Charities and the Commons: The Pittsburgh Survey, Part I. The People
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Title: Charities and the Commons: The Pittsburgh Survey, Part I. The People
Author: Various
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS: THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY, PART I. THE PEOPLE ***
VOL. XXI JANUARY 2, 1909 NO. 14
CHARITIES
AND THE COMMONS
THE PITTSBURGH
SURVEY
[Illustration]
A JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTIVE PHILANTHROPY
PUBLISHED BY
THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
ROBERT W. DEFOREST, President; OTTO T. BANNARD, Vice-President;
J. P. MORGAN, Treasurer; EDWARD T. DEVINE, General Secretary
105 EAST TWENTY-SECOND STREET, NEW YORK
174 ADAMS STREET, CHICAGO
THIS ISSUE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS TWO DOLLARS A YEAR
ENTERED AT THE POST OFFICE, NEW YORK, AS SECOND CLASS MATTER
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* * * * *
OBJECTS OF THE ASSOCIATION=
"THE SHELTERING ARMS" was opened October 6th, 1864, and receives
children between six and ten years of age, for whom no other institution
provides.
Children placed at "THE SHELTERING ARMS" are not surrendered to the
Institution, but are held subject to the order of parents or guardians.
The children attend the neighboring public school. The older boys and
girls are trained to household and other work.
* * * * *
Application for admission should be addressed to MISS RICHMOND, at "THE
SHELTERING ARMS," 129th Street, corner Amsterdam Avenue.
* * * * *
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During JANUARY and FEBRUARY we offer you your choice of all $19.00,
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TO ORDER AT $18.00
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TO ORDER AT $25.00
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Please mention CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS when writing to advertisers.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
AS MEN SEE AMERICA. I.
THE FIRST OF THREE FRONTISPIECES.]
THE COMMON WELFARE
EVERY CITY NEEDS A CITY PLAN NOW
The congestion exhibit in New York last spring proved one of the most
effective and startling means of making a contented community sit up
and think about its "other half." It formulated questions half formed
in many minds and demanded answers. Its influence was felt over the
whole country, and its discussions have bobbed up here and there and
everywhere ever since in articles, conferences and addresses.
That the congestion exhibit answered questions as well as asked them,
and that it has a constructive program to offer not only to New York but
to the whole country are amply proved by the decision just reached, and
announced to-day for the first time, to hold an exhibit and conference
of city planning next March. "Every American city needs a city plan
now," is the conclusion of the committee, and the steps by which it
has arrived at this conclusion are interestingly set forth in its
announcement.
While the organization bears the name of the Committee on Congestion
of Population in New York, its scope and purpose are much wider. The
program approved by its executive committee is "to obtain a plan for
the development of Greater New York, and other American cities, along
economic, hygienic and aesthetic lines; and to promote the better
distribution of population throughout city, state and nation."
To establish the need for such a program, the committee offers as
"admitted facts" the following:
Many American cities with a population of over 50,000 have
congestion of population, factories and offices; such congestion
creates problems for which we cannot find solutions; no city
should use all the land within its boundaries as intensively as
is necessary in its most congested areas,--to do so perpetuates
congestion; no American city yet has a legal right to prescribe the
height and use of buildings in its various sections; no city can
develop normally without a plan which anticipates its growth for
twenty-five or fifty years.
As a means of stimulating consideration of the subject and of promoting
farsighted planning for the future, the committee has adopted as its
slogan the statement, "Every American city needs a city plan now." It
will show, it announces, the cost of the lack of a city plan in New
York, the city planning which has been done in some American and foreign
cities, and the pressing need for a city plan in New York to-day. The
conference on city planning in March will include an exhibit of the best
developments from all over the world. Both exhibit and conference will
be keyed up to two major considerations: "the concentration of one-half
the population of a great state in one city makes the problem of
statewide importance; the concentration of one-nineteenth of a nation's
population in one city gives the problem national bearing."
There will be study of the best methods for distribution of population,
for promoting feasible methods of locating factories and industrial
colonies, and an educational campaign to show the advantages of
migration from congested centers.
EMPLOYERS PAY FOR SANATORIUM CARE
Massachusetts, almost invariably a leader in preventive measures, is
developing this year a most unique and promising kind of co-operative
effort in the prevention of tuberculosis. Massachusetts was the first
state to organize a board of health, dating from 1869. It was the first
state to choose its factory inspectors from the medical profession,
this dating from 1906, and out of these two farsighted provisions of the
law has grown during the past two months a plan by which manufacturers
are assuming a part of the financial burden in seeing to it that
operatives in their factories, found to have tuberculosis in the
incipient stage, are sent to the Rutland Sanatorium and given the best
possible opportunity for cure.
The plan originated in Worcester which, with a string of neighboring
towns and villages, forms one of the sixteen inspection districts into
which the state is divided. As a result of the activity of Dr. M. G.
Overlock, the state inspector of health in charge, seventy manufacturing
plants, employing more than 20,000 hands, have followed the example of
David H. Fanning, president of the Royal Worcester Corset Company, in
agreeing to pay a part of the maintenance cost of any of their employes
sent to Rutland. The cost in the sanatorium is nine dollars a week.
Of this the state pays five dollars and the company four dollars. The
term usually agreed upon is three months. At the end of that time, a
large number of the cases have been so far restored that they can be
taken to nearby, supervised boarding houses and farms and make room for
new patients,--a plan hit upon to relieve the great pressure upon this
institution which accepts only incipient cases. The employer continues
his contribution. The boarding houses, conducted along approved lines,
have sprung up all over the surrounding hills much as they have at
Saranac Lake in New York.
The factory inspection has been keyed up to take the greatest possible
advantage of the co-operation of employers. Frequent visits are made to
all plants, but to those in which the work rooms are full of dust, or
where there are other conditions favoring tuberculosis, Dr. Overlock
makes a visit once a month. All minors on the working staff are taken
before him, and required to furnish a full family history. If there has
been tuberculosis in the family, even remote, a medical examination
is at once made. The others are examined more superficially, but the
least trace of suspicious symptoms is at once seized upon as cause
for an examination. In this way, it is believed, incipient cases among
minors will be caught in their earliest stages. The system will later be
extended to adults. An extension of the plan to secure the interest and
help of employers has begun in some other inspection districts, and will
eventually be introduced throughout the state.
But the carefully laid plans to detect and ward off incipient cases
comprise only one part of the Massachusetts plan to fight tuberculosis.
In May three homes for advanced cases will be opened, and the
development of the plan calls for additional homes, scattered through
the state, until it shall have made complete provision for all cases,
early or advanced. In view of the almost unanimously expressed opinion
at the recent International Tuberculosis Congress, that the strategic
point of attack in the campaign is in isolating advanced cases, the
provision of these homes is, perhaps, the most important plank in the
Massachusetts health platform. Governor Guild is much interested in the
whole plan. In a recent letter to Dr. Overlock he wrote: "It has been a
great pleasure for me to inaugurate the new policy of the commonwealth
of provision for all cases of tuberculosis, not merely as at present the
care of the curable, but the care of the incurable as well."
SALARY LOANS IN CINCINNATI
The business of lending money on salaries and wages has received a
practical knockout blow in Cincinnati through the _Commercial Tribune_,
which instituted the crusade, with the co-operation of the officials of
the city and of various private organizations.
Aided by an ordinance which orders the licensing of salary loan offices
and which makes a weekly report to the city auditor necessary, the
campaigners have already been able to put one office out of business
entirely, and to sew up all the others in the courts in such a way that
it now seems very likely that most of these will retire rather than face
the storm which awaits them.
D. H. Tolman is more deeply involved in Cincinnati than he has ever been
before. His son, E. E. Tolman, who is said to be connected with the
business of his father, is under arrest and is now waiting a hearing in
the police court. His manager has been arrested and convicted on three
counts.
Although these cases have been appealed to a higher court, an
application for an order to restrain the further interference with the
Tolman business has thus far been refused.
D. H. Tolman has ordered his manager in Cincinnati to refuse to comply
with the ordinance and unless the courts do issue this order the manager
will be arrested every week.
The _Commercial Tribune_ has secured all of the Tolman forms from a
former manager. These have all been printed together with a letter
from the ex-manager in which the latter makes a complete exposé of the
methods pursued behind the doors of one of his offices.
The auditor of Cincinnati has declared his purpose of keeping up the
fight. He has forced ten salary loan offices to pay a license fee and
to comply with the provisions of the local ordinance. Agents have been
permanently employed by the official to watch the loan offices and to
ferret out any new agents who may attempt to operate secretly.
The Legal Aid Society which was recently formed to advise the poor,
has made it its business to impress upon all who seek its meetings
the futility of borrowing money from the salary loan people and has
furnished a list of the companies which are classified as "loan sharks,"
to every man and woman whom it could reach.
In this way people who never read the newspapers are given information
which they otherwise would probably never receive.
The Legal Aid Society is also at work on a code of laws which will be
submitted to the General Assembly at its coming session and which it is
hoped will solve the question of loaning money on salaries and chattels
in Ohio for all time.
The attorneys of the society promise a law which will set a fixed
rate, which will include interest and expenses, on all such loans.
It is said now that this rate will be either three or four per cent.
The contemplated law will also contain a provision which will make the
recovery of usury possible.
It is further planned to have a provision in the law similar to the
Massachusetts statute, requiring the signatures of the wife, when a
borrower is married, and of his employer. Some of the best attorneys in
Cincinnati including former Prosecuting Attorney Benton Oppenheimer, are
at work on these laws.
Another movement now on foot is the founding of a salary loan office on
the same basis as several chattel loan offices which are now operating
in the country, whose stockholders are philanthropists and men of wealth.
Cincinnati has such a chattel loan company and the men who are now
fighting the salary loan business there are urging the stockholders of
this company to take up the other work.
The most gratifying thing of the Cincinnati campaign has been the
falling off of business in the loan offices. The companies admit this
and one broker left for Florida after explaining that his business had
decreased seventy-five per cent during the campaign.
FOR A COURT OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS
One of the interesting bills to be brought before the 1909 session of
the New York Legislature is that drawn by Bernhard Rabbino, relating to
a special domestic relations court. Mr. Rabbino believes that if we have
courts for the purpose of divorce, for separating mothers from children
and children from fathers, we should have a separate tribunal to which
families in discord could appeal.
There are probably from 12,000 to 15,000 domestic trouble cases handled
yearly in Manhattan and the Bronx alone, but as no records are kept of
summons cases,--and these come under that head,--it is not possible to
compute the exact number. Probably it is greater than the number of
cases handled by the children's court, and a domestic relations court
is justified by Mr. Rabbino, additionally, on the ground that it
precedes the children's court, having for its fundamental purpose the
preservation of the family as a unit, with an opportunity for fathers
and mothers to secure the same expert and individual attention that is
given to the children.
Domestic affairs are admittedly out of place in a general police court.
The unfortunate participants are not in any sense criminals, and yet
they are surrounded by thieves, pickpockets, drunkards, disorderly
persons,--the regular rabble of the criminal court,--and an outraged
self-respect is the consequence of such treatment. The present
organization of magistrates' courts contemplates that the magistrate
shall sit one-half of the day on the bench and the other half shall be
in chambers for the settlement of just such cases as Mr. Rabbino would
bring before the domestic relations court. As a matter of practice,
however, so congested are the courts and so pressing their work,
that there is no time for this personal consideration which the law
contemplates. The magistrate does what he can in the face of tremendous
difficulties, but he has not the time to investigate these cases, and
without proper attention there can be no adjustment of them. Divorce and
separation are the natural results.
The idea of such a court would be to prevent litigation as a whole
and particularly to safeguard the homes of the poor, for the poor are
those who are obliged to resort to police courts. The better-off take
their affairs to the Supreme Court. It is very possible that these
lower courts might develop into something higher, and many matrimonial
difficulties which now cause a permanent rupture of relations be
peaceably adjusted with judicial assistance. Such a court might also
have a marked effect on juvenile crime, for any force that makes for
better home conditions is preventive of crime. The bill requires also
that the court of domestic relations have exclusive jurisdiction over
all cases of abandonment, non-support, and the non-support of poor
relatives as provided by law.
The bill as drawn would make this domestic relations court part of the
city magistrates' courts, on the lines of the children's courts now
being generally established throughout the country. The idea, however,
would be to have a special court altogether, and if successful, this
would probably be done.
The introduction of this bill in the Legislature may bring to sharp
discussion the whole question of division of jurisdiction in the city
courts. The present established principle is that such courts should
be divided geographically, covering a certain borough or section of a
borough. The children's court differs radically from this and introduces
a functional division. It is an open question whether, with the police
courts crowded as they are, such a functional division has not become
necessary for more cases than those of delinquent children,--whether
the separation of special kinds of cases into children's courts and
into courts of domestic relations will not prove more effective than a
further division of territory.
THE YEAR IN MUNICIPAL EVENTS
A review of municipal events and tendencies for the past year, which
might be the title of Clinton Rogers Woodruff's report as secretary of
the National Municipal League, centers around efficiency and honesty in
government as a result of clear accounting systems and understandable
statistics; wide-spread efforts at charter revision; a constantly
growing sentiment for nomination reform; and a militant desire, evident
in many sections, to tackle the problems which have grown up around the
saloon in politics.
The Massachusetts Bureau of Municipal Statistics, the first of its kind,
has already resulted, Mr. Woodruff believes, in a number of cities
reconstructing their accounts on a sounder and more substantial basis.
The first year's report shows a confusing lack of system in handling the
receipts and disbursements of towns and cities; a wide variety of dates
for closing the fiscal year; many defects in the treasurers' methods
of accounting; and the need for consolidation of the administration of
trust funds. In many instances, money left to the community for special
purposes has been used by the town trustees for general purposes.
But "the movement for uniform accounting proceeds without interruption."
Originated by the National Municipal League, it was given momentum
by the Census Bureau and by legislation in Ohio and Massachusetts.
Accounting investigations and reforms are being made the basis for
an approach to the solution of important problems in Boston, in New
York by the conspicuous work of the Bureau of Municipal Research,
and in Minneapolis. The point of attack in Minneapolis has been the
administration of the school fund "which seems to have been particularly
inadequate and inefficient." A grand jury found "a startling and
deplorably loose state of affairs." The investigation was made by
trained men from San Francisco and other Pacific Coast cities. In
Wilmington there has been a thoroughgoing examination of municipal
account.
Legislative reference bureaus are being established to help in this
movement, of particular value to Chicago which "is on the threshold of
an era of public improvement which will call for the most intelligent
direction from the city government." Mr. Woodruff predicts that "we may
expect within the next half dozen years to find a series of similar
bureaus established in all the leading cities, gathering for their
respective municipalities information concerning improvement; and,
moreover, we may expect a further development, in that all of these
bureaus and libraries will be so co-ordinated, each with the others, as
to form a strong chain of information that will banish from the halls of
legislation and the offices of administration, the dense ignorance that
all too frequently found a welcome lodgement."
Charter changes are pressed every year more strongly to the front.
It is true now that wherever a good government organization of any
sort is found, there will be accompanying it a campaign either for a
new charter or for amendments to the existing one. Perhaps the most
noticeable tendency of the movement is a demand for a greater degree
of home rule for the cities which have been "subjected to a degree of
legislative buffeting that has well nigh destroyed the cherished ideal
of self-government."
Nomination reform has been much discussed, and a number of laws
providing for direct nominations have become effective during the year.
Mr. Woodruff holds that the results of direct nominations have, on
the whole, "recommended themselves to those who are striving for the
elimination of nomination monopoly and for the inauguration of a simpler
and more direct form of election machinery." Further, he holds that "it
is now generally conceded, except by a very small and diminishing group
of men, that the preparation and distribution of the ballots at the
general election is a proper state function and expense."
The objections to direct nominations are discussed at length and finally
dismissed with the conclusion: "We must realize that we are living in a
democracy, and that the election machinery must be democratic and must
record the wishes of the people and be responsive to their desires.
