From History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web:
M Sep 22: Factories and Workers:
A Mule Spinner Tells the U.S. Senate about Late 19th century Unemployment:
Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O’Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel’s questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule spinner for more than half of the year, he described the introduction of new production methods at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked as a mule spinner (a worker who tended the large yarn-making machines). These changes allowed the mill’s owners to employ children, and they also left the mule spinner unemployed for much of the year. O’Donnell described the sharp decline in his family’s living standards that followed and the ways they struggled to make ends meet.
BOSTON, MASS. October 18, 1883.
THOMAS O’DONNELL examined.
By the CHAIRMAN:
Question. Where do you live?
Answer. At Fall River.
Q. How long have you lived in this country?
A. Eleven years.
Q. Where were you born?
A. In Ramsbotham, England.
Q. Have you been naturalized here?
A. No, sir.
LIFE OF A MULE-SPINNER.
Q. What is your business?
A. I am a mule-spinner by trade. I have worked at it since I have been in this country—eleven years.
Q. Are you a married man?
A. Yes, sir; I am a married man; have a wife and two children. I am not very well educated. I went to work when I was young, and have been working ever since in the cotton business; went to work when I was about eight or nine years old. I was going to state how I live. My children get along very well in summer time, on account of not having to buy fuel or shoes or one thing and another. I earn $1.50 a day and can’t afford to pay a very big house rent. I pay $1.50 a week for rent, which comes to about $6 a month.
Q. That is, you pay this where you are at Fall River?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you have work right along?
A. No, sir; since that strike we had down in Fall River about three years ago I have not worked much more than half the time, and that has brought my circumstances down very much.
Q. Why have you not worked more than half the time since then?
A. Well, at Fall River if a man has not got a boy to act as “back-boy” it is very hard for him to get along. In a great many cases they discharge men in that work and put in men who have boys.
Q. Men who have boys of their own?
A. Men who have boys of their own capable enough to work in a mill, to earn 30 or 40 cents a day.
CHILD LABOR NECESSARY TO THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARENTS.
Q. Is the object of that to enable the boy to earn something for himself?
A. Well, no, the object is this: They are doing away with a great deal of mule-spinning there and putting in ring-spinning, and for that reason it takes a good deal of small help to run this ring work, and it throws the men out of work because they are doing away with the mules and putting these ring-frames in to take their places. For that reason they get all the small help they can to run these ring-frames. There are so many men in the city to work, and whoever has a boy can have work, and whoever has no boy stands no chance. Probably he may have a few months of work in the summer time, but will be discharged in the fall. That is what leaves me in poor circumstances. Our children, of course, are very often sickly from one cause or another, on account of not having sufficient clothes, or shoes, or food, or something. And also my woman, she never did work in a mill; she was a housekeeper, and for that reason she can’t help me to anything at present, as many women do help their husbands down there, by working, like themselves. My wife never did work in a mill, and that leaves me to provide for the whole family. I have two children.
HARDSHIP OF UNDERTAKERS. AND DOCTORS. BILLS UPON THE POOR.
And another thing that helped to keep me down: A year ago this month I buried the oldest boy we had, and that brings things very expensive on a poor man. For instance, it will cost there, to bury a body, about $100. Now, we could have that done in England for about 5 pounds; that would not amount to much more than about $20, or something in that neighborhood. That makes a good deal of difference. Doctors' bills are very heavy—about $2 a visit; and if a doctor comes once a day for two or three weeks it is quite a pile for a poor man to pay.
Q. Will not the doctor come for a dollar a day?
A. You might get a man sometimes, and you sometimes won’t, but they generally charge $2 a day.
Q. To operatives?
A. Oh, all around. You might get one for $1.50 sometimes.
Q. They charge you as much as they charge people of more means?
A. They charge as much as if I was the richest man in the city, except that some of them might be generous once in a while and put it down a little in the end; but the charge generally is $2. That makes it hard.
ONE DOLLAR AND A HALF A DAY FOR NINE MONTHS
TO SUPPORT SIX PEOPLE TWELVE MONTHS
I have a brother who has four children, besides his wife and himself. All he earns is $1.50 a day. He works in the iron works at Fall River. He only works about nine months out of twelve. There is generally about three months of stoppage, taking the year right through, and his wife and his family all have to be supported for a year out of the wages of nine months—$1.50 a day for nine months out of the twelve, to support six of them. It does not stand to reason that those children and he himself can have natural food or be naturally dressed. His children are often sick, and he has to call in doctors. That is always hanging over him, and is a great expense to him. And then if he does not pay the bill the trustee law comes on him. That is a thing that is not properly looked after. A man told me the other day that he was trusteed for $1.75, and I understood that there was a law in this State that a man could not be trusteed for less than $10. It seems to me there is something wrong in the Government somewhere; where it is, I can’t tell.
Q. How much money have you got?
A. I have not got a cent in the house; didn’t have when I came out this morning.
Q. How much money have you had within three months?
A. I have had about $16 inside of three months.
Q. Is that all you have had within the last three months to live on?
A. Yes, $16.
SUPPORTING A FAMILY ON $133 A YEAR.
Q. How much have you had within a year?
A. Since Thanksgiving I happened to get work in the Crescent Mill, and worked there exactly thirteen weeks. I got just $1.50 a day, with the exception of a few days that I lost because in following up mulespinning you are obliged to lose a day once in a while; you can’t follow it up regularly.
Q. Thirteen weeks would be seventy-eight days, and, at $1.50 a day, that would make $117, less whatever time you lost?
A. Yes. I worked thirteen weeks there and ten days in another place, and then there was a dollar I got this week, Wednesday.
Q. Taking a full year back can you tell how much you have had?
A. That would be about fifteen weeks' work. Last winter, as I told you, I got in, and I worked up to about somewhere around Fast Day, or may be New Year’s day; anyway, Mr. Howard has it down on his record, if you wish to have an exact answer to that question; he can answer it better than I can, because we have a sort of union there to keep ourselves together.
Q. Do you think you have had $150 within a year?
A. No, sir.
Q. Have you had $125?
A. Well, I could figure it up if I had time. The thirteen weeks is all I have had.
Q. The thirteen weeks and the $16 you have mentioned?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. That would be somewhere about $133, if you had not lost any time?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. That is all you have had? A. Yes, sir.
Q. To support yourself and wife and two children?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Have you had any help from outside?
A. No, sir.
Q. Do you mean that yourself and wife and two children have had nothing but that for all this time?
A. That is all. I got a couple dollars' worth of coal last winter, and the wood I picked up myself. I goes around with a shovel and picks up clams and wood.
DIGGING CLAMS TO EKE OUT AN EXISTENCE.
Q. What do you do with the clams?
A. We eat them. I don’t get them to sell, but just to eat, for the family. That is the way my brother lives, too, mostly. He lives close by us.
Q. How many live in that way down there?
A. I could not count them, they are so numerous. I suppose there are one thousand down there.
Q. A thousand that live on $150 a year?
A. They live on less.
Q. Less than that?
A. Yes; they live on less than I do.
Q. How long has that been so?
A. Mostly so since I have been married.
Q. How long is that?
A. Six years this month.
Q. Why do you not go West on a farm?
A. How could I go, walk it?
TOO POOR TO GO WEST.
Q. Well, I want to know why you do not go out West on a $2,000 farm, or take up a homestead and break it and work it up, and then have it for yourself and family?
A. I can’t see how I could get out West. I have got nothing to go with.
Q. It would not cost you over $1,500.
A. Well, I never saw over a $20 bill, and that is when I have been getting a month.s pay at once. If some one would give me $1,500 I will go.
Q. Is there any prospect that anybody will do that?
A. I don’t know of anybody that would.
Q. You say you think there are a thousand men or so with their families that live in that way in Fall River?
A. Yes, sir; and I know many of them. They are around there by the shore. You can see them every day; and I am sure of it because men tell me.
Q. Are you a good workman?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were you ever turned off because of misconduct or incapacity or unfitness for work?
A. No, sir.
Q. Or because you did bad work?
A. No, sir.
Q. Or because you made trouble among the help?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did you ever have any personal trouble with an employer?
A. No, sir.
Q. You have not anything now you say?
A. No, sir.
Q. How old are you?
A. About thirty.
Q. Is your health good?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What would you work for if you could get work right along; if you could be sure to have it for five years, staying right where you are?
