The sun never were 10 by 14; the sleeping rooms 7 by 9. We could describe other tenement-house abominations of the same foulness and beastly defilement, but it would be but a repetition of nastiness and negligence, and for which neither memory or dictionary could supply words not yet used, or language adequate to the filthy picturing. In the smaller Massachusetts towns, the working people were as badly housed as in Boston. The following is reproduced from contemporary testimony given by a canvasser who went through many of the tenements of Danvers: Take them as a whole, they are horrid; those belonging to the factory especially. There are tenement houses there that ought not to be occupied. Four families have complained to me, that if they go to bed at night and there comes a shower, they have to rise up and put dishes in different places to catch the water, and that they can't sleep in their beds; and to prove it I went and examined and saw it was actually worse than they had said; one house, especially, where a person came to me, and I saw he did n't look right, and I said, "Are you going to work?" "No," he says, "had no sleep last night." It had been raining and his mother had been baking and preparing things for the house, and, in the morning almost everything had swum off and gone away—in all directions. . . . Another house, I was almost afraid to go into. I could see right through into the cellar; the plastering was entirely off the ceiling and they told me it leaked in just about the same way. There is another house, where there is a yard square without a shingle on it; and then another has an addition to it, and you can put your whole arm right in betwixt the two. It is more like a pig-pen than a decent house . . . when people are in the water-closet, the people on the road can see them. There is not a good tenement in the village. 1 Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1871, pp. 517-531. • Ibid., pp. 442-443. The same conditions were reported from Salem. The houses were seldom repaired, the plumbing was very poor, and the pump water was often made unfit for drinking purposes by the washings of the yard. The odor in the houses was bad. The following description of a house at No. 18 Lemon Street, is quoted as an extreme case, which nevertheless indicates what conditions were tolerated in those days: In connection with the kitchen, and only separated by a door was the pantry, quite reluctantly shown us by the mistress. She said that it being very much out of repair, and not fit to be used as such, they concluded it was best to turn it into a cowshed. Here were two cows, and all the accompaniments usually found in a stable, in direct connection with the kitchen, filling the house with its unmitigated stench. In this place pigs and hens were once kept, besides the cow, the former on all occasions making the freest use of the domestic apartments.1 About the same time (1872) shanty dwellers were found among the laborers of Massachusetts. The paymaster of tunnel laborers employed at North Adams in 1872 testified that many of them lived in shanties on the works and even kept boarders. "The miners, rockmen, etc., who have no families, board at the shanties. They are filthy, dirty places.. 112 The congestion and squalor of the past were no better than the worst housing conditions that were found by the investigators of the Immigration Commission among the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Yet the tenement-house dwellers of forty years ago were all of Teuton and Celtic stock. As stated in a previous chapter, contemporary observers sought to explain the bad housing conditions of the Irish immigrants by the low standard of living of the people of Ireland.3 Although living conditions I * Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1870, pp. 372 and 380. 2 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. Third Annual Report (1871-1872), pp. 440-441. 3 Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 459. in Ireland have greatly improved since those days, yet they still remain far below the average of the most overcrowded sections of the great American cities. I The investigation of the Immigration Commission was confined to "the overcrowded, poor quarters of the city"; in the households investigated, the average number of persons per room was 1.34. In the city of Dublin, according to the census of 1901, four fifths of all tenements consisted of four rooms or less with an average of 2.20 persons per room. More than one third of all tenements had three persons or more per room. Three fifths of all tenements consisted of one or two rooms only. In the whole of Ireland, one third of all families lived in two rooms or less.3 There were 38,086 families of three or more persons living in one room each. These extremes of congestion comprised 4.2 per cent of all Irish families. The details are given in Table 72. TABLE 72. PERSONS, 1901.4 NUMBER OF TENEMENTS OF ONE ROOM OCCUPIED BY THREE OR MORE If it is maintained that the immigrant tends to transplant to the American soil the standard of living of his native country, it must follow from the latest statistics of housing conditions in Ireland that even the present-day Irish immi 'Jenks and Lauck, loc. cit., pp. 117, 119. 'See Appendix, Table XVI. 3 Census of Ireland, 1901. General Report, p. 112, Table 9; p. 173, Table 49. Ibid., Table 10. grants are open to the same objection as the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The fact that the investigation of the Immigration Commission discovered among the Irish no overcrowding approaching that of their mother country must be taken to mean one of two things: either its investigators overlooked the recent Irish immigrants and selected only old Irish settlers who had in the course of time advanced on the social scale, or else the standard of living of the recent Irish immigrants in the United States was not determined by their living conditions in Ireland, but depended upon their earning ability in this country. In either case the race theory of economics fathered by the Commission fails. That bad housing conditions are not the exclusive characteristic of the immigrant, but are found under like economic conditions among the native wage-earners as well, has been shown by the investigation of the Immigration Commission in Alabama, where there are practically no foreigners whose competition might be supposed to have forced down the American standard of living. In the outlying towns, beyond the territory immediately adjacent to Birmingham, many of the bituminous coal mines are operated exclusively by native labor and native white Americans are employed as unskilled laborers. "In these environments the home of the native white laborer is frequently devoid of the more modern equipment and sanitation." Mr. Streightoff, in his study of the standard of living, uses stronger language. According to him, "in the Southern mill towns conditions are about at their worst." The number of foreign-born wage-earners in the Southern mills is negligible and cannot affect the housing situation. The mill workers are country people of old American stock. And yet the company houses in which they live "are neither sheathed, plastered, nor papered, and the tenants suffer intensely from the occasional cold weather."2 1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 9, p. 229. Streightoff: The Standard of Living, pp. 76-77 and 92. I The preceding comparison between the present and the past, on the one hand, and between native and foreignborn mill and mine workers, on the other, irresistibly leads to the conclusion that the cause of bad housing conditions is not racial, but economic. That the difference among wage-earners in this respect "depends, of course upon the income," is admitted, "to a considerable extent, by the experts of the Immigration Commission with the qualification, however, that the difference depends "apparently also upon the insistence" of the tenants themselves upon having proper accommodations. If the South Italian or Irish laborers, or the Southern white mill hands, are not so well housed as their Welsh foreman, or English engineer, it is because, apart from their inability to raise the rent of a substantial dwelling, they do not "insist" upon having it for the money they are able to pay. That the English or German laborers and factory hands of past generations lived in filthy tenements, must have been due, by the same method of reasoning, to lack of "insistence" on their part upon better accommodations. This view implies a belief that the law of supply and demand will assure to the wage-workers such homes as they will "insist" upon. The economic distinction between land and other forms of property is lost sight of. The inadequacy of the law of supply and demand in the matter of housing was conclusively demonstrated by all investigations of the New York housing system, which "agreed in showing the landlord, rather than the helpless tenant, as the primitive cause of tenement evils."2 In the mill towns and mining camps of to-day, as in the "There seems to be a decided difference . . . among the various races-the South Italians and the Syrians among the recent immigrants, the Irish among the older immigrants, not being so well provided with sanitary equipment as are the other races. This depends, of course, to a considerable extent, upon the income, but apparently also upon the insistence of the persons themselves upon having proper water supply and toilet accommodations."-Jenks and Lauck, loc. cit., p. 126. Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 459. |