Direct nominations are a step in advance because they enable the
people directly to express their wishes. No doubt they have made their
mistakes, and will continue to make them; but they have had to bear the
brunt of them in the past, and they must continue to bear them in the
future; and this in the long run will prove to be the most effective way
of building up an enlightened and efficient democracy."
The initiative and referendum are advocated, because "they are
unquestionably proving effective in breaking down some of the privileges
and monopolies that have characterized political organizations for many
years."
TO STIMULATE PARKS AND PLAY
The Council of One Hundred, an auxiliary to the Parks and Playgrounds
Association of New York, has been fully organized by Miss Pauline
Robinson and Seth Thayer Stewart, with a membership of well known
men and women who are interested in playground activities and civic
improvement. At the first meeting of the council at the home of Mrs.
Charles B. Alexander, in December, Richard Watson Gilder presided,
introducing Mrs. George C. Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), who read
a valuable paper. Eugene A. Philbin, president of the Parks and
Playgrounds Association, outlined the development of that organization,
which is the union of the Brooklyn Society for Parks and Playgrounds and
the Metropolitan Parks Association. Howard Bradstreet, the secretary of
the association, gave through lantern slides a synopsis of the active
work in conducting playgrounds and baseball centers during the last
season. Seth Thayer Stewart sketched a possible plan for the extension
of the recreation idea throughout the city, and Dr. Luther H. Gulick
spoke briefly on recreation for girls.
The Council of One Hundred, of which Mr. Gilder is president, Jacob H.
Schiff, George D. Pratt, Mrs. Frederick W. Whitridge and Mrs. Samuel
Bowne Duryea, vice-presidents; and Miss Pauline Robinson, secretary
and treasurer, will meet two or three times a year. Its purpose is to
assist individually and as a body in the active work of the Parks and
Playgrounds Association. While much is being done by the city through
park and school in the way of offering play facilities to children,
nevertheless, so great is their number in New York, that only a small
percentage of the possibilities have as yet been realized. With a
million children of school age or under, occupied only a small part of
the time, the street must be the chief resort for the large majority.
The experience of last summer showed both the feasibility and the good
result of organizing the children of the street by play leaders who
appreciate the value of free play, and are acquainted with child nature.
The plan of work as outlined calls for the placing of such play leaders
in various sections of the city; the encouraging of the establishment
of places for recreation by different organizations and neighborhood
committees, and for the provision and maintenance of various forms of
play throughout the year in sections otherwise neglected. During the
summer the association maintained eight vacant lots as playgrounds,
eleven baseball centers and a camp for boys. The neighbors of several of
these grounds have asked to have them extended during the winter, and
the association will undertake to do so early in the new year.
NEW YORK STATE TRADE SCHOOL PLANS
Much significance is attached to the recent organization of the New York
state branch of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial
Education. The passage of the industrial education bill last year opened
up to the state possibilities in the way of industrial education which
it has not thus far been able to measure. A volunteer body of some
sort has been needed to awaken interest and stir up the whole state.
Particular opportunity offers among the up-state cities and it was with
this in mind that the officers and advisory board were elected, for as
the list shows, the members are representative of the state as a whole
as well as of many lines of industrial and educational activity. The
officers are:
President, James P. McElroy, manager of the Consolidated Car
Heating Company, Albany; vice-president, Dr. Andrew S. Draper,
state commissioner of education, Albany; secretary-treasurer,
Arthur L. Williston, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
Additional members of the executive committee are:
V. Everit Macy, chairman of Board of Trustees, Teachers'
College, New York; Joseph R. Campbell, president Diamond Saw and
Stamping Works, Buffalo; Thomas D. Fitzgerald, president Allied
Printing Trades Council of New York State, Albany; Frank L.
Babbott, manufacturer and member of the School Board, Brooklyn.
At a public meeting following the formation of the branch, considerable
enthusiasm was developed and a number of interesting papers were read.
Of these, perhaps the most substantial contribution to the discussion
of the evening was by Dr. William H. Maxwell, city superintendent of
schools, New York, who presided. Among other things Dr. Maxwell said:
Certain things may be taken as demonstrated with regard to
industrial education:
First, trade schools are needed. They are needed for the sake
of our industrial wealth and efficiency. They are needed for the
sake of the boys and girls of this city. The best preparation for
a trade is the manual training high school where, in connection
with elements of a liberal education, students receive instruction
in drawing, in tools, and in applications of art to industry.
But these schools breed engineers, not journeymen. Hence we need
schools to give training that will shorten and enrich the period of
apprenticeship for the journeyman.
Second, such schools must be a part of the public school
system and must articulate directly and closely with the elementary
schools, to the end that boys and girls between fourteen and
eighteen, or at least sixteen, may obtain that training which will
enable them to be of use in a shop; because it is in the public
schools that the boys and girls are found who need such training.
Third, to carry out this articulation, elementary schools
should have manual training to discover these boys and girls who
have an aptitude for mechanical pursuits. Brains are as necessary
in mechanical pursuits as in law or theology.
Certain difficulties stand in our way:
First, apathy of manufacturers who have shown little desire to
obtain really skilled American workmen, as for example, the firm
which established a school to train apprentices and found that they
were taken away by other firms as soon as they had learned a few
tricks of the trade.
Second, apathy of the financial authorities of the city who
have just cut out the amount asked for by the Board of Education
for shops and kitchens, and given only $22,000 for a trade school.
It is encouraging, however, to remember that the first annual
appropriation for manual training in Brooklyn was only $5,000. If
we make good use of the small appropriation, the demonstration will
secure larger appropriations in the future.
Third, the foolish or nebulous arguments of many of those who
have been advocating trade schools. Arguments have been foolish
when they became pleas for the elimination of existing high schools
and the conversion of these institutions into trade schools. Those
that have not been foolish have been largely nebulous, vapory
exhortations to establish trade schools, without the substance of
a well considered plan. Such a well considered plan is now the
great desideratum. While the advocates of trade schools have been
talking, the Board of Education has established and maintained five
prosperous and useful evening trade schools which are patronized
largely by apprentices. Those evening trade schools confine their
operations chiefly to the building and machinists' trades. Shall we
stop there? Will our friends not give us a plan for teaching our
three largest trades, clothing, beer brewing, and sugar refining?
What we need farther is a well thought-out plan of co-operation
between the school and the manufacturer, such as that at Fitchburg,
Mass.
For these reasons,--the apathy of manufacturers, the apathy of
the financial authorities of our city, and the need of definite,
coherent plans,--the cause of trade schools stands sorely in need
of the aid of this local branch of the national society. The time
is surely opportune when the Board of Education has appointed a
standing committee on this subject and when the state, through the
industrial education bill, passed last winter by the Legislature,
has decided to give substantial financial assistance to any
community that established trade schools.
TO RESTRAIN HOLIDAY BEGGING
The mummery and begging in which the children of New York city so
generally indulge Thanksgiving Day and other holidays have long been
matters of concern and alarm to those who are interested in educational
work with young people. Many articles have appeared denouncing the
custom. On the morning of Thanksgiving, the New York _Times_ contained
an especially well directed effort to protest against this growing evil.
The children of Asacog Social Settlement, 52 Sands street, Brooklyn,
partake very generally in these holiday mummeries, masquerading and
begging. The harmful results have long been realized, but the efforts
heretofore used to modify the custom have been quite ineffective. It
was resolved this year to undertake a different method of modifying the
nuisance.
It was found in all cases that the children had no idea why they should
choose Thanksgiving for begging, beyond the fact that people gave them
money on that day and all their playmates chose this method of "having
fun," so of course it was necessary to be in the game.
So with "having a good time" in mind, parents, young people, children,
were invited to a festival on Thanksgiving eve. It seemed quite
necessary to draw a moral lesson in the attempt to overthrow such a
deeply seated custom, and this was done through a series of tableaus
and dances with connecting narrative.
The probable historical setting of the Thanksgiving custom was presented
through scenes of the Dutch in Holland, during the troublesome times
of William of Orange, when the sea beggars made their famous pledge.
Two tableaus showing the court scene and the banquet of the beggars
were followed by a costume dance by small boys, which was called the
"beggars' march." The English contribution to the celebrations was in
tableaus from the history of the Guy Fawkes plot. The Dutch and English
transferred to America were shown by Peter Stuyvesant and his surrender;
the southern scenes with their harvest ideas through a colored
plantation sketch; the Puritans and Indians by tableaus and Indian squaw
dances. Then followed the times of the Revolution, with the tyranny of
the British, the spirit of '76, and the Evacuation Day celebration on
November 25, 1783.
The tableaus were given in costume by the young people and children,
about seventy-five taking part. The members of the Civic Club, composed
of mothers and neighborhood women did a great deal in preparing the
costumes and dressing the actors.
The settlement had the valuable help of Miss Mari R. Hofer in preparing
Dutch and Indian dances, and of Howard Bradstreet, the narrator of the
evening.
Admission was by tickets given in clubs and classes, and the seating
capacity of three hundred and twenty-five was taxed to over five
hundred. But the carnival spirit was in the midst and no one minded
the necessity of standing on a chair with a friend or two in order to
catch an occasional glimpse of the stage. Several of the star performers
became so interested in the audience that it was necessary to snatch
the nearest boys or girls as the occasion demanded, hustle them to the
improvised "green" room, hastily dress them in remaining fragments of
costumes far removed from the historic time, and with impromptu coaching
from the wings, an attitude was struck worthy of any Dutch patriot or
Puritan dignitary.
The most gratifying results of the performance were that the begging
on the street was greatly diminished. Many of the children did dress up
and beg, for of course we could not expect a complete reformation on
Sands street. But up to eleven o'clock not a begging child had been seen
on Asacog corner. Later in the day little beggars began to appear but
in smaller numbers and at three o'clock in the afternoon, a very lively
hour, all the children on the block were out playing their ordinary
street games, and but one child was in fancy costume. From one tenement
from which twenty children begged last year, but two indulged this year,
one mother having been to the festival, and really beginning to realize
the dangers of street gaieties for the first time, refused to permit
her eight year old girl to parade in fancy dress, at which the child
volunteered to stay in bed, feeling life was too dull for words, and
besides she was tired from the night before, the carnival spirit having
worked itself out. In reality it was the "day after the fun."
FOLK DANCES IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL
The pupils in the Lincoln School, situated in the suburbs of Burlington,
Iowa, feel no restraint from want of room to play, for the school
grounds are as large as a small park, and stretches of prairie land
roll before and behind the building. Beautiful oaks and elms form tiny
forests round about, a brook rushes through the outskirts, and in each
season nature calls so loudly to the boy that it requires all the
ingenuity of teachers and truant officers to keep him in school. Many
nationalities have congregated in this part of the city, for it is a
factory district, and each September there are enrolled little Germans,
Russians, Swiss and Irish who are instinctively antagonistic to one
another.
The teachers of Lincoln School have found it advisable to be present
during the noon hour, as well as during recess, to prevent the playing
of rough games in which many children were injured, or which resulted in
fighting.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
About ten years ago a may-pole was introduced, which revolutionized
the school. A small organ was carried into the yard and as many as
forty children took part in this dance at the same time. About five
years ago, fearing that this dance would become monotonous, other folk
dances were introduced, and now one may see during all intermissions,
groups of boys and girls dancing the _gavotte der kaiserin_, Irish
reel, Highland fling, sword dance, dance of the Alpine peasants and
the minuet. In order that even these should not become uninteresting,
costumes have been provided for each dance, and this is bound to be the
greatest aid in discipline; for what boy will play truant when he can
impersonate Washington in the minuet or some Scottish hero in the sword
dance or Highland fling. To defray the expense of the costumes, a play
was given,--Spyri's Heidi. This met with such success that they now
have a dramatic club, whose members have presented Old-Fashioned Girl,
Eight Cousins and Little Baron to large audiences in the Opera House.
Many unruly boys have become docile, after impersonating some genuinely
honest boy character. The manners and dress of both boys and girls have
been much improved since they have taken part in these plays.
The folk-dances have been used in this school for so many years that all
are prepared to say that they are a success with the boys in as great a
degree as they are with the girls. A boy seldom refuses to join in the
dances. The most enjoyable period during the session is the time of the
rhythmic play. They need no other punishment for disobedience than to
threaten to refuse to play for the folk dances.
THE STANDARD FOR A CITY'S SURVEY
GRAHAM TAYLOR
Social research on a city-wide scale is a contemporary product.
Appropriately old London was the first to have its living conditions
comprehensively investigated. To Charles Booth belongs the credit of
having initiated and set the type of such enquiry. His great work in
seventeen volumes on Life and Labor in London standardized methods
and results in some lines of civic investigation. Its data were
almost entirely derived from secondary documentary sources furnished
by official records and the reports of voluntary agencies, but the
originality with which it is everywhere stamped lies in the handling and
verifying of the material thus acquired. The whole great analysis and
synthesis of the largest city population of the world, thus attempted
for the first time, deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest
achievements of the closing decade of the nineteenth century. That this
brave pioneering was attempted by one of London's great shippers, and
that it was so successfully carried through to completion at a cost
of twenty years of labor and a quarter million of dollars, also sets
a standard of self-exacting citizenship worthy alike of the world's
greatest city and of one of its most modest and personally resourceful
citizens.
The extent to which this survey of London afforded intelligent incentive
and basis for the reconstructive civic spirit and work which attended
and followed it is demonstrated by contemporary history. The voluntary
efforts to improve conditions, and the London County Council's
achievement in increasing open and street spaces and in furnishing
housing and other equipment for city life, were on a scale befitting
the foundation in fact substantially laid by Mr. Booth's monumental
work. Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and many provincial cities received
impetus and direction in their heroic efforts to ascertain and improve
their own conditions.
Seebohm Rowntree followed Mr. Booth's example in his study of poverty in
York, but went beyond his methods in making a first hand investigation
of the facts. Robert W. deForest and Lawrence Veiller set the type for
American enquiry into city conditions by their investigation and reports
of the Tenement House Problem in New York. And now the Pittsburgh Survey
registers the most inclusive standard thus far set in ascertaining
the facts of living conditions in a typical industrial community. In
cooperating to carry through this constructive survey the Russell Sage
Foundation and this magazine achieve the most noteworthy fulfilment of
their common purpose to improve social and living conditions in the
United States.
PREACHING AND PRACTICE
JACOB A. RIIS
[Illustration]
These two Christmas stamps are next of kin. Our Red Cross stamp is the
youngest child of the Danish _Julemarke_ which sprang out of a country
postmaster's brain to take its place among the most effective weapons
in the world-wide fight with the white plague. Of what stout stock the
family are,--it is a big family by this time, with sons and daughters in
many lands,--this year's issue of the Danish stamp tells at a glance.
For the big building pictured in it is the "Christmas Stamp Sanatorium,"
built for tuberculous children out of the half pennies the Danish people
have given these five years as their contribution to the great campaign.
[Illustration]
Denmark is a little country. All in all it has not much more than half
as many people as the Greater New York, if indeed it has so many. Yet
in so short a time it has wrought so great a tangible result. What it
has further wrought in the way of arousing public interest and guiding
public education in this matter is beyond calculation. For the last is
the biggest end of the work of the Christmas stamp, wherever it goes.
In New York city two years ago we raised a great outcry about child
cripples, made so by tuberculosis. We counted five thousand or more
in the tenements of the metropolis and decided that their one chance
of life lay in building a hospital on the seashore, on the lines of
the little one now run on Coney Island by the Association for the
Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. Forthwith money was raised,
a quarter of a million of dollars, to build a much bigger one with,
and architects were set to work to draw plans. The city appropriated
a site in a great seashore park, to be laid out for the people. Then
there happened what so often happens in New York when a great public
enterprise is to be carried out. It ran into a rut, somehow. Money
became tight, the controller could not find the funds, park and hospital
were side-tracked and stayed so.