A. Well, if I was where my family could be with me, and I could have work every day I would take $1.50, and be glad to.
Q. One dollar and fifty cents a day, with three hundred days to the year, would make more than you make now in three or four years, would it not?
ONLY A DOLLAR’S WORTH OF COAL IN TEN MONTHS.
A. Well, I would have no opportunity then to pick up clams. I have had no coal except one dollar’s worth since last Christmas.
Q. When do the clams give out?
A. They give out in winter.
Q. You spoke of fuel—what do you have for fuel?
A. Wood and coal.
Q. Where does the wood come from?
A. I pick it up around the shore—any old pieces I see around that are not good for anything. There are many more that do the same thing.
Q. Do you get meat to live on much?
A. Very seldom.
Q. What kinds of meat do you get for your family?
A. Well, once in a while we gets a piece of pork and some clams and make a clam-chowder. That makes a very good meal. We sometimes get a piece of corn beef or something like that.
Q. Have you had any fresh beef within a month?
A. Yes; we had a piece of pork steak for four of us yesterday.
Q. Have you had any beef within a month?
A. No, sir. I was invited to a man’s house on Sunday—he wanted me to go up to his house and we had a dinner of roast pork.
Q. That was an invitation out, but I mean have you had any beefsteak in your own family, of your own purchase, within a month?
A. Yes; there was a half a pound, or a pound one Sunday—I think it was.
Q. Have you had only a pound or a half a pound on Sunday?
A. That is all.
Q. A half pound of pork?
A. Yes. About two pounds of pork I guess we have had in the month, to make clam-chowder with, and sometimes to fry a bit.
Q. And there are four of you in the family?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. How many pounds of beefsteak have you had in your family, that you bought for your own home consumption within this year that we have been speaking of?
A. I don’t think there has been five pounds of beefsteak.
Q. You have had a little pork steak?
A. We had a half a pound of pork steak yesterday; I don.t know when we had any before.
Q. What other kinds of meat have you had within a year?
A. Well, we have had corn beef twice I think that I can remember this year on Sunday, for dinner.
Q. Twice is all that you can remember within a year?
A. Yes—and some cabbage.
Q. What have you eaten?
A. Well, bread mostly, when we could get it; we sometimes couldn’t make out to get that, and have had to go without a meal.
Q. Has there been any day in the year that you have had to go without anything to eat?
A. Yes, sir, several days.
Q. More than one day at a time?
A. No.
Q. How about the children and your wife—did they go without anything to eat too?
THE CHILDREN CRYING FOR FOOD.
A. My wife went out this morning and went to a neighbor’s and got a loaf of bread and fetched it home, and when she got home the children were crying for something to eat.
Q. Have the children had anything to eat to-day except that, do you think? A. They had that loaf of bread—I don’t know what they have had since then, if they have had anything.
Q. Did you leave any money at home?
A. No, sir.
Q. If that loaf is gone, is there anything in the house?
A. No, sir; unless my wife goes out and gets something; and I don’t know who would mind the children while she goes out.
Q. Has she any money to get anything with?
A. No, sir.
Q. Have the children gone without a meal at any time during the year?
A. They have gone without bread some days, but we have sometimes got meal and made porridge of it.
Q. What kind of meal?
A. Sometimes Indian meal, and sometimes oatmeal.
Q. Meal stirred up in hot water?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Is it cold weather down there now?
A. It is very cold now.
SCANT CLOTHING IN COLD WEATHER.
Q. What have the children got on in the way of clothing?
A. They have got along very nicely all summer, but now they are beginning to feel quite sickly. One has one shoe on, a very poor one, and a slipper, that was picked up somewhere. The other has two odd shoes on, with the heel out. He has got cold and is sickly now.
Q. Have they any stockings?
A. He had got stockings, but his feet comes through them, for there is a hole in the bottom of the shoe.
Q. What have they got on the rest of their person?
A. Well, they have a little calico shirt—what should be a shirt; it is sewed up in some shape—and one little petticoat, and a kind of little dress.
Q. How many dresses has your wife got?
A. She has got one since she was married, and she hasn’t worn that more than half a dozen times; she has worn it just going to church and coming back. She is very good in going to church, but when she comes back she takes it off, and it is pretty near as good now as when she bought it.
Q. She keeps that dress to go to church in?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. How many dresses aside from that has she?
A. Well, she got one here three months ago.
Q. What did it cost?
A. It cost $1 to make it and I guess about a dollar for the stuff, as near as I can tell.
Q. The dress cost $2?
A. Yes.
Q. What else has she?
A. Well, she has an undershirt that she got given to her, and she has an old wrapper, which is about a mile too big for her; somebody gave it to her.
Q. She did not buy it?
A. No. That is all that I know that she has.
Q. You have had $1 or $2 worth of coal last winter?
A. I think it was a quarter of a ton, and I believe it was $2.25 worth.
Q. Is that all you have had?
A. That is all I had last winter. All the rest I picked up—wood.
Q. Did you try to get work?
A. I was working last winter.
Q. You say that a good many others are situated just like you are?
A. Yes, sir; I should say as many as a thousand down in Fall River are just in the same shape, if not worse; though they can’t be much worse. I have heard many women say they would sooner be dead than living. I don’t know what is wrong, but something is wrong. There is an overflow of labor in Fall River.
Q. Why do not these people go out West upon farms and go to farming?
A. They have not got the means. Fall River being a manufacturing place, it brings them in there; and when the mills in other places stop for want of water that brings them into Fall River. I think there are quite a lot of them that have come from Lowell and Lawrence these three or four weeks back—whatever brings them.
Q. Is there anything else that you want to say to the committee?
A. Well, as regards debts; it costs us so much for funeral expenses and doctors. expenses; I wanted to mention that.
The CHAIRMAN. You have stated that. It is clear that nobody can afford either to get sick or to die there.
The WITNESS. Well, there are plenty of them down there that are in very poor health, but I am in good health and my children generally are in fair health, but the children can’t pick up anything and only get what I bring to them.
Q. Are you in debt?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. How much?
A. I am in debt for those funeral expenses now $15—since a year ago.
Q. Have you paid the rest?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. You live in a hired tenement?
A. Yes; but of course I can’t pay a big rent. My rent is $6 a month. The man I am living under would come and put me right out and give me no notice either if I didn’t pay my rent. He is a sheriff and auctioneer man. I don.t know whether he has any authority to do it or not, but he does it with people .
Q. Do you see any way out of your troubles—what are you going to do for a living—or do you expect to have to stay right there?
A. Yes. I can’t run around with my family.
Q. You have nowhere to go to, and no way of getting there if there was any place to go to?
A. No, sir; I have no means nor anything, so I am obliged to remain there and try to pick up something as I can.
Q. Do the children go to school?
A. No, sir; they are not old enough; the oldest child is only three and a half; the youngest one is one and a half years old.
Q. Is there anything else you wanted to say?
A. Nothing further, except that I would like some remedy to be got to help us poor people down there in some way. Excepting the Government decides to do something with us we have a poor show. We are all, or mostly all, in good health; that is, as far as the men who are at work go.
Q. You do not know anything but mule-spinning, I suppose?
A. That is what I have been doing, but I sometimes do something with pick and shovel. I have worked for a man at that, because I am so put on. I am looking for work in a mill. The way they do there is this: There are about twelve or thirteen men that go into a mill every morning, and they have to stand their chance, looking for work. The man who has a boy with him he stands the best chance, and then, if it is my turn or a neighbor’s turn who has no boy, if another man comes in who has a boy he is taken right in, and we are left out. I said to the boss once it was my turn to go in, and now you have taken on that man; what am I to do; I have got two little boys at home, one of them three years and a half and the other one year and a half old, and how am I to find something for them to eat; I can’t get my turn when I come here.
He said he could not do anything for me. I says, “Have I got to starve; ain’t I to have any work?” They are forcing these young boys into the mills that should not be in mills at all; forcing them in because they are throwing the mules out and putting on ring-frames. They are doing everything of that kind that they possibly can to crush down the poor people—the poor operatives there.
Source: U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Report on the Relations Between Labor and Capital, Vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 451–457.
Slumming Among the Unemployed: William Wycoff Studies Joblessness in the 1890s:
Even before the 1890s depression struck with devastating force in 1893, large numbers of jobless men and women competed in tight labor markets and faced homelessness. One of the best first-hand descriptions of “what it is to look for work and fail to find it” comes from political economist Walter Wycoff’s two-volume study of The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, first published in 1899. Wycoff had abandoned his studies at Princeton to seek a more concrete appreciation of social problems. His record of his two years spent as a common laborer became an early classic of sociological writing.
