meat are considerably higher in the case of the more recent immigrants than in the case of the older immigrant races and the whites native-born of native father."4 By way of illustration The Industrial Commission found that the average rent paid by a family of a garment worker in the city was $8.95 per month for three rooms, whereas the country garment workers who did not own their houses paid on an average $4.59 for a whole house. (Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 730.) The difference in rent amounted to $4.37 per month, i. e., to $1.00 per week. Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. I, p. 39. 3 Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, p. 96. 4 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 6, p. 356. the following items are quoted from some of the published budgets. The Magyar is a great consumer of meat. A butcher states that a group of eight Magyar men on an average eat 4 pounds of beef, 5 pounds of pork, 3 pounds of Polish sausage, and 4 pounds of veal, and often in addition, bacon and ham and other cured meats, each day. (Thus on an average, each man eats 2 pounds of meat each day.) The Bulgarians. Among them bread is the staple article of diet. Each man will consume a three-pound loaf of bread per day. They also use a small quantity of meat each day, usually about a pound per man. (The experts of the Commission consider one pound a day per man "a small quantity." Few boarding houses patronized by university professors serve meat in greater quantities.) The kind of food consumed daily by a Bulgarian couple was about as follows: Breakfast: Tea, cream, cheese, bread. Dinner: Bread, some kind of meat or stew. Supper: Bread, meat stew, or eggs. Presumably these budgets were published by the Immigration Commission, because they were regarded as representative. How do these food standards compare with the standard of the native American workingman? We may accept as the official definition of the American food standard the ration fixed by act of Congress for enlisted men on the warships of the American navy. A specimen bill of fare prepared in accordance with the Navy ration prescribed by Congress, is as follows2: Breakfast: Baked beans, tomato catsup, bread, butter, coffee. * Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 9, pp. 82–96. Į Frank J. Sheridan: "Italian, Slavic, and Hungarian Unskilled Immigrant Laborers in the United States." Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 72, p. 466. Dinner: Roast beef, brown gravy, string beans, sweet potatoes, cottage pudding, vanilla sauce, bread, coffee. Supper: Cold boiled ham, canned peaches, bread, butter, tea. Judged by this official standard, the Hungarian and Bulgarian workmen, with their daily fare of one or two pounds of meat per man, do not appear to have "introduced a lower standard." Concerning the Italians, material for a comparison of their food expenditure with that of native white Americans is furnished in the Report of the Immigration Commission on iron and steel manufacturing in the South. The Italians whose budgets were reported were all unskilled, earning from $7.50 to $12.50 per week, with the exception of one foreman of unskilled laborers, who was earning $15.00 and had an 18-year-old boy who contributed $7.00 a week to the family income. The Americans were all skilled mechanics with a weekly income of from $18.00 to $25.00, except one carpenter whose wages were $12.00 a week. In Table 77 the food expenditures of these families have been reduced to nutrition units per man per day according to the scale adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture. Although the budgets secured by the investigation of TABLE 77. AVERAGE EXPENDITURE PER MAN PER DAY OF SELECTED FAMILIES OF SOUTH ITALIAN AND NATIVE WHITE WORKERS IN THE IRON AND STEEL DISTRICT OF THE SOUTH. 2 For an explanation of the method used, see Robert Coit Chapin: The Standard of Living among Workingmen's Families in New York City, pp. 125-126. For details see Appendix, Table XVII. the Immigration Commission included none for unskilled American workmen and only one for an Italian employed in a supervisory capacity, all the rest relating to unskilled Italian laborers, yet the preceding table shows that the food expenditure of the South Italian laborer is the same as that of the Southern white skilled mechanic.1 A special investigation of the expenditures of single laborers in construction camps was made by the Bureau of Labor in 1906. Fresh and salt meats were found to be essential parts of the bills of fare of "Hungarian" and "Slav" laborers. The same information was obtained concerning Hungarian laborers in an iron and steel plant in Ohio: "They used beef as a rule three times a day." At Hansford, Pa., the bill of fare of Hungarians and Slavs on week days was as follows: "Breakfast: Bread and coffee. Lunch: Four or five sandwiches (beef). Dinner in the evening: Soup, boiled or roast beef, one half to three fourths of a pound a head. Vegetables and coffee." According to Dr. Roberts, who has made a study of the conditions of labor in the anthracite coal mines, "the Slavs have good bread made of the best wheat or rye; they consume daily about a pound of beef for boiling or of fat pork or bologna sausage, a quantity of potatoes, cabbage, milk, coffee, and beer, butter and cheese, sugar, eggs, and fish." An earlier investigation made by the Bureau of Labor among the Slav and Hungarian workmen in the iron mines of Pennsylvania showed that, in 1890, their bill of fare included "two pounds of meat per man per day, one for dinner and one for supper. The one exceptionally high average, 62 cents per man per day, was obtained from a native machinist, who was employed in the railroad shops at $23.00 per week and had only his wife and a small child dependent upon him. The term "Hungarian" often comprises all immigrants from Hungary, most of whom belong to various Slav races. Bulgarians are also "Slavs." 3 Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 72, p. 475. With respect to Italians, a distinction must be drawn between families and single men, or married men whose families have remained in Italy. It is learned from the investigation of the Bureau of Labor, that men who are employed in construction camps live principally on vegetables and reduce their expenditures to a minimum, in an effort to save as much as possible of their wages. Italian families, however, do not differ in the matter of food expenditures from families of other nationalities with the same income. Beside the budgets of the Immigration Commission which have been analyzed above, this fact is brought out in Professor Chapin's monograph on the standard of living among New York workingmen, based upon a canvass of 391 families in the summer of 1907. The following table, giving the classification of food expenditures by income and nationality, is compiled from Professor Chapin's budget statistics, the nationalities being arranged in the descending order of their average expenditure per man per day: TABLE 78. AVERAGE FOOD EXPENDITURES PER MAN PER DAY, BY INCOME AND Austrian, Hungarian, and other S. E. European 24.0 23.9 Austrian, Hungarian, and other S. E. European 25.1 24.3 |