They are side-tracked yet. The money kind-hearted New Yorkers gave for
the children is in the bank. The little cripples still crawl around
their tenements. The winds blow over the ocean and waste their healing
balm. The park is as far away as ever. And the purses of the charitable
snap with an extra twist of tightness when they think of it all. Next
time we shall plead the children's cause in vain.
That is the way of New York. The picture above tells the way of poor
little Denmark. No doubt there is an excuse, or a string of them, for
the American city. But excuses do not mend aching joints and wasted
frames. How long before New York will catch up with Denmark? Would it
not be fine if this lusty son of a worthy sire, the Red Cross Christmas
stamp, were to help get us started again?
RAILWAY ACCIDENTS
EMORY R. JOHNSON
University of Pennsylvania
The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman by J. O. Fagan is an
exceptionally able book, worthy of the serious attention of every
student of the causes of railroad accidents.[1] The author gives his
qualifications for writing the book by saying that he "has been a
telegraph operator and tower-man for twenty-seven years and part of the
time chief clerk to a railroad superintendent," and he further adds that
"the extent of territory covered by this experience is even wider than
one would suppose. For a telegraph operator is, of necessity, one of the
best posted men in the service." In addition to this experience from
which a knowledge of the subject has been gained, the author possesses
a remarkably well trained mind and has command of exceptionally clean
English.
[1] The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman, J. O. Fagan. Pp. 182.
Price $1.00, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1908. This book may be
obtained at publisher's price through the offices of CHARITIES AND THE
COMMONS.
The main thesis of the book is that accidents are due mainly to
non-observance of rules. "Railroad managers, therefore, sooner or later
will come to understand that the one thing needed in the railroad
service at the present day is to educate employes to appreciate the fact
that successful and safe railroading in the future will have to depend,
not upon the multiplication of safety devices or the reconstruction of
rules, but upon the personal effort and conduct of conscientious, alert,
and careful men." Furthermore, the author has "arrived at the conclusion
that on our railroads the interests of the community have become
secondary to those of the employe and his organization." Mr. Fagan also
maintains that "it is actually a matter of reasonable demonstration
that at least seventy-five per cent of the casualties might be avoided
by increase of interest on the part of the employe, and the earnest
concentration of his best thought on the subject."
[Illustration: FROM CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN]
The natural remedy for the situation, as stated by Mr. Fagan, would lie
in the observance by employes of the company's rules and regulations,
in the discipline by the management of all employes for each and every
non-observance of any rule, and the enforcement of discipline with
appropriate penalties regardless of the personality of those subjected
to discipline. The enforcement of discipline, moreover, should not be
made to depend upon consequences resulting from non-observance of rules.
Employes should be penalized by loss of pay for their disregard of
the rules or regulations whether their actions do or do not result in
casualties.
Mr. Fagan, however, believes, and brings convincing evidence to show,
that the above remedy is beyond hope. The organizations of which the
railroad employes are members take the position that the member who
violates a rule is to be defended against condemnation by the public
or discipline by the management. Instead of taking the view that the
interests of the public are paramount to those of any individual
railroad employe, the railroad employes' organization seeks invariably
to shield its members against the consequences of their actions.
Furthermore, the managers of most railroads have decided that the strict
enforcement of the rules and the punishment of those who do not observe
the rules result in so many controversies with the labor unions and
are so destructive of harmonious relations between the company and the
unions, that it is better to strive for harmony rather than to enforce
discipline. In other words, discipline and the safety of the public
are made subsidiary to the maintenance of harmonious relations with
the employes. Such being the situation, Mr. Fagan believes that reform
is not to be expected within railway management but must come from the
outside as the result of the exercise of governmental authority. The
government must punish employes for non-observance of rules and penalize
railroad officers for the non-enforcement of their regulations.
The analyses and arguments of the book are convincing. The position
taken by Mr. Fagan is one the accuracy of which will doubtless be
vigorously denied by the organizations of railroad employes and will be
to some extent questioned by the responsible management of railroads.
However, it seems to the author of this review that Mr. Fagan has
established his thesis.
INDUSTRIAL ITALY
ARTHUR P. KELLOGG
The simple Italian peasant, he whose meager village life was so
accurately drawn by Mr. Mangano in earlier issues of this magazine, is
familiar in every city in this country, and we have in America what
is probably a fair appreciation of his poverty, his hardships and the
longing for better things which send great blocks of the population
of rural provinces flocking across the Atlantic. Of industrial Italy
we know less, having few sources of information. If the life of the
factory towns is really as bad as The Forewarners,[2] by Giovanni Cena,
makes it,--if wages are as low, work as hard, housing as squalid and
amusements as few,--then we have in the book a story of remarkable
growth in wretchedness, for the manufacturing towns of northern Italy
are, as Mrs. Humphry Ward points out in the introduction to the English
translation, only forty years old.
[2] The Forewarners, Giovanni Cena, 1908, New York, Doubleday, Page and
Company. Price $1.50. This book may be ordered at publisher's price
through the office of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS.
The book makes clear the source of the socialist vote in the Italian
Parliament and the human stuff which the railway and other big strikes
are made of. It is, supposedly, the life story of a Turin printer.
Starting as the son of a clay digger, he graduates into the working
world after a childhood spent in an orphanage. Having some little
education more than his fellows, he becomes a proofreader for a house
which is putting on the Italian market the standard works of science
and philosophy in all languages. This gives him stronger meat than a
weak body and an overwrought mind can digest, and he becomes oppressed
with the wrongs of his class, with the grind of the factory and the
squalid life of the house where he has a tiny cell in the garret. There
he piles up, in proof sheets, a library of the greatest books in the
world. Pouring over them by night, half-fed, unsociable, brooding, his
mind slips gradually from its moorings and he throws his life away as
a sacrifice, for this book, the story of his life and the story of his
class, is hidden in his bosom. A tragic death, he believes, will cause
it to be published and set afoot nothing short of a revolution.
The book does not tell the manner of his death, but it implies that he
threw himself in front of the King's automobile, which he often met in
his wanderings outside the city. It typified to him the oppression which
he felt,--"the griefs of others I have such a longing to relieve that
the desire becomes a torment to me, and I cannot shake myself free from
it except by action." Of the automobile drivers he had written: "Whilst
the nobility are trying to draw in their claws so as not to exasperate
us, here come these bourgeoise parvenus to insult us in our own house.
Yes, in our own house, for the highroad belongs to the peasant and
the poor man." His studies, which put him above the other workmen,
were themselves his undoing, for the substance of Tolstoi and Spencer
became so much more to him than the form, that his work grew bad and
worse until he was discharged,--an incident convincing to one who has
attempted to read proof with an eye to things greater than commas and
spelling.
Out of it all he worked a scheme of things as they ought to be, which,
whether it came from the proofreader or from the author who takes a
proofreader's smarting sense of wrong as his theme, makes an interesting
program:
A king who has a lofty ideal of society wishes to lead his
subjects up to it by his methods of government, and is willing
to abdicate when he feels that they are really free. His chief
instruments in the work of redemption are doctors and school
teachers. On the one hand freedom, on the other action. Freedom
from error whilst doing everything to favor and afford sufficient
light. A tendency to abolish all forms of restraint, from the
material ones for criminals to the moral ones for all men; from
handcuffs to laws. The gradual abolition of hereditary rights of
property; every human being to have the needful, and everything
to return to a common fund at his death. The legal personality of
women, and the equality of the sexes, to be recognized as steps
to the conquest of individuality, liberty, happiness. Each to be
free to develop to the utmost his own life, his own affections.
Birth and education to be protected. Rest to be ensured to old age.
Public hygiene to be watched over till disease be eliminated. Every
facility to be afforded to manufactures, commerce and science, so
as to encourage man to conquer himself, the earth, the heavens.
Faith in progress, as if it were not,--and it is not,--destined to
die with our earth. The worship of life.
Such a scheme and the style and force of the book are difficult to
associate with the neurasthenic proofreader, skilfully as the author has
drawn the background and made the man's thought develop over his proof
table.
But whether the character be drawn convincingly or not, the book gives
a wonderfully clear and sharp-cut picture of the environment of such a
worker. Some bits of description stand out above the others, one of them
the Turin tenement, where "from the first flights of stairs, carpeted
and warmed by hot air pipes, to the bare flight of our top floor, the
steps grew ever steeper and steeper. Each evening we passed through
all the social zones, hot, temperate and cold; we were lodged in the
arctic regions." There were 142 of these steps to the top floor, where
naught but poverty dwelt,--a penniless poet with a sister who supported
him, a lonely working girl, a woman of the streets, a drunkard and his
screaming, beaten wife and half-witted children, and Cimisin, a cobbler,
who always "was whistling at full speed to the accompaniment of his
hammer. The tears of women, the curses of drunkards, had for so many
years mingled with the merriment of that harmless madman."
His history of the printing shop is complete and modern, even to the
point where the men went back to their cases after a strike, only to
find that long rows of linotypes with women operators had displaced
them. These women, he thought, might have among them one fitted to be
his mate, but he was too shy to seek her out. He could see them only as
workers at the almost human machines, or where "the cylinders revolved
with a loud din, the sheets rained out one on top of the other,
the women in their long overalls kept on repeating their monotonous
movements, feeding the sheets into the press or collecting them into
piles. On two side platforms the women were in constant motion. A
hundred women and a hundred men. It was impossible to imagine that
relations other than those existing between the several parts of a
machine might be formed between these beings created for a mutual
understanding." Still he wonders vaguely if
perhaps in this uniformity of action, foreign to and apart
from the monotonous toil which exhausts them, something exists,
smiles, shines? Have some got a small bird singing in their hearts
whilst their hands grow grimy at the wheel?... No love of their
work,--that is to say of their life,--inspired them; each of them
constantly saw the work of an hour, a mere fragment, leave his
hands anonymously and forever, and none of them could ever say of
anything, "That is my work!" What will remain of them at the end of
their lives to prove that they have lived? In truth, they have not
lived.
Of the women in his tenement, girls who were not harnessed to a factory,
he found even less of life, though perhaps more of womanhood. Going with
his friend to see the latter's young sister in a maternity hospital, he
reflects that this is the way with many of them,--"love leads to the
hospital." The patients there are mostly unmarried girls. The married
ones have few children now. "How talk of love, of family life, in a
society which deals out the same ration to the single man and to the
father of a family?"
His friend starves, the sister dies, the drunkard's wife, mother of six,
takes her life,--everyone whom he knew, it seems, all the associates
high up in the attic of the "aëropolis," come to grief and misery and
death. He greatly admires the woman, a physician, who visits them.
"She picks up, joins, straightens out innumerable threads; she seems
to be weaving a tapestry of which she will only complete a tiny bit, a
work which she has inherited from one generation and will transmit to
another." She offers him a part in her work, but he feels "incapable
of giving myself in small doses." He is impatient, irritable for
"something ready to hand, swift as lightning," that shall right all
wrongs and ease all pain at a stroke. He cannot work with others, or for
others, and so he tucks his story into his bosom and starts out to meet
the King's car. Almost at the last he confesses, "I have passed beside
life."
SCHOOL REPORTS[3]
Reviewed by ROLAND P. FALKNER
To the great majority of people the school report is the only tangible
evidence of what the school administration is doing. The citizens
generally cannot be expected to know what goes on in the school rooms or
in the meetings of boards of education, nor what is taking shape in the
back of the superintendent's head. Even were they afforded the utmost
opportunity and gifted with such unusual perception, it is not likely
that without convenient summaries and condensed statements they could
form any idea of the public school system as a whole.
[3] School Reports and School Efficiency by David S. Snedden and William
H. Allen for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School
Children. New York, 1908. Pp. 183. This book will be sent by CHARITIES
AND THE COMMONS postpaid for $1.50.
If the school report is at once the evidence and test of the school
administration, it is clear that its ideal is such a marshalling of the
facts regarding the schools of the city as will give the reasonably
intelligent citizen a clear notion of just how well the schools are
performing the duties entrusted to them.
The book before us is a study of the school reports for the purpose of
ascertaining how far and in what manner they seek to embody such ideal.
It is a study in comparative administration.
This study reveals so wide a diversity among school reports as to
preclude the idea of any consensus of opinion as to what they should
contain. While uniformity of scope and treatment is not to be expected,
it might reasonably be anticipated that the similar purposes of the
school administration in different places would give to these reports
a certain family resemblance. In so far as such a resemblance can
be traced, it does not appear to be so much the result of parallel
internal development as the product of external compulsion or
suggestion. State educational departments charged with allotment of
state school funds according to a fixed unit in school work, have led to
an emphasis upon such units. A similar influence has been exerted by the
United States Bureau of Education in its request for information along
certain definite lines.
Apart from these influences tending toward a certain uniformity, there
are other forces working in the same direction though less effectively.
The trend of present discussion in educational affairs is not without
its influence, and when certain facts are needed to point a moral or
adorn a tale the experience of other cities points to investigations
or arrangements of material which are new to the city in question.
Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a
theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National
Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly
fruitless.
With these general considerations by way of introduction, the work takes
up its main theme, the scope of educational statistics. In them we find
the condensation of educational experience, and here more than in other
parts of the text we should expect the experience and practice of one
city to be helpful to another. Too often, indeed almost universally, the
tables of facts are isolated from the text of the report, and no effort
is made to explain their meaning or set forth the salient features which
they present. In view of the volume of tabular matter there is a painful
poverty of interpretation.
The method pursued by the author in his record of the facts, is to
furnish a specimen table from the different reports in regard to each
matter touched upon, a selection of the simpler and then the more
detailed statements to be found in them. The following heads are
treated in this way: School plant, expenditure, census, attendance,
age of pupils, promotions, survival, compulsory attendance, high
schools, vacation schools, libraries, medical inspection, teachers
and summaries. The variety of forms exhibited is highly instructive
although, it may be confessed, somewhat bewildering. The author has
confined himself so strictly to a study of methods that he is disposed
to let the tables speak for themselves. There is here, too, an absence
of interpretation. Tables of figures may speak for themselves but to
understand them one must know their language. One cannot help but feel
that in many cases some explanation why the detailed tables are to be
regarded as superior, other than the fact that they are more detailed,
would have been more illuminating and would have relieved somewhat the
monotony of this important chapter for the general reader.
No attempt is made to outline a model report. We have instead in chapter
5 a series of questions which might be answered in a school report. The
list does not pretend to be exhaustive but in reality it constitutes a
somewhat formidable program, if it be assumed that the greater part of
these questions should receive attention.
Conscious of the fact that somewhat staggering demands are made on
the school administration, the discussion of "suggested economies and
improvement" comes as an antidote. This is a brief discussion of short
cuts and methods to get at desired results. It looks to a simplification
of records and such forms and registers as will supply the needed
information, without excessive work. This is a very vital point and the
suggestions as far as they go are admirable.
While the subject presented in these pages is thoroughly technical,
the work may be commended most heartily to school authorities and to
all who are interested in the progress of our schools. It is an appeal
for exact information and should not be passed by without a hearing.
Such information in regard to our schools,--one of the most important
branches of our government,--is painfully lacking. It has too often
been assumed that the management of schools was a matter for experts of
which outsiders could not properly judge. Within certain limits this
is true, but it does not distinguish between the scholastic and the
administrative sides of school work. We undoubtedly need both among
our school authorities, and in the public at large a keener perception
of the requisites of a sound and effective administration. It is not,
perhaps, too much to say that there is no great business enterprise of
the people of which they know so little as they do of their schools. In
private affairs such ignorance on the part of directors and stockholders
would lead to bankruptcy.
The authorship of the several chapters of the book is distinctly stated.
The general considerations herein briefly noted are the work of Dr.
Snedden; the particular application to the city of New York is the work
of Dr. Allen. Those who are familiar with Dr. Allen's work answer that
he can always be relied upon for a readable and spicy statement. But
in view of the predominantly local interest of his discussion and the
inexorable limits of space, it has seemed best in the foregoing notice
to lay the greater emphasis on those large aspects of the subject which
are from the pen of Dr. Snedden.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._]
HYMN OF PITTSBURGH
BY RICHARD REALF
My father was mighty Vulcan,
I am Smith of the land and sea,
The cunning spirit of Tubal Cain
Came with my marrow to me;
I think great thoughts strong-winged with steel,
I coin vast iron acts,
And weld the impalpable dream of Seers
Into utile lyric facts.