CHAPTER I: THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’s CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.
Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891.
A new phase of my experiment is begun. Hitherto I have been in the open country, and have found work with surprising readiness. Now I am in the heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience, what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as though the strength of our desire must take that kingdom by force. But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened, you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe. You are a superfluous human being. For you there is no part in the play of the world’s activity. There remains for you simply this alternative: Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?
That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark and me. Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high spirits. We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work, we must sleep in the station-house.
We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until midnight. We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than that hour. Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.
An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has threatened to put him out.
I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every square foot of the paved floor.
We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact. The silver lining of our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow. From the murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city, a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.
In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other, with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of food, what we shall choose to-morrow.
It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the intimacy between Clark and me. We never saw each other until last Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past. But I feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back in our histories. Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest the basal kinship of our common humanity. Ours are not intellectual affinities — at least they are not consciously these—but we feel shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working world.
Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I began the last stage of the march to Chicago. A walk of something less than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.
There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the journey. Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the waste of tissue. I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my fellow-men.
On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that inbreathing which gives the zest of life. Long had Chicago loomed large to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.
How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the shifting centre of our population! The unemployed were there, and I had not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute, who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept together. All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete experience.
Nor was I insensible to the charm of other novelties. I have been pressing westward through a land unknown to me. Gradually I am beginning to see the essential provinciality of a mind which knows the Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries and cities and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely ignorant of our own vast domain, and shrinks from all that lies beyond Philadelphia as belonging to “the West,” which sums up the totality of a frontier, where man and nature share a sympathetic wildness, and sometimes vie in outbursts of lawless force. I have not yet reached “the West” in any essential departure from the social and industrial structure of the East. And from the new point of view, “the West ” recedes ever farther from my sight, until impatient desire sometimes spurs me to a quicker journey, in the fear that the real West may have faded from our map before I reach it, and I may miss the delight of vital contact with the untamed frontier.
Moreover, I could but feel a student’s kindling interest in the larger vision of this great centre of industrial life. Its renaissance with augmented vigor from the ashes of its earlier history.“The swelling tide of its swarming people until the fifteen hundred thousand [1.5 million] mark is reached and passed, and the mounting waves of population roll in, each with the strength of an army of fighting men. ” The vastness of its productive enterprises, where all the shrewd economies of modern commerce reveal themselves, and where skill and organizing power and the genius of initiative win their quick recognition and rewards, and men of parts pass swiftly from the lowest to the highest places in the scale of productive usefulness and power. And then the splendid vigor of its nobler living, its churches and public schools and libraries and wise philanthropies, and its impatient hunger after art, which impels it to lay eager, unrelenting hands upon the products of a score of centuries, and, in a single day, to call them “mine.”
But I was fast nearing the goal of my desire, and the claims of pressing needs were crowding out the visions of the morning. I had passed through the wilderness by which the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne Railroad enters the outskirts of Chicago. As far as the eye could reach had stretched a dreary plain broken by the ridges of sand-dunes, among which stood dwarfed oaks, and gnarled and stunted pines, and the slender, graceful stems of white-barked birches, on whose twigs the last brown leaves of autumn rustled in the winter wind. Upon my right I saw at last the broad bosom of the lake, gleaming like burnished steel under the threatening sky, and breaking into a line of inky blackness where it lapped the pebbles on the beach.
Presently I learn that I am in South Chicago, and I note the converging lines of railways that cross the streets on the level at every possible angle, and the surface cable-cars, and the long line of blast-furnaces by the lake, and elevators here and there, and huge factories, and the myriad homes of workingmen. It is all a blackened chaos to my eyes, rude and crude and raw, and I wonder that orderly commerce can flow through channels so confused.
But the streets are soon more regular, and for some time I have been checking off, by their decreasing numerals, the approach to my journey’s end. I am in the midst of a seemingly endless suburban region. There are wide stretches of open prairie, cut through busy city streets; there are city buildings of brick and stone standing alone, or in groups of twos and threes, stark and appealing in their lonely waiting for flanking neighbors; and there are comfortable wooden cottages set with an air of rural seclusion among trees, and having lawns and garden areas about them; and then there are whole squares built up like the nuclei of new communities with conventional three-storied dwellings, and the varied shops of local retail trade, and abundant saloons.
Early in the afternoon I stop to rest on the platform of the Woodlawn station of the Illinois Central Railway. For some time I have had glimpses within a highly boarded enclosure of towering iron frames, with their graceful, sweeping arches meeting at dizzy heights, and appearing like the fragmentary skeletons of mammoths mounted in an open paleontological museum.
The suburban trains are rushing in and out of the station with nearly the frequency of elevated trains in New York, and not far away are lines of cable-cars, where a five-cent fare would take me, in a few minutes, over the weary miles which intervene to the business portion of the town. But I have not one cent, and much less five, and if I had so much as that it would go for food, for I am tired, it is true, but I am much hungrier than tired.
There is a hopeful prospect in the air of immense activity in this neighborhood. I have easily recognized the vast enclosure beyond as Jackson Park, and the steel skeletons as the frames of the exposition buildings. Thousands of men are at work there, and the growing volume of the enterprise may furnish a ready chance of employment. I am but a few steps from the Sixty-third Street entrance, and, in my ignorance, I am soon pressing through, when a gatekeeper challenges me, civilly:
He is roused in an instant, and he steps threateningly toward me, his voice deepening in anger.
At the gate I stand my ground in the right of a citizen and explain that I am looking for work, and am hopeful of a job from one of the bosses.
Not far away there are many new buildings going up, huge, unlovely shells of brick that even at this stage tell plainly their struggles with the purely utilitarian problem of a maximum of room accommodation at a minimum of cost. I walk toward the nearest one, pondering, the while, the meaning of the word hobo, new to me, and having an uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I have been taken, not for an unemployed laborer in honest search of work, but for one of the professionally idle.
It has begun to rain, a dreary, sopping drizzle, half mist, half melting snow, heavy with the soot of the upper air, and it clings tenaciously, until my threadbare outer coat is twice its normal weight, and my leaking boots pump the slimy pavement water at every step.
For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the new buildings, asking work. The interviews are short and decisive. The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with attention fixed upon some detail. He hears without heeding my request, and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative“No, I don’t want you!” and sometimes an added curse.
When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements. Mile after mile I walk, tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder. Is there in the wide world a city street to match with this? Rising in a paradise of landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad sweep of another Champs Elysees, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,” and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity.
It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance. The sense of infinity is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.
Scarcely a soul is in the street. It is a residence quarter of much wealth, and like all else that I have seen so far, of strangest incongruities. Houses of lavish cost and shabbiest economy of taste, so gorgeous that you can scarcely believe them private homes, give way, at times, to lines of brown fronts precisely like those which in unvarying uniformity of basement and “stoop” and four-storied facade, flank miles of dreary side-streets in New York. These yield in turn to churches and apartment-houses and hotels and clubs—all creating an atmosphere of wealth and of social refinement, while almost interspersed with them are homes of apparent poverty and certainly of gentility on the ravelled edge of things. And bursting now through all this medley is the clanging, rumbling rush of railway traffic. I can scarcely believe my eyes at first, but under the frowning walls of a towering armory I am held up by the downward sweep of the gates of a railway crossing, on the dead level of the avenue, and am kept there until a freight-train has crawled past its creaking length.
It all seems a meaningless chaos at the first, but soon I feel the pulse of the life within it, a young life of glorious vigor and of indomitable resolve to attain what it so strongly feels though vaguely knows. And here and there I can see the promise of its fair fruition in lines of strength and power and beauty, where the hand of some true master has wrought a home for the abiding of good taste.
Soon there is an abrupt end of buildings on my right, and the land fades away into an open plain, and from out the sleet-swept darkness beyond comes faintly the sound of “crisping ripples on the beach.”I know that I am at my journey’s end, for I have begun to catch glimpses of Ossa-piled-on-Pelion structures which rise in graceless lines into the black night. I come up all standing before one of these, a veritable Palazzo Vecchio, huge, impenetrable, vast, bringing into this New-World city something of the sense of time and density of the Piazza della Signoria.
