CHAPTER X

IN

THE STANDARD OF LIVING.

A. Introductory

so far as immigration is an economic movement, it is obvious that the immigrant's standard of living in his home country must have been below the American standard. This is as true of the old as of the new immigration. Those immigrants only are an exception to this rule who seek to escape from political or religious oppression. Its victims are not confined to the poorer classes, but include people of means and of standing in the community, whose standard of living is often superior to that of the native American mechanic. Since 1890, however, of all the races which have come to this country, the Jews, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Russians, the Finns, and the Armenians, have furnished the only immigrants of this class. As to all others, it was just the higher standard of living 'of the American wage-earner that induced them, like most races that preceded them, to emigrate to the United States. If the lower standard of living to which the immigrant has been accustomed at home tends to reduce the American standard of living, then these effects of immigration must have manifested themselves in the days of the Irish and German immigration as much as to-day. At most there may be only a difference of degree. That the standard of living of the recent immigrant employed as an unskilled laborer is lower than that of the native American mechanic or of the older immigrant engaged in skilled work, is no new

discovery. To prove, however, that the new immigrants have introduced a lower standard of living, it is necessary to show that the standard of living of the recent immigrants employed as unskilled laborers is lower than that of the Irish and German immigrants of past generations who were doing the same grade of work, or of the native American unskilled workers of the time before the Irish and German immigration. The experts of the Immigration Commission, however, have simply taken for granted that the standard of living of the present-day American or Americanized skilled mechanic is identical with that of the unskilled laborer of the same racial stocks in the days before the new immigration. This assumption is not borne out by American economic history.

The housing conditions of the foreign-born population have been most dwelt upon in the discussion of the standard of living of the immigrant, because they strike the eye of the outsider. On this subject there are ample comparative data. New York has always had more than its proportionate share of newly arrived immigrants; its housing problem, as affected by immigration, therefore, calls for separate treatment.

B. Congestion in New York City

Overcrowding was recognized as a serious evil in New York City as far back as 1834. A city inspector for that year attributed the high rate of mortality to "the crowded and filthy state" in which the population of New York lived. As the city was growing, the well-to-do residents were moving northward and their old dwellings were let to the poor. The traditional American one-family house was adapted to the requirements of a population of independent artisans and small shopkeepers, many of whom were home-owners. With the growth of great cities and the rise of land values, and with the development of a * Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 452.

wage-earning class, the one-family house became the cause of congestion in its worst form. The rental of such a house was beyond the reach of the wage-earner. Each room was let out to a separate family. Naturally, such improvised dwellings lacked the most necessary accommodations. The basement of the one-family house of the old type, formerly used as a dining-room and kitchen, developed into a separate cellar apartment.

Towards the middle of the '40's there had grown up in New York a great "cellar population." A pen picture of the condition of the cellars is given in a report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population, which was published in 1845:

The most offensive of all places of residence are the cellars. It is almost impossible, when contemplating the circumstances and conditions of the poor beings who inhabit these holes, to maintain the proper degree of calmness requisite for a thorough inspection of their miseries and sound judgment respecting them. You must descend to them; you must feel the blast of foul air, as it meets your face on opening the door; you must grope in the dark or hesitate until your eye becomes accustomed to the gloomy place, to enable you to find your way through the entry over the broken floor, the boards of which are protected from your tread by a half inch of hard dirt; you must inhale the suffocating vapor of the heated rooms; and in the dark, dim recesses endeavor to find the inmates by the sound of their voices, or chance to see their figures moving between you and the flickering light of a window, coated with dirt and festooned with cobwebs or, if in search of an invalid, take care that you do not fall full length upon the bed with her, by stumbling against the rags and straw dignified by that name, lying upon the floor, under the window, if window there is.1

The occupants of these tenements were "principally Irish and German" whose habits were described in 1837 as "more or less filthy." An account of one of these houses, in the rear of No. 49 Elizabeth Street, is given in an official report of a city physician:

The front building, a small two-story frame house, was partly occu* Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 453.

pied by the proprietor or lessee of the building as a liquor store and partly sublet to several Irish families. A covered alleyway led to the rear of the building. This was a double frame house of three stories in height. It stood in the center of the yard, ranged next the fence, where a number of pigsties and stables had surrounded the yard on three sides. From the quantity of filth, liquid and otherwise, thus caused, the ground, I suppose, had been rendered almost impassable, and to remedy this, the yard had been completely boarded over so that the earth could nowhere be seen. These boards were partially decayed, and by a little pressure, even in dry weather, a thick, greenish, fluid could be forced up through the crevices.1

These evils were not confined, however, to the foreignborn population. The living conditions of the sewing women, a large majority of whom were American-born, were thus described by the New York Tribune, in the same year 1845:

These women generally "keep house"—that is, they rent a single room, or perhaps two small rooms, in the upper story of some poor, ill-constructed, unventilated house in a filthy street, constantly kept so by the absence of back yards and the neglect of the street inspector— where a sickening and deadly miasma pervades the atmosphere and in summer renders it totally unfit to be inhaled by human lungs depositing the seeds of debility and disease with every inspiration In these rooms all the processes of cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, working, and living are indiscriminately performed.2

Bad as these conditions were, they were not the worst. The wages of Irish laborers in Brooklyn were so low that they could not afford to pay any rent at all, so "they were allowed to build miserable shanties on ground allotted them by the contractors on the plot occupied by them in performing the work."3

In the '60's there was a "shanty population" of about 20,000 on the upper west side of Manhattan Island. was composed of Germans and Irish. They were largely

It

• Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., pp. 452-453. Helen L. Sumner: Report of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. ix., p. 135.

3 Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. viii., pp. 225226; quoting from New York Weekly Tribune, May 2, 1846, p. 3, col. 3.

day laborers, employed by contractors in grading, paving, and sewering the streets, and in the removal of rock, or in excavating for public purposes. In a typical shanty, according to an inspector of the council of hygiene, "domiciliary and personal cleanliness is almost impossible. In one room are found the family, chairs, usually dirty and broken, cooking utensils, stove, often a bed, a dog or cat, and sometimes more or less poultry. On the outside, by the door in many cases, are pigs and goats and additional poultry. There is no sink or drainage, and the slops are thrown upon the ground."

Gloomy pictures of the housing conditions which prevailed in the '60's are drawn in contemporary reports of medical inspectors. They speak in general terms of "the contracted alleys; the underground, murky, and pestilential cellars; the tenement house, with its hundreds of occupants where each cooks, eats, and sleeps in a single room without light or ventilation, surrounded with filth, in an atmosphere foul, fetid, and deadly."

The Thirteenth Ward was densely crowded with working classes, the majority of whom were Irish; Germans ranked next, and Americans last. ... The ward showed a high rate of sickness and mortality, owing to the over-crowded and ill-ventilated dwellings and to the ignorant and careless habits of the people themselves. From Fortieth to Fiftieth Street the foreign population was mainly Irish or of Irish descent, packed in filthy tenements and of the most unclean and degraded personal habits. . . . The tenement houses in which most of the foreign population found their homes were certainly little calculated to develop high social and moral types, and indeed brought to bear influences working directly the other way.3

The following description of the tenements in Sheriff Street, which was then settled by Germans, is quoted from contemporary sources:

The attic rooms are used to deposit the filthy rags and bones as they are taken from the gutters and slaughterhouses. The yards are filled with dirty rags hung up to dry, sending forth their stench to all the Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 457. • Ibid., p. 454.

3 Ibid., p. 458.