I am monarch of all the forges,
I have solved the riddle of fire,
The Amen of Nature to need of Man,
Echoes at my desire;
I search with the subtle soul of flame,
The heart of the rocky earth,
And out from my anvils the prophecies
Of the miracle years blaze forth.
I am swart with the soot of my chimneys,
I drip with the sweats of toil,
I quell and scepter the savage wastes
And charm the curse from the soil;
I fling the bridges across the gulfs,
That hold us from the To Be,
And build the roads for the bannered march
Of crowned Humanity.
Published in the _National Labor Tribune_,
Saturday, February 23, 1878.
[Illustration: _Chautauqua Photographic Co._
PITTSBURGH.
THE POINT, AS SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE SOUTH SIDE.]
[Illustration: THE PITTSBURGH ARCH SESQUI-CENTENNIAL WEEK.]
THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY
PAUL U. KELLOGG
Engineers have a simple process by which in half an hour's time they
strike off a "blue print" from a drawing into which has gone the
imagination of a procession of midnights, and the exacting work of a
vast company of days.
God and man and nature,--whosoever you will,--have draughted a mighty
and irregular industrial community at the headwaters of the Ohio; they
have splashed, as Kipling puts it, at a ten league canvas with brushes
of comet's hair. Under the name of the Pittsburgh Survey, Charities
Publication Committee has carried on a group of social investigations
in this great steel district. In a sense, we have been blue-printing
Pittsburgh. Our findings will be published in a series of special
numbers of which this is the first, covering in order:
I.--The People;
II.--The Place;
III.--The Work.
Full reports are to be published later in a series of volumes by the
Russell Sage Foundation and, throughout, the text will be reinforced
with such photographs, pastels, maps, charts, diagrams and tables as
will help give substance and reality to our presentations of fact.
In this sense, then, it is a blue print of Pittsburgh, that we attempt.
At least the analogy of the draughting room may make it clear that the
work, as we conceive it, lies, like the blue print, within modest outlay
and reasonable human compass. Our presentation must frankly lack the
mechanical fidelity and inclusiveness of the engineer's negative; but we
can endeavor to bring out in relief the organic truth of the situation
by giving body and living color, as we see them, to what would otherwise
be but the thin white tracings of a town.
Occasional articles have been published during the year, but the results
of the Survey are put forward for the first time as a consecutive
whole in the pages that follow. Here is the place, then, for a simple
statement of the drive and scope of the work as conceived by those who
have carried it forward:
The Pittsburgh Survey has been a rapid, close range investigation of
living conditions in the Pennsylvania steel district. It has been
carried on by a special staff organized under the national publication
committee which prints this magazine. It has been financed chiefly by
three grants, of moderate amount, from the Russell Sage Foundation for
the Improvement of Living Conditions. It has been made practicable by
co-operation from two quarters,--from a remarkable group of leaders
and organizations in social and sanitary movements in different parts
of the United States, who entered upon the field work as a piece of
national good citizenship; and from men, women and organizations in
Pittsburgh who were large-minded enough to regard their local situation
as not private and peculiar, but a part of the American problem of city
building.
The outcome has been a spirited piece of inter-state co-operation in
getting at the urban fact in a new way. For consider what has already
been done in this field in America. We have counted our city populations
regularly every ten years,--in some states every five. We have known
that the country has grown and spread out stupendously within the
century, and that within that period our cities have spread out and
filled up with even greater resistlessness. How goes it with them? What
more do we know? True, we have profited by incisive analyses of one
factor or another which enters into social well-being,--tuberculosis,
factory legislation, infant mortality, public education, to name
examples; and we have heard the needs of particular neighborhoods
described by those who know them. But there is something further,
synthetic and clarifying, to be gained by a sizing up process that
reckons at once with many factors in the life of a great civic area, not
going deeply into all subjects, but offering a structural exhibit of
the community as a going concern. This is what the examining physician
demands before he accepts us as an insurance risk, what a modern farmer
puts his soils and stock through before he plants his crops, what the
consulting electrician performs as his first work when he is called in
to overhaul a manufacturing plant. And this, in the large, has been the
commission undertaken by the Pittsburgh Survey.
The main work was set under way in September, 1907, when a company
of men and women of established reputation as students of social and
industrial problems, spent the month in Pittsburgh. On the basis of
their diagnosis, a series of specialized investigations was projected
along a few of the lines which promised significant results. The staff
has included not only trained investigators but also representatives
of the different races who make up so large a share of the working
population dealt with. Limitations of time and money set definite bounds
to the work, which will become clear as the findings are presented.
The experimental nature of the undertaking, and the unfavorable trade
conditions which during the past year have reacted upon economic life in
all its phases, have set other limits. Our inquiries have dealt with the
wage-earners of Pittsburgh (a) in their relation to the community as a
whole, and (b) in their relation to industry. Under the former we have
studied the genesis and racial make-up of the population; its physical
setting and its social institutions; under the latter we have studied
the general labor situation; hours, wages, and labor control in the
steel industry; child labor, industrial education, women in industry,
the cost of living, and industrial accidents.
From the first, the work of the investigations has been directed to the
service of local movements for improvement. For, as stated in a mid-year
announcement of the Survey, we have been studying the community at a
time when nascent social forces are asserting themselves. Witness the
election of an independent mayor three years ago, and Mr. Guthrie's
present fight to clear councils of graft. Within the field of the
Survey and within one year, the Pittsburgh Associated Charities has
been organized; the force of tenement inspectors has been doubled
and has carried out a first general housing census, and a scientific
inquiry, under the name of the Pittsburgh Typhoid Commission, has been
instituted into the disease which has been endemic in the district
for over a quarter of a century. A civic improvement commission,
representative in membership and perhaps broader in scope than any
similar body in the country, is now in process of formation.
A display of wall maps, enlarged photographs, housing plans, and
other graphic material was the chief feature of a civic exhibit held
in Carnegie Institute in November and December, following the joint
conventions in Pittsburgh of the American Civic Association and the
National Municipal League. The local civic bearings of the Survey were
the subject of the opening session of these conventions. Its economic
aspects were brought forward at a joint session of the American Economic
Association and the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City in
December.
[Illustration: SCHEME OF THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY.
From Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit, Carnegie Institute, November-December,
1908.]
The present issue is frankly introductory. It deals with the city as
a community of people. Pittsburgh is usually defined in other terms.
First among American cities in the production of iron and steel, we
are told that it ranks fifth as a general manufacturing center. There
are forty-seven furnaces within forty miles of the heart of the city,
with an annual capacity of over seven million tons of pig iron,--more
than twenty-five per cent of the total production in the United States.
Statistics of the American iron trade for 1907 show that Allegheny
county produced a fourth of all Bessemer steel and a third of all open
hearth steel, a fifth of all rails rolled in the United States, a third
of all plates and sheets, and very nearly a half of all structural
shapes. Pittsburgh proper ranked fourth in foundry and machine shop
products, second in brick and tile, pottery and fire clay, and first
in electrical apparatus and supplies. In coal and coke, tin plate,
glass, cork, and sheet metal,--in products as varied as the fifty-seven
varieties of the pickles in which it excels,--its output is a national
asset. Pittsburgh stands tenth in postal receipts and fifth in bank
deposits. Its banking capital exceeds that of the banks of the North Sea
empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states. Here is
a town, then, big with its works.
[Illustration: BLAST FURNACES AT NIGHT.]
Again, there is a temptation to define Pittsburgh in terms of the matrix
in which the community is set, and the impress of this matrix on the
soul of its people no less than on the senses of the visitor. Pipe lines
that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges,
four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, wires surcharged
with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes,
bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole.
The approaching traveller has ample warning. Hillsides and valleys are
seamed with rows of coke ovens, gaunt tipples bend above mine mouths,
derricks and bull-wheels stand over fuel wells, and low lying mill
buildings, sided with corrugated iron, rear their clusters of stacks
like the pipes of huge swarthy Pans. Then comes the city with its
half-conquered smoke cloud, with its high, bare hills and its hunch of
imposing structures. The place to see Pittsburgh from is a much whittled
little stand on the high bluff of Mt. Washington, where votaries of
the national game assemble on a clear afternoon and spy upon a patch
of green in Allegheny City, hundreds of feet below them, and more than
a mile away across the Ohio River. Their business is with Honus Wagner
and the three-bagger he is going to knock out. But yours can be with the
great Y of the rivers, churned by stern-wheeled steamers and patched
here and there with black fleets of coal barges. Below you to the right
is the South Side; to the left across the rivers, is Allegheny City,
and between them is a little trowel of land piled high with office
buildings. This is the "Point," cut short as it is by the "Hump" and
by higher hills behind; and flanked by narrow river banks that grudge
a foothold to the sounding workshops and lead up and down to the mill
towns. You are looking at commercial Pittsburgh. From the Herron Hill
reservoir, mid-way between the forks of the Y, you get a panorama of the
other side of the community,--Shenley Park to the right of you, with
the Carnegie buildings and the ample residences of the East End, and
to the left, long swales of small, thickly built houses that make up
Lawrenceville and the adjoining home areas.
But it is at night that the red and black of the Pittsburgh flag marks
the town for its own. The lines of coke ovens seen from the car windows
have become huge scythes, saw-edged with fire. The iron-sheathed
mills are crated flame. Great fans of light and shadow wig-wag above
furnaces and converters. From Cliff street, the lamps of Allegheny lie
thick and clustered like a crushed sky, but from the bridges that span
the Monongahela between the mills,--where choleric trains shuttle on
either bank, and the rolls are at thumping war with the sliding, red
billets,--the water welds the sparks and the yellow tumult, and you
feel as if here were the forges of the sunrise, where beam and span and
glowing plate are fabricating into the framework of dawns that shall
"come up like thunder." Here,--if we doubted it before,--is a town that
works; and that works in a big way.
But the people, rather than the product or the setting, concern us. In
December, 1907, Pittsburgh and Allegheny were merged, and the Greater
City entered the class of Baltimore, St. Louis and Boston. This is
the half-million class. Last September, Pittsburgh celebrated its
one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and a street pageant exhibited
both the industrial vigor of the community, and the variety of its
people. There was a company of Corn Planter Indians, descendants of
the aboriginal Pittsburghers; there were floats representing the early
settlers; there were Scotchmen with kilts and bagpipes; nor were they
all. A wagon load of Italians bore a transparency,--"Romans dig your
sewers," and Polish, Slovak and other racial organizations marched in
the costumes of their native countries. For the life of the city has
become intricate and rich in the picturesque. That old man you passed on
the street was a Morgan raider, and behind him trudged a common soldier
of the Japanese War. Here is an American whose Pittsburgh is the marble
corridors of an office building, and the night desks of the men in shirt
sleeves and green eye shades; and here, one whose Pittsburgh reaches
back to a stately old parlor with gilt-framed mirrors and spindling
Chippendale. Here is "Belle," who exchanges her winter in the workhouse
for a summer in a jon-boat, which she reaches by a plank. Here is the
_gazda_ who ruined himself that his boarders might not starve. And here,
the inventor who works with many men in a great laboratory and scraps a
thousand dollars' worth of experimentation at the turn of a hand. Here
is a gallery of miners pounding their grimy fists at a speech by Haywood
in the old town hall; and here a bunch of half-sobered Slavs in the
Sunday morning police court.
You do not know the Pittsburgh District until you have heard the
Italians twanging their mandolins round a construction campfire, and
seen the mad whirling of a Slovak dance in a mill town lodge hall; until
you have watched the mill hands burst out from the gates at closing
time; or thrown confetti on Fifth avenue on a Halloween. Within a few
blocks of the skyscrapers of the Point, I have seen a company of Syrians
weaving almost unceasingly for four days a desert dance that celebrated
the return of one of them to Jerusalem. (An Irishman thought it a wake.)
A possum swings by the tail at Christmastide in front of that Negro
store in Wylie avenue; long bearded Old Believers play bottle pool in
that Second avenue barroom; a Yiddish father and five children lie sick
on the floor of this tenement; this old Bohemian woman cleaned molds as
a girl in the iron works of Prague; that itinerant cobbler made shoes
last winter for the German children of the South Side, who were too poor
to pay for them, and stuffed the soles with thick cardboard when he was
too poor to buy leather. Here is a Scotch Calvinist, and there a Slavic
free thinker; here a peasant, and there a man who works from a blue
print; engineers, drag outs, and furnace-men from the mill district;
yeggs and floppers and '69ers from the lower reaches of the city;
strippers and core makers and coffin buffers. There a Russian exile
with a price on his head, and here a Shaker of old Pennsylvania stock!
You have heard of Shakespeare's London, of the port of Lisbon in the
days of the Spanish Main, of the mixtures of caste and race and faith
on the trade routes of the East. They are of the ilk of Pittsburgh. How
to get orderly plans of social betterment out of the study of such a
community is at first sight a staggering question. But the clue to its
answer is that same fact that stood out when we looked at Pittsburgh as
a city of tonnage and incandescence. These people are here to work. This
fact once grasped in its bearings and we get a foothold for estimating
Pittsburgh. The wage earners become a fairly well-defined belt in the
population. What the issues of life and labor mean to them will help
us in understanding the trend of conditions in industrial communities
generally.
First, you have the mere fact of aggregation. Pittsburgh has as many
people as the whole state of Pennsylvania had at the opening of the last
century; Allegheny county as many as at that time the commonwealths of
Massachusetts and New York combined. The Greater City has twice as many
as all the future cities of the United States had in 1800; as many as
Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, combined, in 1850.
Here, then, is a community worthy of as serious statesmanship as that
which has served whole commonwealths at critical periods in our national
advance. Now in all history, cities have never reproduced themselves.
They draw on the country districts to replace the stock that they burn
out. But when one-third of the total population comes to live in cities,
they can no longer do this. It becomes vitally important that city
people live well, else the race lapses. At risk, then, of going over old
ground, let us look at some of the dynamic influences that affect the
life of this particular community.
No American city presents in a more clear-cut way than Pittsburgh the
abrupt change from British and Teutonic immigration. Sociologists
tell us that in the mid-eastern valleys of Europe successive waves of
broad-headed, long-headed, dark and fair peoples gathered force and
swept westward to become Kelt and Saxon and Swiss and Scandinavian and
Teuton. They were the bulwark which obstructed the march of Hun and Goth
and Turk and Tartar, sweeping in from the East. It is from Slavs and
mixed people of this old midland, with racial and religious loves and
hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to
work out civilization under tense conditions. A vineyard blighted, a
pogrom, torture, persecution, crime, poverty, dislodge them, and they
come.
Further, the sociologists tell us that by mixed peoples the greatest
advances have been made. It was in Amsterdam, Venice, London, and the
Hanse towns, places of mart which brought together the blood and
cultures of distant races,--it was here that democracy gathered head and
the arts flourished. But in Pittsburgh are the elements of a mixture
yet more marvelous. A common fund of Slavic words, almost a Pittsburgh
dialect, is finding currency. The Pole still speaks Polish, but he makes
an adaptation of his words, and the Slovak understands. The Syrian and
Arabian peddlers know these words and use them in selling their wares in
the courts and settlements,--a contrast to the great gulfs that still
separate the Slav and the English-speaking.
Furthermore, the city is the frontier of to-day. We have appropriated
and parcelled out most of our free land. The edge of settlement is
no longer open as a safety valve for foot-loose rebels against the
fixity of things. They come to the cities. They swarm in new hives. To
Pittsburgh especially where men deal with devil-may-care risks and great
stakes, come the adventurous and the unreckoning. A smack of the mining
camp is in the air about the mill yards.