Here, too, the avenue is almost deserted, and I turn sharply under the massive battlements of this Florentine palace, to where the glare of many lights and the counter-currents of street-crowds attract me. Across Wabash Avenue I pass on to State Street. My eye has just begun to note the novelties of the scene when it falls upon the figure of a young man. He stands in the middle of the pavement at the corner, and swiftly hands printed slips of white paper among the moving crowd. Many persons pass unheeding, but a few accept the proffered notice. I take one, and I stop for a moment on the curb to read it. Its purport as an invitation to attend a Gospel meeting has become clear to me, when I find the young man at my side. He wears a heavy winter ulster that reaches to his boot-tops, and its rolling collar is turned up snugly about his ears. On his hands are dog-skin gloves, and the rays of street-lights glisten in the myriad drops of half-frozen mist that cling like heavy dew to the rough, woollen surface of his coat. I must cut a figure standing there, wet and travel-stained, my teeth chattering audibly in the cold night air, and it is plainly my evident fitness as a field for Christian work that has drawn to me the notice of this young evangelist.
The place is crowded with men—workingmen many of them—and many are plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no loafing place.”
Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat. A warm, seductive ease enfolds me. I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street. And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud. Out from this warmth and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town? Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving! And all the while I know—such is the subtlety of our instinctive thinking—that it is the awful fear of this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.
The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium. Short prayers are offered, and fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally the men are urged to “testify.”
I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but no clear idea reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear of a benediction which will send us out again. But while the men are speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed seat of thought a sense of something very living. Their speech, in simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real. They speak of life—their own sunk to deepest degradation. They tell the story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life, of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair. And then the purport of it all shines clear in that they have to tell of a Divine hand reached out to them of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.
Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for, standing straight not far from where I sit, is a grand figure of a man. He is bronzed, deepchested, lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength, which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their grip upon the seat in front. He has the modest bearing of a gentleman, and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep sincerity.
He sits down, and a hymn is given out and sung, but the truth which has found lodgement in our hearts is the living truth of a human life reclaimed. We have listened to the story of the prodigal from his own lips. We have heard again the cosmic parable of wandering and return; the mystery of creation, and fall, and recreation by a power divine; the great, irrefutable witness to the Truth in the history of a lost soul come to itself and returning to the Father’s House.
In the midst of the singing the leader walks quietly down the aisle to the rear. Two ladies are there struggling in a vain effort to quiet an old man. They have come to help in the conduct of the service, and the old man has increasingly claimed their care, for he is drunk and is growing violent. I have noticed him in his restless movements. Upon his stooping figure he wears an old army coat and cape that are dripping with the rain. His gray mustache and beard are long and matted, and stained all round his mouth with the deep brown of tobacco-juice. His unkempt hair falls in frowsy masses about his ears, and his lustreless eyes, inflamed and expressionless, bulge from their swollen sockets.
In an instant the leader’s strong hand is upon him, and with no commotion above the sound of song the old man is soon without the hall, and the leader back in his place again singing as heartily as ever.
When the meeting ends the crowd moves slowly and listlessly toward the door, as though its prevailing mood were aimless beyond the dull necessity of passing the time. The fine rain and melting snow are still falling through the mist. The men drift away singly or in groups of twos and threes, under the flickering lights, their heads bent slightly forward and their bare hands thrust into the side-pockets of their trousers.
In the crush about the foot of the aisle a young man speaks to me:
I see at a glance that he is far more respectable than I, and my first mental attitude is one of hospitality to further evangelizing effort. But I shift at once, for without awaiting for a reply from me, he adds:
I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of “partner.”
We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.
At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the character of the street. It is wide, with broad pavements on each side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the “department store” the prevailing type. The shop-windows are ablaze with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking on a holiday character. Whole fronts of some of the buildings are fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,” and “fire sales.”
There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs. The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.
We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights of a cheap theatre.
I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side wall of the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.
There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated small groups of men and women drinking beer. Some of the men are workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic type.
The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among them. They are simply commonplace. As a company the women lack the hale robustness of the men. They are mostly little women, of slight figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish brightness of the eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption. A few are cast in a sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink, they look strong and healthy. All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and some even of taste in their shabby winter hats. Each carries a leather purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her gloves. The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once that they are large and coarse and very dirty.
Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest, completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent interchange of men’s and women’s voices.
The naturalness and untrammeled social ease have blinded you for a time to what you really see, and the
Source: Walter A. Wycoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 1–39.
"For the Further Benefit of Our People": George Pullman Answers His Strikers:
For workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 1890s, home was the company town of Pullman, Illinois, and rent was deducted from their wages. While owner George Pullman touted it as a model town, the men and women who labored there during the 1893 depression endured starvation wages, deplorable living and working conditions, and, worst of all, Pullman’s paternalistic control over all aspects of their lives. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), which organized a nationwide strike and boycott against Pullman. In this open letter in the Chicago Herald in June 1894, as the strike began, Pullman explained his motives for cutting wages during the economic depression of 1893.
In the first week of May last there were employed in the car manufacturing department at Pullman, Ill., about 3,100 persons. On May 7, a committee of the workmen had an interview by arrangement with Mr. Wickes, vice-president, at which the principal subject of discussion related to wages, but minor grievances as to shop were also presented, and it was agreed that another meeting should be held on the 9th of May, at which all the grievances should be presented in writing. The second meeting was held. As to the complaints on all matters except wages, it was arranged that a formal and thorough investigation should be made by Mr. Wickes, to be begun the next day, and full redress was assured to the committee as to all con-plaints proved to be well founded.
The absolute necessity of the last reduction in wages, under the existing condition of the business of car manufacturing, had been explained to the committee, and they were insisting,, upon a restoration of the wage scale of the first half of 1893, when Mr. Pullman entered the room and addressed the committee, speaking, in substance as follows:
"At the commencement of the very serious depression last year, we were employing at Pullman 5,816 men, and paying out in wages there $305,000 a month. Negotiations with intending purchasers of railway equipment that were then pending for new work were stopped by them, orders already given by others were canceled, and we were obliged to lay off, as you are aware, a large number of men in every department, so that by November 1, 1893, there were only about 2,000 men in all departments, or about one third of the normal number. I realized the necessity for the most strenuous exertions to procure work immediately, without which there would be great embarrassment, not only to the employees and their families at Pullman, but also to those living in the immediate vicinity, including between 700 and 800 employees who had purchased homes and to whom employment was actually necessary to enable them to complete their payments.
"I canvassed the matter thoroughly with the manager of the works and instructed him to cause the men to be assured that the company would do everything in its power to meet the competition which was sure to occur because of the great number of large car manufacturers that were in the same condition, and that were exceedingly anxious to keep their men employed. I knew that if there was any work to be let, bids for it would be made upon a much lower basis than ever before. (NOTE.—The selling prices of passenger, baggage, box, refrigerator and street cars in the last two years have fallen by percentages, varying in the separate classes, from 17 to 28, the average reduction, taking the five classes together, being 24 percent.)
"The result of this discussion was a revision in piecework prices, which, in the absence of any information to the contrary, I supposed to be acceptable to the men under the circumstances. Under these conditions, and with lower prices upon all materials, I personally undertook the work of the lettings of cars, and by making lower bids than other manufacturers I secured work enough to gradually increase our force from 2,000 up to about 4,200, the number employed, according to the April pay rolls, in all capacities at Pullman.
"This result has not been accomplished merely by reduction in wages, but the company has borne its full share by eliminating from its estimates the use of capital and machinery, and in many cases going even below that and taking work at considerable loss, notably the 55 Long Island cars, which was the first large order of passenger cars let since the great depression and which was sought for by practically all the leading car builders in the country. My anxiety to secure that order, so as to put as many men at work as possible, was such that I put in a bid at more than $300 per car less than the actual cost to the company. The 300 stock cars built for the Northwestern road and the 250 refrigerator cars now under construction for the same company will result in a loss of at least $12 per car, and the 25 cars just built for the Lake Street elevated road show a loss of $79 per car. I mention these particulars so that you may understand what the company has done for the mutual interests and to secure for the people at Pullman and vicinity the benefit of the disbursement of the large sums of money involved in these and similar contracts, which can be kept up only by the procurement of new orders for cars, as you know, about three fourths of the men must depend upon contract work for employment.
"I can only assure you that if this company now restores the wages of the first half of 1893, as you have asked, it would be a most unfortunate thing for the men, because there is less than sixty days of contract work in sight in the shops under all orders and there is absolutely no possibility, in the present condition of affairs throughout the country, of getting any more orders for work at prices measured by the wages of May 1893. Under such a scale the works would necessarily close down and the great majority of the employees be put in idleness, a contingency I am using my best efforts to avoid.
"To further benefit the people of Pullman and vicinity we concentrated all the work that we could command at that point, by closing our Detroit shops entirely and laying off a large number of men at our other repair shops, and gave to Pullman the repair of all cars that could be taken care of there.
"Also, for the further benefit of our people at Pullman we have carried on a large system of internal improvements, have expended nearly $160,000 since August last in work which, under normal conditions, would have been spread over one or two years. The policy would be to continue this class of work to as great an extent as possible, provided, of course, the Pullman men show a proper appreciation of the situation by doing whatever they can to help themselves to tide over the hard times which are so seriously felt in every part of the country.
“There has been some complaint made about rents. As to this I would say that the return to this company on the capital invested in the Pullman tenements for the last year and the year before was 3.82 percent. There are hundreds of tenements in Pullman renting for from $6 to $9 per month, and the tenants are relieved from the usual expenses of exterior cleaning and the removal of garbage, which is done by the company. . . .”
On the question of rents, while, as stated above, they make a manifestly inadequate return upon the investment, so that it is clear they are not, in fact, at an arbitrarily high figure, it may be added that it would not be possible in a business sense so to deal with them.
The renting of the dwellings and the employment of workmen at Pullman are in no way tied together. The dwellings and apartments are offered for rent in competition with those of the immediately adjacent towns of Kensington, Roseland, and Gano. They are let alike to Pullman employees and to very many others in no way connected with the company, and, on the other hand, many Pullman employees rent or own their homes in those adjacent towns. The average rental at Pullman is at the rate of $3 per room per month. There are 1,200 tenements, of varying numbers or rooms, the average monthly rental of which is $10; of these there are 600 the average monthly rental of which is $8. In very many cases men with families pay a rent seemingly large for a workman, but which is in fact reduced in part, and often wholly repaid, by the subrents paid by single men as lodgers.
On May 10, the day after the second conference above mentioned, work went on at Pullman as usual, and the only incident of note was the beginning by Mr. Wickes, assisted by Mr. Brown, the general manager of the company, of the promised formal investigation at Pullman of the shop complaints.
A large meeting of employees had been held the night before at Kensington, which, as was understood by the company, accepted the necessity of the situation preventing an increase of wages; but at a meeting of the local committee held during the night of May 10 a strike was decided upon, and accordingly the next day about 2,500 of the employees quit their work, leaving about 600 at work, of whom very few were skilled workmen. As it was found impracticable to keep the shops in operation with a force thus diminished and disorganized, the next day those remaining were necessarily laid off, and no work has since been done in the shops.
The pay rolls at the time amounted to about $7,000 a day, and were reduced $5,500 by the strike, so that during the period of a little more than six weeks which has elapsed the employees who quit their work have deprived themselves and their comrades of earnings of more than $200,000.
Source: Reply of the Pullman Company, U.S. Strike Commission, Report and Testimony on the Chicago Strike of 1894 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 578–80. Reprinted in Thomas G. Manning, The Chicago Strike of 1894 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 4–7.
Outside Looking In: Byington on Homestead's Women:
In 1892, Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company’s ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907–1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. The resulting six-volume report, written by progressive social reformers, included Margaret Byington’s Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. This excerpt from Byington’s study depicted work and home life for the immigrant women of Homestead. Byington’s account, while sympathetic to the immigrants who comprised the bulk of the steel town’s labor force, was written from the perspective of an outsider. She emphasized women’s limited participation in the paid labor force in steel mill towns like Homestead, yet she provided repeated testimony regarding the multiple economic and social roles of women in Homestead as managers of family finances and family relationships.
One morning I entered a two-room tenement. The kitchen, perhaps 15 by 12 feet, was steaming with vapor from a big washtub set on a chair in the middle of the room. The mother was trying to wash and at the same time to keep the older of her two babies from tumbling into the tub full of scalding water that was standing on the floor. On one side of the room was a huge puffy bed, with one feather tick to sleep on and another for covering; near the window stood a sewing machine; in the corner, an organ,—all these, besides the inevitable cook stove upon which in the place of honor was simmering the evening’s soup. Upstairs in the second room were one boarder and the man of the house asleep. Two more boarders were at work, but at night would be home to sleep in the bed from which the others would get up. Picture if you will what a week or a season means to a mother in such a home, the overwork, the brief respite from toil—to be increased afterward—when the babies come?
Yet it is even more disastrous to the children both in health and character. In the courts studied, out of 102 families who took lodgers, 72 had children; of these, 25 families had two, 10 had three, and seven had four. There were 138 youngsters in all. A comparison of births and deaths of children under two . . . shows that among the Slavs one child under two years of age dies to every three children born; among the English-speaking Europeans, one dies to every seven born; among the native whites and colored, one to every five. In the crowded Second Ward, taking all races, one child under two dies to every three born,—compared with one to every four in the First Ward, one to every five in the Fifth, one to every eight in the Third, and one to every seven in the Fourth.
Against many of these deaths was the physician’s entry “malnutrition due to poor food and overcrowding”; that is, the mother too poor, too busy, and too ignorant to prepare food properly, rooms over-tenanted, and courts too confined to give the fresh air essential for the physical development of children. A priest told me he believed that the taking of lodgers caused the appalling death rate among the babies in his parish. Neither preaching nor pointing out to women personally the folly of the economy had sufficed to check the habit.
Not only is the mother too busy to give much time to her babies, but she also suffers from overwork during pregnancy and from lack of proper care afterward. Housework must be done, boarders must be fed, and most women work until the day of confinement. In accordance with their home customs, almost all of them employ midwives and call a doctor only in an emergency. I was told by a local physician that nearly half of the births in Homestead, the large proportion of them among the Slavic people, were attended by midwives. These women, who charge $5.00 or $10, include in their services the care of both woman and child for several days, and thus perform the services of trained nurse as well as doctor. While of the 21 midwives registered in Homestead, five or six have diplomas from schools of midwifery abroad, most of them are ignorant and are careless about cleanliness. In a paper before the Allegheny County Medical Society, Dr. Purman, a local physician, reported numerous instances where both mother and child had suffered serious injury from the ignorance of these women.
The necessity for mothers to be up and at work within three or four days adds to the harm. In at least 10 of the 29 Slavic families visited, special reference was made by the Slavic investigator to the ill health of the mother due to overwork and to lack of proper care during confinement. The strength to bear much doubtless comes to these women from years of work in the fields, but the change to the hot kitchens where their work is now done undoubtedly entails a strain which not only injures them but lessens the vitality of the children. This weakened condition at birth combines with the inadequate food and insufficient air and the neglect which comes through over-burdening the mother to produce the appalling infant death rate in these courts.
Yet sometimes as you watch the stunted, sickly looking children, you wonder if the real tragedy does not lie rather in the miserable future in store for the babies who live, many of them with undervitalized systems which may make them victims either of disease or of the dissipation that often fastens upon weak wills and weak bodies.
Keeping lodgers ruins the training as well as the health of the children. The overworked mother has neither time nor patience for wise discipline. As the men who work on night turns must sleep during the day, crying babies must not be allowed to disturb this uneasy rest. All this adds to the mother’s weary irritation and makes it harder to maintain any sort of uniform control. This failure of intelligent discipline was noticeable in most of the families I visited, where cuffs and sharp words were the usual form of correction. One of the Protestant missions which tried through mothers' meetings to give the women some suggestions as to child training, found them too busy to come. Fortunately, however, the children who attend the public schools receive some training. This the parents value. A teacher in the Second Ward school said that while she had a great deal of trouble in teaching the Slavic children obedience, she at least found the parents willing to uphold her in whatever action she took.
Even more serious is the injury to the moral tone of the Slavic community caused by the crowding together of single men and families. In only four instances in the courts studied were lodgers found in families where there were girls over fourteen, but even younger children learn evil quickly from the free-spoken men. With the husband at work on the night shift the situation is aggravated, and reports are current of gross immorality on the part of some women who keep lodgers; two or three actual instances came to my knowledge from unquestioned sources. Since half the families in the courts studied used the kitchen as a sleeping room, there was close mingling of lodgers and family among them. This becomes intolerable when families living in but two rooms take lodgers. This was true, as we have seen, in 71 instances. Even when extreme crowding does not exist, family and lodgers often all sleep in the kitchen, the only warm room, in winter.