The life to which these people come is different from that known of any
previous generations. We have seen how in Pittsburgh traction lines,
tunnels, inclines, telephone wires, weave a city of a size and on a
site which would have been impossible in the old days. The householder
is far removed from the sources of his food supply. He lives two or
three families deep and many to the acre. The very aggregation of
people breeds disease, a complication which in turn may yet be balanced
by those revolutions in medical science which have brought glad, new
optimism to sanitarian and physician.
[Illustration: SOURCES OF IMMIGRANT LABOR FORCE, CARNEGIE STEEL CO.
Each dot a man.
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: 10421
INCLUDING: SLOVAKS 6477
POLES 611
BOHEMIANS 45
GERMANS 135
CROATIANS 1239
HUNGARIANS 1323
ROUMANIANS 410
RUSSIA: 2577
INCLUDING: POLES 1644
LITHUANIANS 476
BRITISH ISLES: 2010
INCLUDING: ENGLAND 1456
IRELAND 257
SCOTLAND 137
WALES 100
SWEDEN: 287
BULGARIA 58
FRANCE 52
TURKEY IN EUROPE 26
ROUMANIA 24]
The work to which these people come is not the work of their fathers.
The discipline of the mill is not the discipline of the field. Human
nature is put to new and exacting tests. It works unremittingly as it
has not worked before,--eight, ten, twelve hours a day, seven days in
the week, with the chance of twenty-four hours once in the fortnight.
It works by artificial light and at night. It works in great plants and
creates and puts together in fierce new ways. Of that growing share
of the population of Pittsburgh which is continental born, a large
proportion is from the country and small villages. This is no less
true of the influx of southern Negroes,--a north-bound movement here
and in other cities, the final outcome of which we do not know. The
newcomers, it is true, may be groomed in passage. A railroad may open up
a Hungarian back country and the peasant get his first training there;
a Ruthenian may work on the plantations and sugar beet factories of
Bessarabia before coming on; a southern Negro may hire out in the mills
of Alabama before starting north; or a Slovak may work as a slate picker
or miner's helper in the anthracite fields on his way westward. The
drift through it all none the less is from field to mill.
New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred,--so much
the sociologist has pointed out to us; the economist has other things
to tell. He sees about him the potent aftermath of those great changes
from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system.
As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial
revolution is repeated, but processes are accelerated and the experience
of a generation is taken at a jump. With this has occurred a great
lateral stratification of industry. There is no longer the feudal
loyalty to a particular concern, but to the men of a particular trade.
Unions have sprung up, and have grown or broken. The thing above all
others which has tended in Pittsburgh to their undoing in certain great
trades has been the subdivision of labor. The flea on the hair of the
tail of the dog of the wild man of Borneo just come to town, is an
entity large and complete compared with the processes which occupy many
men in the electrical works and car shops. This change has multiplied
product, and set unskilled labor to busy itself at a thousand stints;
but it has fore-shortened trade knowledge and ousted much craftsmanship.
Along with it has come another physical change. The skilled men of the
old time hammers and anvils work with electric cranes and at continuous
processes that reach from the heat of great ovens and the jaws of
soaking pits to the piled and finished product. An intricate dovetailing
of flagmen, brakemen, engineers and train despatchers makes up a train
to carry huge dynamos and steel structural shapes across the continent.
This fact has a new and vital social significance. Its essence is team
play. Its reactions upon the psychology of associated effort have yet to
be explored. Once again, new and unheard of crafts are ushered in, to
engage their quota of the time and strength of the working force, and to
put it to new tests of adaptability. Take the implications of the steel
industry itself, in the building trades. The old time carpenter and
builder gives way to the house-smith and the structural steel worker.
[Illustration: INDUSTRIAL TOWNS OF ALLEGHENY CO. PA.
PERCENTAGE OF NATIVE & FOREIGN BORN WHITES IN CITIES &
BOROUGHS HAVING 2500 INHABITANTS OR MORE
1900]
In Pittsburgh, too, we have a stupendous example of the influence upon
the wage earners' city of a mighty fiscal change in industry, combining
in one corporation all processes from the ore to the completed bridge.
Work is organized nationally. The steel center like the mill town is
not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from
without and owned by a multitude of nonresident stockholders. Pittsburgh
must build up an active, native citizenship or be merely an industrial
department. The community and the workshop are at issue.
Finally,--in our roster of dominating influences,--within the last
twenty-five years, has come the invasion of women into industry. This is
not a simple thing, nor a little one. It can directly affect half the
population. Pittsburgh is not primarily a woman's town, yet 22,000 women
engage in the trades, and each year they invade a new department. These
women workers are affected by all the forces noted and in turn affect
and complicate those forces.
These are some of the dominant influences that affect wage-earners in
cities assembled. One element runs through their complications and
brings us clear-seeing and hope. It is the element of change and flow.
In the Royal Museum at Munich are the miniatures of a group of medieval
towns carved out of wood. The spires of the churches, the walls and
gates of the city, markets, houses, outbuildings and gardens are
reproduced with a fidelity that has stood these centuries. They embody
the old idea of a town, of the fixity of things. A man was his father's
son. He worked as his father worked. He was burgher, or freeman, or
serf as his father was burgher, or freeman, or serf. His looms and his
spinning wheels and vats were as his fathers had contrived them. He
lived in the house of his father as his father had lived and it served
him well. Pittsburgh is the antithesis of such a town. It is all motion.
The modern industrial city is a flow, not a tank. The important thing
is not the capacity of a town, but the volume and currents of its life
and, by gauging these, we can gauge the community. We must gauge at the
intake,--the children, the immigrant, the countrymen who come in; gauge
at the outlets; and gauge at the stages in the course of the working
life. If there be unnecessary death, if strong field hands are crippled
or diseased through their manner of living or working, if the twelve
hour man sees everything gray before his eyes in the morning, if women
work in new ways that cost their strength or the strength of their
young, if school children are drafted off as laborers before they are
fit; if boys grow into manhood without training for the trades of this
generation,--then we have a problem in social hydraulics to deal with.
We must put old social institutions and usages to the test of these
changing tides. Herein lies the essence of constructive philanthropy.
In this light, tenement house legislation is no more than an adaptation
of domestic necessities and customs to the difficulties of living three
stories deep, and factory acts no more than an effort to work out the
law of skull crackers, freight yards, and electrically driven mines. We
have to fashion a city not alone for the hereditary householder, but for
the mobile and transient and half-assimilated, for workers with multiple
tools and above all for people on an upward trend.
Faced with its great task of production, Pittsburgh has not set itself
to the thrift of self-knowledge. When half a thousand people were dying
each year from typhoid fever, the movement to clear the water supply
was blocked and exploited at every turn. Half a thousand workmen are
now killed each year in the industries of Allegheny county, and yet the
public has not taken the trouble to sift the accidents through and see
which can be prevented. Nobody knows how many men are seriously injured
every year; nobody knows how many men and women are beset with trade
diseases. Nobody knows how much the community is paying for such wastes
as these. Nobody knows how far the seeping off of human integers into
hospitals, and jails, insane asylums, brothels, and orphanages, could be
checked; the guesses of the town's best men are that much is needless.
Pittsburgh is a town which does not know the number of its children of
school age, nor, the physical status of the children of its classes; it
is a town which, for five years, did not so much as demand a report from
its health department. In such an arraignment, we must bear in mind that
there are notable exceptions in one phase of social concern or another
to this lack in Pittsburgh's self-knowledge, and that Pittsburgh is not
merely a scapegoat city. It is the capital of a district representative
of untrammeled industrial development, but of a district which, for
richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for vigor, waste and
optimism, is rampantly American.
The Pittsburgh Survey has been carried out with such a working
conception of the field it had before it. We have brought to one city
people of special experience in others, to gauge its needs. We have
measured its institutions against standards worked out in this city or
in that, or in other local enterprises; and we have estimated civic
and industrial conditions by their effect on groups of individual
families. In the present issue we put forward the composite situation
as reflected in the lives of two groups--the immigrant and the Negro.
Later issues will go into the social bearings of courts and schools,
hospitals, houses and factories. But such individual problems have no
reality unless seen in their human relations and for this reason, this
issue begins with an interpretation of the genesis of the community by
a native Pittsburgher, who has become one of the civic leaders of New
England. We have an estimate of new immigration by a Welshman from the
Anthracite region, who is representative of the old, and an estimate of
his fellows by one of the Slavs. The outlook of the steel mill worker is
appraised by a man whose eyes have known the broad sweep of prairies of
the American Northwest. A description of the working women whose hours
and wages and conditions of employment will next concern us, and of the
families into whose lives come the tragedies of industrial accidents,
are included. And finally, the issues of life in a representative
mill town are put forth, standing out more isolated and clear cut for
the purposes of analysis than it is possible to find them in the more
intricate operations of the Greater City.
* * * * *
One of my earliest recollections of a canvas covered geography is the
prime fact which is Pittsburgh,--that here the Allegheny and Monongahela
rivers unite to form the Ohio. Huge economic foundations buttress this
fact (oil and gas and clay and iron and coal). History in the making
has rolled it into new shapes and a changing significance. The junction
is the great left fist of the Father of Waters. The three rivers give
the town common cause and intercourse with the Atlantic coast ranges to
the east, and the mid-continental bottom lands, north and south, to the
west. Their waters carry the ores and fill the boilers and douse the
hissing billets of the steel makers. They are not easy overlords, this
triumvirate of rivers. They carry fever which scotches one town and
the next. They rise a bit too far and the fires are out, the streets
flooded. But grudgingly and inevitably, they yield mastery. They are
dammed and sluiced and boiled and filtered to suit the demands of
navigation and power and temperature and thirst.
The mastery they yield is to another current--the eddying peoples which
make up the community and all its works--a current more powerful and
mysterious than the bulk of brown waters. The War Department engineers
can tell you the exact number of cubic feet which slide past either
side of the Point every minute. The sanitarians can give you the
number of bacteria, friendly or plague-besetting, which infect any
cubic centimeter. The weather man in a high building can forecast the
exact stage which the water will register hours hence. But what of the
people?--they have largely taken themselves for granted. They have
rarely taken the time to test their own needs or consciously gauge
the destination of the currents that possess them. They are here--the
strong, the weak, the cowed, the ambitious, the well equipped and the
pitiful. They jostle and work and breed. For the most part they run a
splendid course. But they do not keep tally, and their ignorance means
sorrow and death and misunderstanding.
* * * * *
To give a little help to those who are trying to understand, and measure
these currents, and deal with them as intelligently as the locks and
channels of the rivers are dealt with, has been the purpose of the
Pittsburgh Survey. Such chartings as we have attempted have been of
these living waters.
[Illustration: COKE OVENS AT NIGHT]
PITTSBURGH
AN INTERPRETATION OF ITS GROWTH
ROBERT A. WOODS
HEAD OF SOUTH END HOUSE, BOSTON
Pittsburgh has always been unique among American towns. Known as the
dingy capital of a "black country," during all but the latest period
of its growth it has attracted few visitors save those whose business
motive brought them. The nucleus of its population is different from
that of any other of our large centers. Its situation at the gateway of
the Middle West was sure to bring it into significance as the center
of the country's population and activity shifted, but the Allegheny
mountains were for a long time a barrier against the easy movement of
population in this direction. It is the varied mineral resources of
western Pennsylvania, and the pertinacity of the chief element among its
inhabitants in developing them, which has created a new metropolitan
district, having virtually a population of a million, to be added to the
seven or eight urban centers which now dominate different sections of
the United States.
Beginning as a little hamlet about the fortifications used first by
the French, then by the English, at the junction where the Allegheny
and Monongahela rivers form the Ohio, the settlement developed from a
trading post to a market town. It would have been limited to the career
of such a place much longer if, in spite of the excellent soil of the
surrounding region, the farmers had not found it difficult to compete in
the matter of the staple crops with the slave-tilled plantations of the
South. It was as a sort of forced alternative that small iron-working
plants began to spring up along the rivers. The ore was brought down
from the Alleghenies. Bituminous coal,--the distinguishing asset of the
coming industrial center,--had already been discovered by the French in
the river valleys.
The "town beyond the mountains" again found itself embarrassed in
marketing its commodities,--not by competition this time, so far as
America was concerned, but by the heights over which its ponderous new
output must be carried. This obstacle was overcome by a system of canals
with inclined cable portage lines up the mountain slopes. Meanwhile the
great trade with the West for the supply of its incipient civilization
was being established through the river traffic as well as by newly dug
canals.
Some of the first citizens of the town after the revolutionary days
were naturally men who had been prominently engaged in the war. Two of
them were Irishmen who had leaped to the opportunity to fight England.
At the close of hostilities they had foresight to discern that large
developments were to come at the juncture of the rivers. The descendants
of these men,--some of whom by a curious irony are English and have
never seen this country,--are at the present moment the greatest holders
of Pittsburgh real estate. The great bulk of the early immigrants
into the town were Scotch-Irish, who began to come in large numbers
early in the nineteenth century, and almost two generations before the
inrush of the southern Irish. Until recent great developments, when
the skyscrapers began to appear, the older part of the city in its
aspect was distinctly suggestive of British towns of the same size
and character. Two of its local sections were very naturally called
Birmingham and Manchester, names which have almost passed out of use
among the American born generations. The manners and customs of the
people showed about equally the traces of pioneer days in the Ohio
valley and the traditions of the old country. Unlike the large cities
that have grown up along the Great Lakes, Pittsburgh owes nothing to
successive waves of migration from New England. It is only in very
recent years, with the varied developments of technical and educational
interests, that there have been enough New Englanders living in the
city to develop any of the organized front which they maintain in all
other northern cities. It is natural therefore that, though Pittsburgh
was strongly loyal for the union during the Civil War, the spirit of the
city should in many respects suggest the South rather than the North.
Around the nucleus of Scotch-Irish, gathered, as time went on, large
numbers of southern Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans and German Jews.
But these different types are still to a noticeable degree always
considered as being marked off by themselves as against the dominant
Scotch-Irish. It is only as individuals from among them gain a position
of influence by special achievement that they are considered a part of
the bone and sinew of the city. The Scotch-Irish with their contrasted
traits of sturdiness and ardor, have two great separate interests in
life,--industry and religion. The other nationalities have either had
the same traits in good measure, or by process of selection individuals
have caught the spirit and have come to the front while the rest have
fallen to the rear. Yet those who fell back have in most cases found a
reasonable opportunity in the great material progress of the town.
Pittsburgh is all the more characteristically American for having
been built up from first to last by immigrant stock, not merely by
unsettled natives. It remains to this day a sort of natural selection
of enterprising spirits from out of every European nation and tribe,
Americanized not by any tradition or other educational process than that
of having the typical American experiences in what still remains the
heart of the country.
Pittsburgh has never been a place to emigrate from. It has held its own,
and constantly invites each nationality to bring more of its kind. The
only deserters were those who found it in them to care for a reasonable
measure of cultivated life, difficult to secure in a town where there
was not a library worthy of the name until 1895 and where a whole winter
would sometimes pass without a single lecture on a significant theme
intelligently treated. It was natural that in the formative period there
were some who sought more congenial associations in the seacoast cities.
In religion until comparatively recent days it could be said that
there was not a more Calvinistic atmosphere about Edinburgh, Glasgow
or Belfast. The early Pittsburghers had almost as strong a tradition
of what it means to fight for their faith as the Puritans themselves,
and this sense has not had time yet altogether to fade. The orthodox
spirit of the town has all along palpably affected the religion of
the other racial types. So it is hardly surprising to find that
certain regulations of the Catholic Church seem to be more insistently
promulgated and more rigorously observed in Pittsburgh than in other
places.