Certainly there is little to quicken mental and spiritual development in these crowded tenements where there is neither privacy nor even that degree of silence necessary for reading. We agree in the abstract that the individual needs room for growth, yet complain of the stunted mental stature of these people who have the meagre development of seedlings grown in a mass.
Moreover, families who live in narrow quarters have no room for festive gatherings. In the evening a group often gathers around the stove gossiping of home days, playing cards, drinking, and playing simple musical instruments. On the Saturday after pay day the household usually clubs together to buy a case of beer which it drinks at home. These ordinarily jovial gatherings are sometimes interrupted by fights and the police have to be called in. One officer who had been on the force for nine years said that these men were generally good-natured and easygoing, and in all his experience he had never arrested a sober “Hunkie”; it was when they were drunk that the trouble began. The punishment usually inflicted for disorderly conduct in Homestead, a small fine, has little deterrent effect among the Slavs. It is indeed currently said that some are proud of having a large fine imposed, as they feel that it indicates increased importance. Usually, however, they gather without disturbance simply to chat and drink, to pass the hours after the day’s work.
The women have few opportunities for relaxation. Sometimes they gossip around the pump or at the butcher’s, but washing, ironing, cleaning, sewing and cooking for the boarders leave little time for visiting. The young people perhaps suffer most from the lack of home festivities. A two-room house has no place for games or “parties,” or even for courting; there is not even space enough, to say nothing of privacy. So young folks are driven to the streets for their gayety. Almost the only time when the house is really the scene of festivity is when those primal events, birth, and marriage, and death, bring together both the old-time friends and the new neighbors.
On most of these occasions, whether weddings, christenings or funerals, joy and grief and religious ceremony are alike forgotten in a riotous good time. The weddings are the gayest affairs in the life of the community. After the morning service at the church, all return home if the house is big enough, and if not, they go to a hall, and there the dancing begins. Each man pays what he can, usually a dollar, for the privilege of dancing with the bride, and the money—their form of a wedding present—helps furnish the home for the young couple. At one wedding during the winter $75 was thus received, but the girl by evening felt that she had earned the money. In the afternoon the drinking begins and by midnight the revel is at its height. The neighborhood considers a family under obligation to provide these festivities. I was told of one pathetic instance where a woman, as she was very ill, did not invite any one to her baby’s christening. Her offended neighbors refused to visit her, but when she died they were ready enough to come to the funeral and share in the drinking.
Some old-world customs, too, are maintained which seem strangely at variance with new-world conditions. All summer over the doors and windows are seen dried, smoke begrimed branches from which the faded leaves hang disconsolately. These decorations are part of a joyous religious festival in the spring time similar to those that added merriment to the village life at home. At Eastertide they keep up an old custom, said to date from pagan days. On Monday the men go about with willow branches and switch the women until they make them a present, while on the following day the women retaliate by throwing water on the men.
In other superficial habits of life they show themselves eager to adopt American customs. This tendency is clearly—sometimes humorously—exemplified in the quickness with which they adopt our style of clothing. The men on Sunday can often be differentiated from the American workmen only by the unmistakable Slavic type of face. Even in their own homes the women quickly adopt the machine-made cotton wrapper and on Sunday the streets blossom with cheap ready-made adornments. I was fairly startled by one apparition in a gay pink hat, crude blue skirt, and green silk waist that no grass in Homestead could hope to vie with, all products of a department store, which evidently gave the wearer a proud sense of being dressed like other Americans. As I stood Easter Sunday watching the kneeling women, the mass of vivid colors showed how easily they copy the less desirable habits of their native born sisters. If opportunity offered they would doubtless be as ready to pick up our customs in other more essential matters.
Lack of intercourse, however, hinders. The Slavs must keep up their own festivities the more because they cannot join in the amusements of the rest of the community. To the better class of entertainments they are not welcomed, and to others the difference in speech is still a barrier. Obviously the theatre, and even in a measure the nickelodeons, are uninteresting to those who cannot understand the language. Thus cut off from what little normal amusement Homestead offers, they cling to the few festivities their limited opportunities make possible.
In summer there are of course more chances for recreation; trolley rides and picnics in the park make a welcome variety from the heat of the courts. The following statements, taken from the notes of the Slavic woman who assisted in making the investigation, tell the story simply:
They do not go to amusements of any kind on account of being so poor and feel so badly after they have finished their day’s work.
Husband and wife go to the lodge dances, which they enjoy very much. Wife goes to the five cent theatres, to the parks in the summer and for trolley rides. Is fond of all kinds of amusements and goes when they can afford it.
The family have no amusements at all outside of their own home, simply because they cannot afford it. They would like to be able to go to some places of amusement, if they could spend their Sundays at home in a pleasant way. The mother and children go to church every Saturday evening to say the rosary, which is one of their chief pleasures.
Starting in with such a household as that described at the opening of this chapter, how far do any of these Slavic families succeed in working out ideals they have set for themselves?
If we turn from the crowded courts with their two-room tenements to the homes of some who have attained their ambitions, we find conditions that show an inherent capacity for advancement in the race. As an illustration, note the change in type in two houses, the homes of families from the same place in the old country, the one newcomers, the other among the “oldest inhabitants” of the Slavic community. The first family live in a one-room tenement, where even though the furniture includes only absolute necessities, it is hard to keep all the crowded belongings in order. On wash-day morning the disorder is increased. Nevertheless, the home is kept as neat as the circumstances permit, and the bright pictures on the wall are proof of a desire to make it attractive. As the man earns only $9.90 a week, they must keep their rent low if bills are to be paid and anything laid by for the future. In the other picture, the “front room” with its leather-covered furniture is in a five-room house which the family owns. The sacred pictures with their vivid coloring relieve the severity of the room while they also reveal the religious note in Slavic life, for if happiness is to stay with the family, the priest must come yearly to “bless the home.” This family after many years in America has, by hard work and thrift, succeeded in obtaining a real home.
Turning from this visible evidence of the way in which an individual Slavic family has prospered, we find in the mill census that the number of skilled, and therefore highly paid members of the race, are few. Of the 3,603 Slavs in the mill in 1907, 459 were ranked as semi-skilled, 80 as skilled. The Slovaks from Austro-Hungary are the most numerous of the race in Homestead, and were the first of this stock to come here. Among them we find proportionately a slightly larger number of semi-skilled workers. [They formed 51.7 per cent of all the Slavs in the mill in 1907, 60.1 per cent of the semi-skilled Slavs, and 56.2 per cent of the skilled Slavs.]
We have seen that of the budget Slavs still earning laborers' wages, a third had been here over ten years; it is apparent, however, that individuals are slowly making their way into skilled work—a movement which, as the older English-speaking men drop out, is probably bound to increase. In the 29 immigrant families keeping budgets all of the men who earned $12 or more a week had been here over five years. It is interesting to note that some had come here when they were very young, eleven, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old; for example, a tonnage worker had been here ten years; a man at one of the furnaces earning $3.50 a day, seventeen years, and a machinist who earned about the same amount, eighteen years. Even with the higher wages, their families continue to make sacrifices to secure the desired property more rapidly. A helper at one of the open-hearth furnaces, who had been here for seven years, was earning $2.50 to $3.00 a day. The husband and wife still took in two boarders, so that with their two children there were six people in a two-room house, which was but scantily furnished. They had a bank account of at least $400. Another Slav, the head of a family of three, had been here ten years and was working on tonnage, in good times earning about $6.00 a day. They, too, lived in a two-room house, but it was neat and from their standpoint probably seemed large enough as they had no lodger. They had purchased the farm in the old country and besides had a $500 bank account. Again, take a family of six. The father, still only about thirty years old, had been here for over fifteen years. Out of his wages—about $3.50 a day at fairly skilled work in the mill—he was buying a small house with a garden. He was naturalized and the family stood as a fair type of our new citizens. They took no lodgers, but the limitations imposed by such thrift as they practiced are illustrated by the notes on this household made by my interpreter. Herself a Slav, their circumstances were a matter of no special interest, and she therefore wrote her notes with no attempt to add “local color” such as a person of another race would have put into them. To her the statement was simply one of facts:
Conditions of Work:
The man works on day and night shifts alternately.
Home:
They don’t own their own home, on which there is a mortgage. The man gives all his earnings to his wife and when he needs any spending money, he asks for it.
Furniture:
They live in two rooms comfortably furnished, one a living room and the other a bed room. They have a sewing machine on which the mother does the sewing for her family. Does her washing by hand.
Clothes:
They wear plain clothing. The woman does all her own mending with care. The father buys ready-made clothing. They have a change of clothing for Sundays, of a fairly good quality.
Food:
They buy their food at grocery stores; don’t get all at one store. They live principally on vegetable diet, not using much fruit. The man works hard and they are obliged to have good substantial food. The family eat their evening meal together.
Woman’s Work:
The woman does her own work at home, but does not earn anything outside, her time all being taken up with caring for her family.
Lodges:
The man belongs to St. Stephen’s Lodge, and his wife belongs to St. Catherine’s, both church lodges. They attend one meeting every month unless something to prevent. When not able to go, they send in their dues. The man gets $5.00 a week sick benefits, also a death benefit of $1,000 to his family after his decease. His dues are $2.00 monthly and the wife’s dues are $1.00 a month. In case of death of the woman the family gets $700. The wife’s reasons for belonging to above lodges is that their family may have benefits paid by the lodges in case of a death, either father or mother.
Health:
This man is in good health. The woman is not in good health, having gone to work too soon after her confinement was attended by a midwife. She did not have proper care during her confinement. The children are sickly. One of them had typhoid fever.
Education:
There are four children, the oldest seven years and now attending public school. The only reading matter they have is his Lodge paper, which he gets once a week.
Accidents:
The man had one accident, but no help from the Carnegie fund.
Drink:
The man drinks at home and sometimes at saloons. Pays for himself. He does not get intoxicated. The woman drinks a little when she has it at home.
Amusements:
The man goes only when his lodge gives a dance, it being expected of every member to buy tickets. Neither he nor his wife ever attend theatres, on account of being kept at home with their family. The woman cannot remember having been to any of the parks or amusements of any kind.
It is by such thrift that some of the Slavs attain their ambition to own a home. An official in the foreign department of one bank said he knew of 25 Slavs who had purchased homes in 1907. Sometimes these families continue to live in the Second Ward. One family, for example, had bought an eight-room house on one of these busy streets. The four rear rooms they rented, but with evident regard for appearances lived themselves in the four that faced the front. With the aid of the rent from the rear tenement they had succeeded in freeing the house from the mortgage. The families more often, however, move further from the mill. One I knew bought a house on the hill with two porches and a big yard where they kept chickens. While they had only succeeded in paying $500 on the $1,700 the place cost, now that a son was at work they hoped to be able to clear the debt. In the meantime they truly rejoiced in being on the hill above the smoke and away from the bustling courts.
The English-speaking families on such streets rarely extend a cordial welcome. A woman who lives next door to a Slavic family told me that some of the neighbors objected because they were rather noisy and drank a good deal, though she herself found them pleasant enough.
All the Slavs who prosper, however, do not try to buy property here. Some prefer a bank account. It is authoritatively stated that about 1,600 Slavs have savings bank accounts in Homestead ranging from $100 to $1,000, and even in a few instances to $1,500. Occasionally this zeal for saving gets a setback. A few years ago a Slav ran an “exchange bank” in Homestead and when he had secured a goodly sum departed. One family was so discouraged at losing the $400 it had on deposit with him, of hard earned savings, that the woman ceased to take boarders and the man to work hard.
Yet not all the extra money goes into bank accounts and houses. If we compare the budgets of the 10 Slavic families spending more than $15 a week with the average of the 42 budget families (of all races) in the same expenditure groups, we shall find that the former increase their expenditures along much the same lines as do the other peoples, though it is to be noted here, as in the general averages, that the Slav spends a slightly larger per cent for food and a slightly smaller per cent for rent.
If, on the other hand, we compare the Slavic families spending over $15 with those spending less than $12 we find that the expenditures which have increased less rapidly than the income are the essentials, food, rent, fuel, and clothing; that insurance increases a little more rapidly, but that the great part of the increased pay goes for more distinctly cultural expenditures.
This comparison, though fragmentary, suggests that on the whole these Slavs made a wise use of their increased earnings—that there is an actual increase of expenditure for every item, but that by far the largest gain is in that sphere which stands for the less material side of life, church, education, recreation and savings.
For most Slavic households, however, the increased income which would make such increased expenditure possible must be looked for not from the man’s wages, but, at least in the first years, from other sources. We have seen how the first recourse of the young couple is to keep lodgers and the cost to health and childhood that involves. Time goes on, brings children, and household expenses rise, and even with increased earnings, tends to keep the couple at this double work.
Source: Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 145–157.
Telling Tales: Byington's Study of Homestead:
Homestead, Pennsylvania, was in many ways the prototypical early twentieth-century mill town. Located seven miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, the first steel mill was built in Homestead in 1881. In 1892, Homestead was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company’s ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907–1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. Written by progressive social reformers, the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the devastating impact of industrial life on those who labored in the nation’s factories. The following excerpt is from Margaret Byington’s Pittsburgh Survey volume, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. In the spirit of the Progressive-era effort to scientifically document conditions, the book also included photographs (by the famous documentary photographer Lewis Hine) and detailed family budgets.
From the cinder path beside one of the railroads that crosses the level part of Homestead, you enter an alley, bordered on one side by stables and on the other by a row of shabby two-story frame houses. The doors of the houses are closed, but dishpans and old clothes decorating their exterior mark them as inhabited. Turning from the alley through a narrow passageway you find yourself in a small court, on three sides of which are smoke-grimed houses, and on the fourth, low stables. The open space teems with life and movement. Children, dogs and hens make it lively underfoot; overhead long lines of flapping clothes must be dodged. A group of women stand gossiping in one corner, awaiting their turn at the pump,—which is one of the two sources of water supply for the 20 families who live here. Another woman dumps the contents of her washtubs upon the paved ground, and the greasy, soapy water runs into an open drain a few feet from the pump. In the center a circular wooden building with ten compartments opening into one vault, flushed only by this waste water, constitutes the toilet accommodations for over one hundred people. Twenty-seven children find in this crowded brick-paved space their only playground; for the 63 rooms in the houses about the court shelter a group of 20 families, Polish, Slavic and Hungarian, Jewish and Negro. The men are unskilled workers in the mills.
This court is one of many such in Homestead; one of hundreds of similar courts in the mill towns of the Ohio valley. The conditions produced by the incoming of these alien workers form one of the unsolved problems of the steel district.
Two elements in the old country feed the population of these crowded sections: the ambitious young men, with no ties, unless to aged parents; and the men with wives, sometimes with children, who come over here to make a better home for them. They are all stimulated by the successes of their friends, who perhaps have returned with savings that seem fortunes. Often these people mortgage their all for the passage money and if they fail here no place is left to which they can go back. From quiet villages they come to this smoky town; from labor in the open fields to heavy work in the yards and thundering sheds of the mill.
As employment is steady and the workman’s needs are simple, the wages seem large. The newcomer if a single man finds groups of his fellow workers living in close quarters—three or four in a room—who are enjoying life and saving money at the same time. So he too begins to save, and presently, if he has a family at home, sends for them to join him. If he is single, he sends for his sweetheart or marries some girl of his race, whom he meets in the mill-town courts of an evening or at church or at one of the lodge dances. If she has been at service here, she too will likely have a small account in the bank. Then, as the family grows and expenses increase, they resort to the old expedient and begin themselves to take boarders. Children come and grow up. The man’s wage does not increase; as he is a “Hunkie” the chances are that he will remain a laborer. Most of these men come intending some day to go back with a thousand dollars—men of property. But even if they return once to the old country, they often turn again to America; growing attached to the new world, they become permanent residents.
An occasional family, when the man gets into tonnage work or when the children reach earning age and add their wages to the common fund, achieves a long desired happiness; they move to a separate house in the suburbs, perhaps even to one of their own. But to many the crowded court with its isolation from the rest of community continues to be America.
While there were no definite figures available as to the number of these foreigners in Homestead in 1907, two Slavs intimately acquainted with the foreign colony estimated that there were between 6,000 and 7,000. When the mills were running full in October, 1907, 3,603 Slavic men were at work there, forming 53.2 per cent of the total number of employees. As 1,092 of these were single men, the estimate as to the total Slavic population is probably fairly accurate. The rapid increase in numbers is shown by the fact that while there were no Slavic churches in the town in 1896, there are now Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian Roman Catholic churches, a Slovak Greek Catholic church, a Hungarian Reformed church, and one or two Slavic Protestant missions. These churches hold property the value of which is estimated at $400,000.