There is not a city in the country, and probably not in the world, where
strict Sabbath and liquor legislation is more strenuously put into
effect. Unusually genial people to those who do well, they are summary
and even relentless with those who would lower the moral decorum of the
city. But as is very likely to happen where there is a rigid ethical
creed, there is here a very anomalous double standard. The amount
of Sunday work in the steel mills is appalling. There is a certain
sanctity in the operations of business which enables it in specific
ways to nullify the precepts of religion, as when the over-strain of
seven days' work a week is measured in the gradual destruction of the
religious sense in great sections of the population. Local option
sentiment is easily bewildered by political cross-currents. Though the
Brooks law maintains a severe standard as to the conduct of the saloon
business, applied by the county judges to whom a complaint is _prima
facie_ adverse evidence; yet Pennsylvania remains, in the midst of an
unexampled national temperance movement, among the small and ignoble
company of states marked black on the reformers' map.
Few cities have had a greater degree of political machine control, and
the prime sources of this corruption have been nowhere else than among
the Scotch-Irish. Ever since the days of Simon Cameron a clan-like
political organization has dominated the state of Pennsylvania; and
the city of Pittsburgh has been only a less important headquarters
for its operations than Philadelphia. The condition of politics in
Pennsylvania has led many to think that the people of the state
were characterized by a generally lax moral sense. On the contrary,
and in Pittsburgh particularly, this situation is because of a too
intense and therefore too restricted ethical motive. The passage and
enforcement of certain types of legislation having an immediate and
obvious ethical bearing satisfies this restricted ethical demand, and
sidetracks tendencies which might check the indirect causes of great
underlying demoralization. A long list of charities each year receives
substantial appropriations from the Legislature. The 20,000 earnest and
influential people in Pennsylvania who are members of managing boards
of philanthropic institutions receiving state subsidies, are by the
same token so much less inclined and less able to be alert and watchful
against such matters as the theft of millions from the state treasury
and from banks which carry state accounts.
The difficulty with Pennsylvania, and emphatically with Pittsburgh,
is not degeneracy; it is simply public moral adolescence, and the
confusion that inevitably accompanies it. The materialism of Pittsburgh
is that of the overwrought, not of the over-indulgent. No one can study
the life of the city without feeling a mighty under-current of moral
capacity not yet in any sufficient degree brought to the surface. Its
religion cultivates definite restraints and reassurances, rather than
aspiration and moral enterprise. This is, however, always the case when
a community's moral powers are absorbed in the subduing of nature and
the achieving of a great material destiny. The spirit of adventure in
Pittsburgh has been thus far economic. The moral movement of this people
in any case is slow: but it is unyielding always; and once fully aroused
knows how to be irresistible.
The situation can hardly seem abnormal when one realizes the unsurpassed
material resources of the Pittsburgh district and the pressure which has
been laid upon a single community by the whole world for the products
out of which the foundations of world enlightenment are laid. It is
of particular importance in the case of Pittsburgh, that the social
student should take the full measure of the function of the city as the
almost limitless and tireless creator of the solid means of civilized
existence, for this and other nations. The simple fact that it is the
first city in the country in the tonnage of its product, and the second
city of the country in banking capital, largely on account of its great
wage payments, will suggest both the service which it renders and the
power which it has achieved. It is significant that in this district the
two greatest individual fortunes in history have been amassed and the
two most gigantic concentrations of economic power built up.
Without in the least abating the test of moral and legal standards upon
the policy of industrial leadership in the great activities of western
Pennsylvania, it can hardly be doubted that later generations will
include the leaders in such enterprise among the master builders of
modern civilization. The place of Pittsburgh in the American system of
life is that of the city which in an altogether unparalleled way is made
up of producers, of those whose purposes are focused in bringing to pass
the creation of durable and indispensable utilities. Contrasted with
Pittsburgh, every other city in the country is rather a market-place,
made more refined but in some sense less noble by the dominance of
traders and consumers.
It is one of the curious anomalies of American legislation that it
should have so zealously guarded against foreign competition in price
standards, while withholding all protection against competitors bringing
with them a low wage standard. Pittsburgh, in its larger estate, may be
said to be a monument to this anomaly. Severe restrictive protection
against foreign steel, and unlimited immigration, have enabled
Pittsburgh, well-enough otherwise provided, to throw the reins upon the
neck of her prosperity. And it must be borne in mind that the protective
system, for years tacitly acknowledged by Pittsburgh manufacturers to
be unnecessary, is yet clung to as an exclusive and powerful tribal
fetich, from whose point of view every question as to the welfare of the
nation must first be considered. The fresh constructive moral aspects of
politics and patriotism impress Pittsburgh probably less easily than any
other community in the country.
So great and continuous has been the tide of immigration, that the
insistence of the new immigrants for employment on any terms has made
it comparatively easy for industrial captains to control industrial
administration, to the exclusion of all substantial efforts on the part
of the workmen to organize in their own behalf. Beginning with the
British operatives and coming down through the successive types to the
present southeast Europeans, each type up to the present has gradually
raised its demands, made some headway, organized to reach still higher
ground, lost by attack from both front and rear, and disappeared up
and down the social scale in the general community. This very costly
process has been thought necessary to industrial prosperity. There is,
of course, no doubt that the holding down of the wage standard, like
the artificial maintenance of the price standard, has conduced largely
to the making of some of the great personal fortunes; but it is certain
that the future historian will find this checking of the normal and
typically American aspirations of successive waves of newcomers, to
have been distinctly detrimental to the economic, quite as well as to
the social and political well-being of the Pittsburgh community. This
unthrift in the matter of the prime essential productive force and
economic value is again partly accounted for by the very pressure of
opportunity afforded by unlimited resources and the insatiable demand
of the world market. There has not even been sufficient time for
consideration of many economies in process and administration whose
value to manufactures would be unquestioned.
It is to the point here to remember that the two great fortunes just
mentioned began to be great as individual fortunes through special
privileges gained in railroad rates. The topographical convergence of
the Great Lake region on the one side and the Ohio river valley on the
other to a territory less than a hundred miles wide, brought all the
chief means of transportation between the West and the Atlantic seaboard
through this particular territory. These exceptional facilities for
transportation gave a culminating stimulus to industrial progress.
The intense localization of resources and transportation facilities led
almost inevitably to the phenomenal concentration of industrial capital,
followed by highly centralized industrial administration. This process
has in a sense been its own undoing, so far as Pittsburgh is concerned,
because the financial and even the administrative center of the great
combinations have inevitably gravitated to New York, and the old type of
self-reliant leader of industry is fast disappearing. Yet the lesson of
the large spirit of associated production is constantly being inwrought
into the consciousness of the community. A later article in this series
will show that the statesmanlike initiative, which until recent days had
been inevitably swung into the strategy of business, is beginning to
express itself in many promising forms of public spirited activity.
Physical environment, no less than racial stock and economic factors,
condition the development of public sentiment in a community. The
growth of Pittsburgh as a center of population under the pressure of
business opportunity would have been very greatly hampered if electric
transit had not prepared the way. The ground plan runs up and down
almost impossible foldings of hill and valley. The electric cars make
possible the utilizing of all the slopes and hilltops for homes. This
has weakened the inevitable centripetal force of urban growth, and led
to the building up of suburbs very accessible to the central business
section, and comparing for attractiveness and comfort with those of any
other city in the country. Such a transfer of well-to-do population has
made possible other important shiftings both of poorer population and
of business, by which the business center has gained in area and in the
character and adaptability of its structures.
Pittsburgh has grown into an industrial metropolis with outlying
manufacturing towns reaching along the rivers, and following the course
of all the railroads for a distance of thirty or forty miles. The time
is soon coming when all the large industries will be eliminated from
the city, and Pittsburgh proper will become simply the commercial and
cultural headquarters of its district.
Meanwhile all these methods of expansion and relief have not been
sufficient to give adequate room in the downtown section either for
industry, trade or housing. This area, which is closely hemmed in by
the rivers and the hills, now includes the great central commercial
activities, the railroad terminals, several large industrial plants
and numerous smaller ones, together with the homes of the unskilled
population which finds employment within it.
The congestion within these tight limits brings out, in a peculiarly
acute way, the breakdown of many branches of the social administration
of the city, from the point of view of the welfare of its population
as a whole. Here not only the unfitness of hundreds of houses under
existing conditions for human habitation, but the actual and serious
shortage of roofs under which to shelter the lower grades of the
industrial population, is most strikingly seen. Here typhoid fever,
for which Pittsburgh has these many years held a tragic pre-eminence,
is at its highest rate. Here the actual congestion of machinery within
industrial plants which cannot get land to expand upon, is particularly
conducive to the diseases, and to accidents which are associated with
the different branches of industry.
In this situation appears another of the strange contrasts of Pittsburgh
life. The problem of the downtown district is further complicated by the
fact that great sections of it are held under a landlord system like
that of the old world. Thirty-three million dollars' worth of real
estate located almost wholly in the downtown district is held by five
estates, some of the holders living abroad permanently, others traveling
much of the time. Commercial enterprise is handicapped by the difficulty
of securing an independent title to real estate. Much of the most
objectionable tenement house property is held by two of these estates.
Absentee landlordism thus oddly parallels absentee capitalism. To the
fact that the industrial authorities are remote and, by controlling many
plants, can take the fiscal rather than the close range administrative
view of industry, must be largely traced that stern reprobation of any
equity on the part of the workman in his work, which has on occasion
made, and will again make Pittsburgh the country's chief point of social
unrest and danger.
The anti-trade-union policy tends strongly to fix and standardize the
immigrant rate of wages, and has given strong cumulative force to the
personal profit-reapings of the past two decades. Recognizing clearly
the serious limitations of trade unionism as part of the organization
of a tumultuous industry like that of Pittsburgh, it must still be said
that there is substantial evidence to believe that the community cheats
itself when it keeps up a glutted labor market and a lower than standard
wage. However this may be, the Pittsburgh employers' point of view, more
than that of any other city of the country, is like that of England in
the early days of the factory system,--holding employes guilty of a sort
of impiety, and acting with sudden and sure execution, if they undertake
to enforce their claims in such way as to embarrass the momentum of
great business administration. A sound standard of living for the
workman and his right by organized competition to win it, Pittsburgh
must eventually recognize as fundamental to the country's economic and
political welfare. Should she persist in excluding trade unionism,
European experience shows that her hordes of immigrants will quickly
learn to carry their alien types of unrest to the ballot box.
The backwardness of Pittsburgh in the development of culture and public
spirit, must be traced in part to the negative attitude of a serious
minded people toward the amenities of life, and their distrust of the
process of government. There has been no sufficient tradition in the
city of more balanced and varied human interests. The city's population,
instead of finding an increasing social unity, has been increasingly
sectionalized by the overwhelming influx of every type of immigrant.
There has not been leisure for the consideration and discussion of
public questions. The very ground plan of the city, which scatters
all of its responsible citizens through the suburbs at night, tends
to deprive the city of their disinterested co-operation out of office
hours toward raising its tone and standards. But other American cities
have shown how, when many of their people began to be released from the
treadmill of the purely industrial stage of their growth, it is possible
to take advantage of the experience of older communities and move by
long strides toward a humanized type of urban life.
From the foremost absentee capitalist and the foremost absentee landlord
have come as gifts the two epoch-making improvements toward the finer
public life of the city. Schenley Park and the Carnegie institutions
located at its entrance form a civic center whose possibilities of
civic influence are very great. It may be noted that the coming in of
these improvements was coincident with the work of a city engineer
who, indifferent to the political principles under which the city was
administered, and acting as a kind of despot within his domain, carried
through many great improvements in the layout of the new districts of
the city, and with the first move in the direction of a great hospital,
which is one day to be built with money left for the purpose by the man
who for many years was the political master of the city.
The effect upon the city of benefits wrought out in this undemocratic
fashion will of course be subject to heavy abatements; but it would
be a strange doctrinaire who could not see that these specific steps
represent most substantial net gains in the life of the community.
There is indeed a distinct undertone of feeling that such benefactions
represent simply a return to the city of what the city itself has
produced. One can find comparatively few indications that the park, the
library and the rest have placed the city under the depressing bonds of
patronage. The existence and service of these institutions, in any case,
give a new and strong focus to the rising city sense, and the evidence
goes to show that, rather than weakening the spirit of collective
initiative on the part of the citizens themselves, they have conduced to
give shape and force to it.
There are several instructive ways in which this growth of civic
consciousness is expressing itself. The movement for a greater
Pittsburgh now consummated in the union of Pittsburgh and Allegheny with
a few adjacent towns, arises no doubt in the general effort toward power
and prestige; but the step toward inclusiveness is entirely normal, and
has gathered up into a public movement aggressive impulses which had
never before run in that channel. Happily the expansion was preceded by
the election for the first time in a generation of a reform mayor. The
movement came directly as a result of the impudent interference of the
state machine in unseating a mayor who had been elected by an opposing
local faction. This action, carried out under the forms of legislation,
brought Pittsburgh people into a new feeling of municipal self-respect,
and led to their electing on a democratic ticket George W. Guthrie, who
is in every respect one of Pittsburgh's first citizens and has for many
years been earnestly interested in the cause of municipal reform.
The date 1898 may be taken as marking a kaleidoscopic shifting in
the Pittsburgh ensemble. Then the city emerged into the day of large
things,--into the great concentration of capital, and the incidental
liquidation which gave many families overpowering fortunes of cash
in hand; the assembling of vast heterogeneous multitudes of laborers
to keep up with the demands of a period of unparalleled prosperity;
the ampler civic sense signalized by the Carnegie institutions with
their unusual cultural opportunities, and embodied after a time in
solid municipal reform and progress, in a truly enlightened Chamber of
Commerce, and in excellent forms of social service. On the one hand,
irresponsible individuals have gone forth with boundless power to
represent the city to the world at her worst. On the other, Pittsburgh
is gradually and quietly taking to herself the world's lessons in the
making of the modern city and in the building up of citizenship. The
former phenomenon, in which to many this city is allegorized, is but
the froth and the scum; the latter has the beginnings of a tidal energy
behind it.
[Illustration]
THE NEW PITTSBURGHERS
SLAVS AND KINDRED IMMIGRANTS IN PITTSBURGH
PETER ROBERTS
INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENT, INTERNATIONAL YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION
The day laborer of a generation ago is gone,--a change which has been
swifter and more complete in Pittsburgh than in many other of our
industrial centers. "Where are your Irish? your Welsh? your Germans?
your Americans?" I asked an old mill hand. "Go to the city hall and the
police station," he said. "Some of them are still in the better paid
jobs in the mills; but mostly you'll have to look for them among the
doctors and lawyers and office holders; among clerks and accountants and
salesmen. You'll find them there."
The day laborer in the mills to-day is a Slav. The foreign-born of the
steel district comprise, it is true, every European nation, but I shall
deal here only with the races from southeastern Europe, which for twenty
years have been steadily displacing the Teutonic and Keltic peoples in
the rough work of the industries. The tendency of the Italians is to go
into construction and railroad work, a few entering the mines, rather
than into the plants and yards; and my group narrows itself down to the
dominant Slav and Lithuanian. What I have to say of them in Pittsburgh
and Allegheny City is in the main representative of the manufacturing
towns of the whole district.
Roughly speaking, one-quarter of the population of Pittsburgh is
foreign-born. The foreigner is nowhere more at home than here, and
nowhere has he been more actively welcomed by employers. The conflict
of customs and habits, varying standards of living, prejudices,
antipathies, all due to the confluence of representatives of different
races of men, may be witnessed here. The most backward of these
foreigners are superstitious and ignorant and are the victims of
cunning knaves and unscrupulous parasites. On the other hand, the
whole territory is thrown into a stern struggle for subsistence and
wage-standards by the displacements due to these resistless accretions
to the ranks of the workers. The moral and religious life of the
city is not less affected by this inflow of peoples. Their religious
training differs widely from that of peoples of Protestant antecedents,
and institutions that were dear to the founders of the city are fast
undermined by the customs of immigrants from southeastern Europe. Yet as
a whole, they bring with them physical and cultural resources which the
English-speaking community fails to elicit or thoughtlessly wastes.