Numerous national distinctions divide this body of immigrants as a whole, but of these the English-speaking community is in large measure ignorant; to the rest of the town they are all just “Hunkies.” Of the Slavs employed in the mill in 1907, 51.7 per cent were Slovaks, 15 per cent Magyar, 10.2 per cent Romanian, 9.6 per cent Russian, 6 per cent Polish, 3.6 per cent Lithuanian, 3.9 per cent miscellaneous. (For convenience in this book, as already noted, Magyars, Letts, etc., are spoken of as Slavs. Though not of the blood, they come from the same general district in mid-Europe and are part of the same wave of immigration.) Between some of these groups, such as Slovaks and Hungarians, Poles and Russians, feuds dating back many centuries still provoke quarrels in this new-world town. The crowded courts bring them into close and sometimes irritating contact, and as yet there have been few amalgamating forces to counteract the old hatreds. Rather the segmentation of churches and lodges, due to differences in language, tend to keep alive these old antagonisms.
In spite, however, of these national conflicts the Slavs are of similar temperament. Like the Irish who preceded them here, they are in most instances in their own country the ruled rather than the dominant race, and the majority come from agricultural countries, where money is scarce, where living conditions are of the poorest, where hard work in the open air has developed rugged strength. With them they bring the standards of village life, reflecting its crude sanitation (counterbalanced in the old environment by the unlimited supply of fresh air), its bare existence and its low levels of comfort.
The mode of living which we find among the Slavs is in a measure due to a conflict between the nature of community life and industry in America, and the customs and conditions that prevail under a different civilization. In some measure, at least, wages, housing conditions, opportunities for relaxation, conform to the “standards of living” of the influential group in a town, in Homestead, the standards of the native whites. The forces of imitation and self-respect make it easier for a native to achieve these standards, but the newcomers must live under conditions which are not determined by their kind. Moreover, the ambition of most in coming to this country is financial, or largely so; and the determination to get ahead, even at risk of immediate health and happiness, accentuates the problems which their presence creates. They come, then, with this background of meagre surroundings, but with a vision of future riches. They come as prospectors come, ready for any hardships that may help them reach their goal, and with the passive endurance that has been characteristic of their race. Those early dreams of money to be picked up in the streets of the new world are bygones no doubt, but these Slavic adventurers bring with them, nevertheless, the expectation of returning some day men of wealth—wealth made up of savings from American pay.
Their labor is the heaviest and roughest in the mill, handling steel billets and bars, loading trains, working in cinder pits; labor that demands mostly strength but demands that in large measure. They work usually under the direction of an English-speaking foreman whose orders they often fail to understand. Accidents are frequent, promotions rare. In 202 families in the courts studied, 88 percent of the men belonged to the unskilled group, a proportion roughly true for the mill as a whole. (The somewhat higher average of skill among the Slavic budget families is due to the fact that representative units from each of the economic groups were selected; also that the investigator belonged to one of the oldest Slavic families and her acquaintance included many of the most prosperous.) Only 2.2 per cent of the Slavs in the mill are skilled. Some of the men about the furnaces thus work up by slow degrees to be skilled or at least semi-skilled, but in the main, the Slavs have as yet small prospect of advancement. (The sons occasionally enter occupations outside the steel mills which they think more desirable. Two were reported to be drivers for livery-stables and one a roofer. But these young men did not earn much more than their fathers.) Of the 21 budget families whose men were earning laborer’s wages, five had been here from five to nine years, two from ten to fourteen years, and four had been here fifteen years or over. If the rank and file are to satisfy their ambitions they must do it on less than $2.00 a day, or leave Homestead.
Moreover, the Slavs find their work quickly affected by an industrial depression. During the winter of 1907 they were the first to be laid off. Many returned to Austria-Hungary; many could not go. In a group of 295 Bulgarians only 115 had work, while among 212 Russians, 131 were unemployed. The stories of these months of idleness and privation were pathetic. Remittances to wives and old people in Europe dropped off, bank deposits lessened, and goods were purchased on credit till future wages were heavily mortgaged. As Americans were sometimes given laboring work formerly done by Slavs, the latter bore more than their share of a burden that seriously affected the whole community. The company’s policy of caring for its skilled workmen by giving them labor that would normally have been done by the unskilled, was in certain ways estimable; but it made the winter a desperate one for such of the unskilled foreigners as could not return to their own country.
The steel industry, then, requires these strong men to do its heaviest labor, pays them its lowest wage, with little prospect of advancement and with the chance that they will be first to suffer if work grows slack. What for its part does the town offer? The section where the Slavs live is in itself gloomy. The level ground in the Second Ward cut off from the river by the mill and from the country by the steep hill behind, forms a pocket where the smoke settles heavily. There are oases in these wards, sections of street with yards and trees, but for the most part here on the original site of the town, garden plots as well as alleys have been utilized on which to build small frame houses till the blocks are all but covered. While these houses are sometimes built in haphazard fashion, they usually surround such a court as that described at the outset of this chapter. For our cinder path led us directly to the heart of the crowding and the sanitary evils of the steel town.
To determine the extent of such congestion, with the help of the Slavic member of my staff I made a study of 21 courts in the Second Ward . . . where yards, toilets and water supply are used in common. In these courts lived 239 families (of these, 168 were Slovaks, 22 Hungarians, 16 Russians, 10 Poles and 23 Slavs of other origins), 102 of whom took lodgers. Fifty-one families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one-room tenements. One-half the families used their kitchens as sleeping rooms. Only three houses had running water inside, and in at least three instances over 110 people were dependent on one yard hydrant for water.
Each court is shut in between the houses facing the street and a similar row facing the alley at the rear which cuts the block in half. A narrow passage serves as an outlet. Some of the houses are four or six-story buildings, but more than half in the courts studied were but two stories high with four rooms each. (Only four had more than six rooms.) This type usually shelters two families each; one family living in the room opening upon the street and the upstairs room above it; the other, in the two rooms looking into the court.
In summer, to give some through ventilation to the stifling rooms, doors leading to the stairway between the front and rear rooms are left open. As the families are often kin this opportunity for friendly intercourse is not unwelcome. Indeed, the cheerful gossip about the hydrant that enlivens wash day, like the card playing in the court on a summer evening, suggests the neighborliness of village days. Nothing in the surroundings, however, bears out the suggestion. Accumulations of rubbish and broken brick pavements render the courts as a whole untidy and unwholesome. Some of the houses have small porches that might give a sense of homelikeness, but for the most part they are bare and dingy. As the houses are built close to the street with only this busy court behind, the tenant can scarcely have that bit of garden so dear to the heart of former country dwellers. Only here and there a little bed of lettuce with its note of delicate green or the vivid red of a geranium blossom brightens the monotony. Dreary as is the exterior, however, the evils to the dwellers in the court lie deeper; in the inadequate water supply, in meagre toilet facilities, and in overcrowding.
The deficiency in the water supply is serious. In the 21 courts only three families, as stated, had running water in their homes. In no court were fewer than five families using one yard hydrant or pump, while in exceptional instances it was the sole supply of as many as twenty. As waste-water pipes were also lacking in the houses, the heavy tubs of water had to be carried out as well as in, and this in a smoky town where a double amount of washing and cleaning is necessary. When the weather permitted, the heavy washes were done in the yard. The pavement of a populous court covered with tubs, wringers, clothes baskets, and pools of soapy water, is a poor playground for children.
The toilet accommodations, while possibly more adequate than the water supply, are a menace to health in consequence of the lack of running water. There was not one indoor closet in any of these courts. The streets of Homestead all have sewers, and by a borough ordinance even the outside vaults must be connected with them. These are, however, ordinarily flushed only by the waste water which flows directly into them from the yards. When conditions become unbearable, the tenants wash the vaults out with a hose attached to the hydrant. As long as the closets remain in the yards, it is difficult to introduce a system of flushing because of the danger that the pipes will freeze in winter. The vaults are usually in the center of the court only a few yards from the kitchen doors, and create from the point of view either of sanitation or decency, an intolerable condition. While occasionally three or four families must use one compartment, usually only two families do so. But even this means frequently that the closets are not locked and that no one has a special sense of responsibility for their condition; in consequence they are often filthy.
The Slavic courts of Homestead typify the conditions which result when an industrial district is invaded by hundreds of unskilled immigrant laborers, largely single men, largely country people, who want a place to sleep for the least possible cash. Most of the petty local landlords who provide these quarters care nothing for the condition of their places and regard the wages of these transients as fair spoils.
Source: Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 131–137.