Such an exhaustive study as could be made of the immigrant population of
the steel district is outside the possibilities of this paper. I shall
set down only what a month brought me as I visited the lodging-houses
and the courts and the mills of Greater Pittsburgh; as I talked with
priest and leader, policeman and doctor, banker and labor boss, the
immigrants themselves and those who live close to them; but I shall put
it before you in the light of many years' residence in the anthracite
coal communities, where in another section of Pennsylvania, at Mahanoy
City and Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, I have known the Slav and the Lett
and their efforts to gain a foothold in America. I shall deal with
the situation, not as I have seen it in my visits of the past year,
during which the immigrants have returned home by thousands, but as I
came to know it in the heyday of prosperity, the early fall of 1907,
when conditions were as they are likely to be again when industrial
prosperity returns. This is the situation which we must reckon with in a
permanent way.
In 1880, Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians did not form one per cent of
the population in either Pittsburgh or Allegheny. By 1890, they had
reached four per cent, and out of an army of 90,000 wage earners, one in
every ten was an immigrant from southeastern Europe. By 1900, one-third
of the foreign-born were of this new immigration, and the movement
of the Teutonic and Keltic races had practically ceased. We must wait
until the census enumeration of 1910 before we may definitely know what
proportion these newcomers form to-day, but it may safely be assumed
that the percentage of foreign-born in the greater city will equal that
of 1900, thirty per cent, or roughly, 200,000, half of whom will be from
southeastern Europe.
Poles, Italians and Jewish immigrants lead the list. Lithuanians,
Croatians, Servians, Slovaks and Ruthenians are numbered by the
thousands, and Magyars, Greeks, Bohemians and Roumanians are here in
lesser groups.
The representatives of these nations touch elbows in the streets so
that the languages heard when the people are marketing in the foreign
quarters on Saturday night are as numerous as those of a seaport town.
Twenty dialects are spoken. Yet the polyglot mass that confuses the
visitor and induces pessimistic impressions as to the future of the
city, is each morning marshalled without tumult. The discipline of the
industrial establishments converts this babel of tongues into one of the
chief forces of production. Therein lies an appraisal not only of the
American _entrepreneur_, but also of these men coming from nations of
low efficiency, who are able so quickly to fall into line and keep step
in an industrial army of remarkable discipline and output.
There is no way of knowing the annual inflow of immigrants into
Pittsburgh, for the city is a distributing point. The records of the
ports of entry show that in 1907, 187,618 persons gave Pittsburgh as
their destination, but many of these scattered to the neighboring
Pennsylvania towns and many undoubtedly went to the mills and mines of
Eastern Ohio. Every day brings its quota of immigrants in normal times;
occasionally they come by the carloads. Owing to the shifting of the
newcomers, however, the outflow may often equal the inflow. Conditions
of the local industries determine which of these two currents runs the
swifter. During the first seven years of the century, the city possibly
added 15,000 annually by immigration.
Before taking up the living conditions in Pittsburgh as they especially
affect these immigrant laborers, let us consider for a moment certain
characteristics of these people, and their relation to the general
economic situation. First, it is the wages that bring them here. The
workers in the mills of Galicia, the vine-lands of Italy, and the
factories of Kiev, earn from twenty-five cents to fifty cents in a day
of from twelve to sixteen hours. When the American immigrant writes
home that he works only nine, ten, or twelve hours and earns from $1.50
to $2.00, the able-bodied wage earner in the fatherland who hears
this will not be satisfied until he also stands where the shorter day
and the higher wages govern. It is these home-going letters more than
all else which recruit the labor force. They are efficient promoters
of immigration. "There are no able-bodied men," said Big Sam to me,
"between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town in
Servia; they have all come to America."
[Illustration: DIRECT FROM THE FIELDS OF MID-EUROPE.]
Up to September, 1907, the men in charge of furnaces, foundries, forges
and mills, in the Pittsburgh district, could not get the help they
needed. The cry everywhere was, "Give us men." A foreman, therefore,
could assure Pietro and Melukas that if their brothers or cousins, or
friends were sent for, they would get work as soon as they arrived. More
than that, the Slav and Italian are no longer dependent on the English
boss in the matter of finding work for their countrymen. The inflow of
immigration from southeastern Europe has assumed such proportions in the
industries of the cities that superintendents have, in some instances,
appointed Italian and Polish and Lithuanian foremen; and with these, as
with German and Irish, blood is thicker than water. They employ their
fellow countrymen. They know the condition of the labor market and can
by suggestion stimulate or retard immigration.
The tonnage industries of Pittsburgh have expanded tremendously in
the last two decades. Such industries need manual laborers as do no
others. The Slavs have brawn for sale. Herein, at bottom, is the drawing
force which accounts for such a moving in of peoples and the readiness
with which they find their places in the specialized industries of
the district. Pittsburgh has clamorous need for these men. Take the
average Lithuanian, Croatian, Ruthenian, or Slovak, and his physique
would compare favorably with that of any people. Most of the immigrants
are from agricultural communities. Their food in the fatherland was
coarse, their habits simple, their cares few. They had an abundance of
vegetable diet, pure water, pure air and sunshine, and they developed
strong physical organisms. Taking them as a whole, we get the best of
the agricultural communities. The day has not yet come when the weak
emigrate and the strong stay at home. No ship agents, however active,
can reverse the natural order of the tide of immigration, and natural
selection added to federal scrutiny gives us a body of men physically
most fit for the development of our industries. Nowhere has this been
better illustrated than in Pittsburgh.
These men come to be "the hewers of wood and carriers of water." There
are representatives of each race far removed from the lowest industrial
stratum, but taking these people as a whole, it is safe to say that
the bulk of the unskilled labor in the city,--the digging and carrying
in the streets, the heavy labor in the mill, the loading and unloading
of raw material on railroad and river, the rough work around forge and
foundry, the coarse work around factories, and the lifting necessary in
machine shops,--all is performed by them.
[Illustration: YOUNG SLOVAK.]
This is the level at which they enter the economic order. What trade
equipment do they bring into the work with them? Their industrial
efficiency is low and I should estimate that ninety-five per cent have
no knowledge of modern machinery or methods of modern production; they
are children in factory training. Further, those who have trades find
themselves in an industrial environment where their previous training
is of little value. They are in ignorance of the English language, and
the few mechanics and tradesmen among them can do no better than join
the ranks of the common laborers. We must bear in mind, however, that
those of them who know how to use tools, once they are put to work that
requires some skill, adapt themselves quickly to the situation. Hence we
meet not a few Slavs and Lithuanians who execute work of a semi-skilled
nature. Sons, also, of men of these nationalities who settled in the
city a generation ago have risen to positions of standing in the
industries. Thus it is not unusual to hear of this man or that who has
become a foreman in the mills or taken a place in business or in the
professions.
But on several counts the average Slav, Lithuanian and Italian are not
as acceptable as day laborers as were the immigrants from northwestern
Europe. The common opinion of American employers is that they are stupid
and that the supervisory force must be much larger than if they had
English speaking help. Many employers would no doubt, prefer the latter;
but they cannot get them for the wages offered; they must take the Slav
or run short handed. The United States commissioner of immigration
in Pittsburgh is constantly besieged by employers of labor who need
help. Many stories are told of one firm stealing a group of laborers
marshalled at the ports of entry and forwarded to another.
[Illustration: YOUNG SERVIAN.]
I have spoken of the influence which letters and money sent home
have in recruiting immigrant workmen. These people make little or no
use of labor agencies unless the saloon and the small bank may be so
denominated. There are men in each nationality, acknowledged leaders,
who play the part of intermediaries between superintendents and their
people. But such investigations as I have made at Ellis Island do not
lead me to believe that the employers of labor in Pittsburgh violate
the contract labor law. Labor agencies in New York city make a specialty
of distributing Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians to firms in need of
hands. The leader who supplies men to a mill or mining concern gets so
much for each man supplied. Whatever contract there may be is executed
this side of the water. For instance, a leading Croatian had a specific
understanding with one of the mills of Pittsburgh that all men he brings
will find employment. No contract was executed and in the opinion of the
local immigration agent, there was in it no violation of the contract
labor law.
[Illustration: YOUNG CROATIAN.]
I have noted the drawbacks to the new day laborer as such. On the other
hand, it is a common opinion in the district that some employers of
labor give the Slavs and Italians preference because of their docility,
their habit of silent submission, their amenability to discipline, and
their willingness to work long hours and over time without a murmur.
Foreigners as a rule earn the lowest wages and work the full stint of
hours. I found them in the machine shops working sixty hours a week;
at the blast furnaces working twelve hours a day for seven days in the
week. The common laborer in and around the mills works seventy-two hours
a week. The unit of wages is an hour rate for day labor and a Slav is
willing to take the longer hours (twelve hours a day for men who work
fourteen and sixteen in the fatherland) with extra work on Sundays,
especially in connection with clearing the yards and repairing.
Possibly sixty to seventy per cent of the laborers in the mills come
out Sundays and the mechanics and other laborers on occasions work
thirty-six hours in order that the plant may start on time. In one mill
I found Russians (Greek Orthodox) in favor for the reason that they
gladly worked on Sundays.
[Illustration: YOUNG SERVIAN.]
My belief is that certain employers of labor have reaped advantage from
racial antipathies. The Pole and the Lithuanian have nothing in common
and each of them despises the Slovak. Foremen know this and use their
knowledge when foreigners are likely to reach a common understanding
upon wages or conditions of labor. All these considerations have helped
make it less difficult for factory operators to keep open or non-union
shop in Pittsburgh. The constant influx of raw material from backward
nations into the industries of the city has had somewhat the same
effect as the flow of water at an estuary when the tide is rising. All
is commotion. It will continue to be so as long as the inflow of Slavs
and Italians continues as it has in the last decade. But when they have
become permanently placed and their average intelligence and grasp of
American conditions rise, racial prejudices will give way to common
interests. When this time comes, Pittsburgh will witness the rise of
stronger labor organizations than were ever effected by Teuton and Kelt.
We have seen, then, the Slavic day laborers coming into the steel
district in vast numbers. Of their strength and lack of skill at
the outset there is no doubt, and we have noted some of the snap
judgments that are current about them; such as, that they are stupid,
and submissive. All this puts us in better position to consider more
in detail my first statement that it is the wages that bring them to
Pittsburgh, and to see what advances they make once they have gained a
foothold. The Slav enters the field at a rate of pay for day labor which
is higher than that which brought the Germans and the Kelts. The lowest
wage I found Slavs working for was thirteen and one-half cents an hour.
The wage of common labor in the average mill is fifteen or sixteen and a
half cents. The day laborer around the furnaces gets from $1.65 to $1.98
a day.
But the newcomers know nothing of a standard wage, and when work is
scarce, they will offer to work for less than is paid for common labor.
Such was the case of a band of Croatians who offered their services to
a firm in Pittsburgh for $1.20 a day. When the superintendent heard it,
he said, "My God, what is the country coming to? How can a man live in
Pittsburgh on $1.20 a day?" The foreman replied, "Give them rye bread,
a herring, and beer, and they are all right." [I have known a coal
operator in the anthracite fields to pay Italians and Slovaks ninety
cents a day, and ask neither what was the country coming to nor how they
could subsist.] More, the Slavs will consciously cut wages in order to
get work. A man who knows something about blacksmithing or carpentering
will work at a trade for $1.65 or $1.75 when the standard wage may be
$2.50. They count their money in the denominations of the fatherland
and estimate its value according to old country standards. I have known
foremen to take advantage of this. Again, those who are skilled will at
the command of the boss render menial services without a murmur. "These
fellows have no pride," said an American craftsman to me, "they are not
ruled by custom. When the foreman demands it they will throw down the
saw or hammer and take the wheelbarrow."
So the Slav gains his foothold in the Pittsburgh industries, and in the
doing of it, he undermines the income of the next higher industrial
groups and gains the enmity of the Americans. Shrewd superintendents
are known not only to take advantage of the influx of unskilled labor
to keep down day wages, but to reduce the pay of skilled men by a
gradually enforced system of promoting the Slavs. In the place of six
men at ten dollars a day, one will be employed at fifteen dollars,
with five others at half, or less than half, the old rate, who will
work under the high-priced man. Inventions, changes in processes, new
machines, a hundred elements tend to complicate the situation and render
it difficult to disentangle the influence of any one element. But this
much is clear, the new immigration is a factor which is influencing the
economic status of the whole wage-earning population in Pittsburgh; it
is bound to be a permanent factor; and its influence will be more and
not less.
My estimate is that possibly twenty per cent of these laborers from
southeastern Europe now work at machines which require a week or two
weeks to acquire the skill needed in their operation. To be sure, they
are machines "so simple that a child could operate them, and so strong
that a fool cannot break them." Many Slovaks work in the Pressed Steel
Car Company in Allegheny, as riveters, punchers, and pressmen, while
others are fitters, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Some Croatians and
Servians are rising and are found in the steel mills as roughers and
catchers. I saw Ruthenians feeding machines with white heated bars
of steel. It was simple, mechanical work, but of a higher grade than
that of scrap-carrier. The Poles who in recent years emigrated from
Russia and Austria-Hungary are as industrially efficient as any group
of immigrants and work in both mills and foundries. A foreigner who
has a chance to become a machine operator generally goes into piece
work and earns from $2 to $2.50 a day. But all men at the machines
are not on piece work. A foreman explained this to me as follows:
"If the machine depends upon the man for speed, we put him on piece
work; if the machine drives the man, we pay him by the day." The man
operating a machine by the day gets from $1.75 to $2. Many boys and
young women of Slavic parentage work in the spike, nut and bolt, and
steel wire factories. They sit before machines and pickling urns for
ten hours for from seventy-five cents to $1 a day. The Slovak riveters,
punchers, shears-men and pressmen in the Pressed Steel Car Company's
plant are paid by the piece, and for the most part make from $35 to
$50 in two weeks. Fitters, carpenters, blacksmiths and painters are
getting from $2 to $2.50 by the day. Mr. Bozic, the banker, told me
of Croatians and Servians who made as high as $70 in two weeks, and
others who made between $3 and $4 a day--many of them in positions
which once paid English-speaking workmen twice those sums. High and
low are relative terms and they signify very different standards to a
Slav and to an American. But it is a mistake to imagine that the Slav
or Lithuanian cannot adapt himself to modern industrial conditions.
There is considerable of prophecy in the thousands of them already
doing efficient work in the mills. The sooner the English-speaking
workers recognize this and make friends of these workers, the better. No
class of work is now monopolized by Teutons and Kelts, and the service
rendered by the Slav and Lithuanian will before many years equal theirs
in market value.
With this rapid statement of the economic position of the Slavs, we can
more intelligently approach the problem of their living conditions. But
first let us bear sharply in mind that their work is often cast among
dangers; is often inimical to health.
Many work in intense heat, the din of machinery and the noise of
escaping steam. The congested condition of most of the plants in
Pittsburgh adds to the physical discomforts for an out-of-doors people;
while their ignorance of the language and of modern machinery increases
the risk. How many of the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians are injured
in Pittsburgh in one year is not known. No reliable statistics are
compiled. In their absence people guess, and the mischief wrought
by contradictory and biased statements is met on all hands. When I
mentioned a plant that had a bad reputation to a priest, he said, "Oh,
that is the slaughter-house; they kill them there every day." I quote
him not for his accuracy, but to show how the rumors circulate and are
real to the people themselves. It is undoubtedly true, that exaggerated
though the reports may be, the waste in life and limb is great, and if
it all fell upon the native born a cry would long since have gone up
which would have stayed the slaughter.
In the matter of compensation for injuries, the foreign-speaking are
often subjected to hardships and injustice. If the widow of a man killed
in a mine or mill of Pennsylvania lives in Europe, she cannot recover
any damages, although the accident may be entirely due to the neglect
of the company. Because of this ruling, certain strong companies in the
Pittsburgh district seldom pay a cent to the relatives of the deceased
if they dwell beyond the seas. I asked a leader among the Italians,
"Why do you settle the serious cases for a few hundred dollars?" He
replied: "We find it best after much bitter experience. The courts are
against us; a jury will not mulct a corporation to send money to Europe;
the relatives are not here to bewail their loss in court; the average
American cares nothing for the foreigner. Every step of the way we
meet with prejudices and find positive contempt, from those in highest
authority in the courts down to the tip-staff. When I settle for $200, I
can do nothing better."
The influence of the industries reaches still further into the lives of
the immigrants. Each people has a tendency to colonize in one section
of the city and work in some one mill. The Bohemians are strong in
Allegheny City, but few of them are found in Pittsburgh. The Slovaks
predominate in McKees Rocks and Allegheny City, and many of them are
found in the Soho district of Pittsburgh. The Poles are numerous in
many parts of the greater city. The Lithuanians live in large numbers
on the South Side, and near the National Tube Works and the American
Steel and Wire Company. Many Ruthenians work in the Oliver Steel Works,
while the Croatians and Servians have worked for the most part in the
Jones and Laughlin plants. My information is that foremen try to get
one nationality in assigning work to a group of laborers, for they know
that a homogeneous group will give best results. National pride also
enters into selection. In talking to a Lithuanian of the serious loss
of life which occurred when a furnace blew up, I asked, "Were any of
your people killed in that accident?" He answered quickly, "No; catch
our people do such work as that! There you find the Slovak." Of the
grades of unskilled labor, the Slovak, Croatian, Servian and Russian
(Greek Orthodox) may be said to perform the roughest and most risky, and
the most injurious to health. There is, then, a more or less natural
selection of peoples in the neighborhoods of the different great mills.
The geographical contour of the region has also had its influence in
keeping the foreign population within certain limited districts. The two
rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, have cut their beds in the
Allegheny range, leaving a narrow strip of land on either side of their
banks which offers limited sites for dwellings, mills and factories.
The lowlands were preempted long ago, and the contest for parts of them
between the mills and the homes has been intense. There is an advantage
to the employer, however, in having his crude labor force within easy
call, and night work and the cost of carfare help keep the mass of men
employed in common labor near the mills and on the congested lowlands.
The deplorable conditions I found among them I shall describe, but let
me say here that all the houses on the flats are not the same. I visited
homes of Slavs and Lithuanians which were clean, well furnished, and
equal in comfort to those of Americans of the same economic level. These
foreigners have been in the country many years and their children have
risen to the American standard. But our first concern is with the recent
comers, who too often live in lodgings that are filthy; whose peasant
habits seem to us uncouth; and whose practices are fatal to decency and
morality in a thickly settled district.
Yet the foreigner pays a higher rent than does the "white man." In
Bass street, Allegheny City, I found English-speaking tenants paying
fifteen dollars a month for four rooms, where Slavs were charged twenty
dollars. Landlords who received ten dollars and twelve dollars a month
for houses rented to the English-speaking, were getting seventeen and
eighteen dollars from the Slavs. On Penn avenue a Slav paid seventeen
dollars for three rooms, while a family renting eight rooms in the
front of the building paid but thirty-three dollars a month. As nearly
as I could estimate, the average monthly rent paid by the foreigner
in Pittsburgh is more than four dollars a room. I found one family
paying nine dollars and a half for one large room in an old residence
on the South Side; another paid ten dollars for two rooms, another
sixteen dollars for three; and on Brandt street I found a man who paid
twenty-two dollars a month for four. The rent is not always fixed by
the landlord. Where lodgers are taken, it is sometimes regulated by
the number the "boarding-boss" can crowd in, the landlord getting one
dollar a month extra for each boarder. Houses of from eight to twelve
rooms have in them to-day anywhere from three to six families. They were
built for one family, and until the owners are forced by the Bureau
of Health to install sanitary appliances, have equipment for but one.
Too many landlords when they rent to foreigners have apparently one
dominating passion,--rent. They make no repairs, and with the crowded
condition above described the houses soon bear marks of ill usage.
Whenever foreigners invade a neighborhood occupied by English-speaking
tenants, property depreciates. The former occupants get out, the
invaders multiply, and very often the properties pass into the hands of
speculators. Houses once occupied by Slavs can seldom be rented again to
Anglo-Saxons. Foreigners under stress for room use cellars as bed rooms,
and it is against these that the health bureau within the last year has
taken action. I saw one of these beside which a common stable would have
been a parlor.
[Illustration: NIGHT SCENE IN A SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE.
Three men in the far bed, two in the others, twelve in the room. In some
of these lodgings day workers sleep nights in beds occupied by night
workers in the daytime.]
But it is in the immigrant lodging houses that conditions are worst.
These conditions are not always the choice of the men. The Croatians,
Servians, Roumanians and Greeks have only from five to ten per cent of
women among them; hence the men of these nationalities have but few
boarding houses conducted by their own people to go to, and crowding is
inevitable. English-speaking and German families will not open their
doors to them. Single men in groups of from six to twenty go into one
house in charge of a boarding-boss and his wife. Each man pays from
seventy-five cents to a dollar a week for room to sleep in and the
little cooking and washing that are to be done. Food for the company is
bought on one book, and every two weeks the sum total is divided equally
among the boarders, each man paying his _pro rata_ share. The bill for
two weeks will hardly amount to three dollars a man, so that the average
boarder will spend ten dollars a month on room rent and maintenance. The
mania for saving results in many cases in skimping the necessaries of
life. A priest told me of a Lithuanian who lived on ten cents a day, and
by helping the landlady in her house work, the man saved room rent. I
found Russians (Greek Orthodox) on Tustine street who were paying three
dollars a month for room rent. They buy bread made by Russian Jews, get
a herring and a pot of beer, and live,--not always,--in peace. When they
pay three dollars and fifty cents for room rent, soup is included in the
contract. Domestic tragedies sometimes invade these communal households,
such as a case of assault and battery which came up in an alderman's
office. The complainant was a single man who appeared with a ghastly
scalp wound. When this boarding-boss presented his bill at the end of
two weeks, the charges were five dollars more than the man thought
they ought to be. He protested and the boarding-boss took a hatchet
to silence him. The Italians are close livers; but possibly the worst
conditions I saw were among the Armenians in the neighborhood of Basin
alley.
In these boarding establishments as a general rule, the kitchen is
commonly used as a bedroom. When the boarding boss rents two rooms, he
and his wife sleep in the kitchen, and the boarders take the other room.
It is not unusual for a boarding-boss to rent but one room. He and his
wife put their bed in one corner; the stove in another; and the boarders
take the remainder. Sometimes the rooms are so crowded that the boss
and his wife sleep on the floor; and I repeatedly found cases where
beds were being worked double shift,--night and day. The city Bureau of
Health has endeavored to reduce the number of beds in a room, but it
does not follow that the people occupying that room get out,--they sleep
on the floor minus the bed. Here as elsewhere the problem is one of the
hardest for sanitary inspectors to cope with.
[Illustration: SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE ON THE SOUTH SIDE.
Four beds; two in a bed. The young fellow at the table was writing home.
Before him were pictures of his mother and sisters in immaculate peasant
costumes.]
Sometimes four or six men rent a house and run it themselves, doing
their own cooking and washing and occasionally bringing in a woman to
do a little cleaning. They may stand this for about six months and then
get out when the room is past the cleaning stage. Such crowding is very
prevalent in the low lying parts of the South Side, in the neighborhood
of Penn avenue in the city proper, and in sections of Allegheny. Among
the Russians of Tustine street I found thirty-three persons living in
one house in six rooms and an attic. These were distributed among three
families. The Croatians also are bad crowders. A milk dealer told me of
twenty-eight who lived in a house in Carey alley. When I asked, "How
do they live?" his reply was, "I don't know and don't care if I get
my money for my milk." In Pork House row and near Eckert street in
Allegheny, things were no better, and some blocks of houses under the
California avenue bridge were as bad as any thing I saw.
Before we condemn immigrants for the filth of their lodgings, we must
remember that they are largely rural peoples unused to such city
barracks. This fact is illustrated especially in their ignorance
regarding that terror which has waited upon foreigners in the Pittsburgh
district,--typhoid fever. Dr. Leon Sadowski estimated that as high as
fifty per cent of all young foreigners who come to Pittsburgh contract
typhoid fever within two years of their coming. Dr. Maracovick told me
that in four years no less than 100 Croatians in the neighborhood of
Smallman street had come down with the fever, and that most of them
died. "You cannot make the foreigner believe that Pittsburgh water
is unwholesome," said Dr. Welsh of Bellevue. "He comes from rural
communities where contamination of water is unknown." Physicians told
me of men who had been warned, deliberately going to the Allegheny to
quench their thirst.
Where so many single men are huddled together the laws of decency
and morality are hard to observe. The boarding boss seldom has a
family and, in going the round of these houses, the absence of
children is conspicuous. A physician among them told me, "The average
boarding-boss's wife cannot get any,--the moral condition makes it a
physical impossibility." This stands in striking contrast with the
average Slavic woman who in her natural environment, is the mother
of children. These mid-European peoples are not so passionate as the
Italians, but many of the single men, as the case is in all barracks
life, fall into vice. A physician told me that gonorrhea is very
prevalent among the Croatians and Servians. Another physician said of
the Slavs in general, "They frequent cheap houses and come out diseased
and robbed." Many bawdy houses are known in Pittsburgh as "Johnny
Houses," for the reason that they are frequented by foreigners whose
proper names are unpronounceable and who go by the name of "John." The
number entering these on a "wide-awake" (pay) Saturday night is large.
A man who knows this section fairly well, said, "Sometimes these men
have to wait their turn." These are houses of the cheapest kind given
over to prostitutes in the last stage.
The presence of young immigrant women in the immigrant lodging houses
adds to the seriousness of the situation. Here again it is a question
of wages that brings them to this country. They do the drudgery in
the hotels and restaurants which English-speaking girls will not do;
and they are to be found in factories working under conditions their
English-speaking sisters would resent. If any persons need protection,
these young women do. There is no adequate inspection of the labor
employment agencies in Pittsburgh which solicit patronage among them,
often to wrong them. Not only do some of these agencies take their money
but they send girls to places unfit for them. An innocent girl may learn
the character of the house only when it is too late. And even in the
boarding houses their lot is a hard one, especially when the men of the
place are on a carouse.
The Slavs and Lithuanians are fond of drink and spend their money
freely on it. Some spend more money on beer than they do on food. The
evidences of drink in the homes are apparent on all sides; and not only
do national customs and national tastes and usages make for drunkenness,
but the undeniable fact that the liquor interests are the only American
institutions which effectively reach the great mass of the non-English
speaking immigrants. Where else does the stranger find opportunity for
recreation at his very hand? Empty beer kegs and bottles are to be
seen everywhere among the houses of the immigrant lodgers. In Latimore
alley, on a September morning, I counted twenty empty kegs in the yard;
and in another corner there was a pile of empty bottles. It is nothing
unusual for a beer wagon on Saturday to deliver into one of these
boarding houses from eight to twelve cases of beer. When a keg is open
the boarders feel that they must drain it. "It won't keep," they say.
Sunday is the day for drinking. One man often drinks from fifteen to
twenty bottles; while he who drinks from the keg does away with from
two to three gallons. No social gathering is complete without drink.
Marriages, baptisms, social occasions, holidays are all celebrated with
beer and liquor. There is no good time and no friendship without it. The
Slavs usually rent a hall to celebrate their weddings. The scenes of
debauchery with which such festivities sometimes end are discountenanced
by the respectable element among these people. Pool rooms afford loafing
places for the young men of the worst sort. The cheap vaudeville shows,
nickelodeons, and skating rinks are run for profit and not for the sake
of clean recreation such as the community should in some way provide.
But such places cannot be eliminated unless the craving of young people
for amusement is met intelligently and sanely.
[Illustration: SLOVAK GIRL.]
Where the environment of the home is unsanitary and repulsive, and
where opportunities for recreation are limited and sordid, crime is
bound to flourish. Approximately one-fifth of the persons incarcerated
in Allegheny county in recent years have been immigrants from
southeastern Europe. A visit to the police stations of the South Side
on Sunday morning when the police magistrate dispenses justice after a
"wide-awake" Saturday night, is a thing never to be forgotten. In such
a section the foreigners form a majority of the offenders. On one of my
visits to a South Side court, a young Pole was brought up who said he
wanted to be arrested just to find out how it felt. The judge asked him,
"How do you like it?" "All right," he said laughing. He got a full taste
by being sent to jail for ten days. Another young Slav had violated a
city ordinance. He could not speak English. The judge asked him how long
he had been in the country. "Four years," he replied. "And you cannot
talk English?" said the judge. "Don't you know that you ought to learn
English that you may know we have laws and ordinances which must be
obeyed?" In the judge's remark there was more of a commentary on civic
duties unfulfilled than he perhaps realized. But who was to blame? Was
it the Slav boy? Or was it the community which had failed to meet him
halfway?
Here it is well to point out that the public school authorities have not
made any strenuous effort to open evening schools for foreign adults in
the city. The notable exception to this rule has been the work carried
on by Principal Anthony among the Jewish people of the hill district,
which grew out of classes carried on at Columbian Settlement. Another
evening school, in the establishment of which a priest was the prime
mover, met with fair success, but the foreigners dropped out very
quickly. When asked why the school was given up, one of the school
officials said that the pupils did not want it to continue; but their
hours of work and changing shifts are probably still more important
factors. Kingsley House, Woods Run and Columbian Settlement have carried
on successful classes for foreigners, and the Y. M. C. A.'s of the
districts are entering the field of civic and language instruction. The
development of the evening courses of the Carnegie Technical Schools
has been significant, but as yet they do not reach many unskilled
immigrants, who need a nearby elementary help. The camp schools carried
on by the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, at Aspinwall
and Ambridge, have illustrated what could be done, and the response
which comes from the immigrants themselves. More important, they were
the means of securing the passage of legislation enabling local school
authorities to open classes for adults. But in Greater Pittsburgh,
it remains true that the school authorities are not yet awake to the
importance of opening schools for foreign-speaking people and inducing
them to attend. There could be no greater service rendered these young
foreigners (or the city that harbors them) than that of aiding them to
form clubs, and of engaging competent men to teach them English and give
them some idea of the history and laws of the country.
In police station No. 3 on Penn avenue, the cases averaged four hundred
and forty-five a month during the ten months I studied them. Drunkenness
and disorderly conduct formed sixty-eight per cent of these cases, and
the foreigners from southeastern Europe were charged with twenty-seven
per cent of them. Three-quarters of the criminals were single men, and
the large number of single men among the foreigners who lack decent
homes, doubtless partly accounts for the frequency of their arrests.
Similar proportions governed at police station No. 7 on Carson street.
A study of the docket of the Aldermen's Court on the South Side, in
a prescribed area where Slavs and Lithuanians form an essential part
of the population, showed a total of 167, or 39.5 per cent for these
nationalities; but these cases varied greatly from those in the police
stations. 48.3 per cent were cases of assault and battery and 45.6 per
cent of the culprits were foreigners. The cases of fornication and
bastardy, adultery and rape, numbered seventeen, more than half of
which were to be laid at the door of the foreigners. Cases of larceny,
disturbance of the peace, and disorderly conduct were about equally
divided between the English-speaking and the non-English-speaking
of southeastern Europe. Out of thirty-one cases of desertion and
non-support, not a Slav, Lithuanian or Italian was implicated.
[Illustration: SERVIAN GIRL.]
A closer study of this list indicated that aldermen were giving
preference to cases where the returns were sure. Pittsburgh suffers
under a system of petty aldermen's courts such as Chicago only recently
put an end to, and from which Philadelphia is exempted by constitutional
provision. The aldermen are dependent upon their fees and the
immigrants, ofttimes innocent, are the special prey of such as may be
unscrupulous.
Profits are not what they used to be for those who prey upon ignorance,
as I gathered from the constable who told me, "The foreigner knows too
much now; old times are past." In the good old times he had made from
fifteen to twenty dollars a day. But even if the most flagrant abuses
are now infrequent and if some of the aldermen are of unquestionable
character, the system is wrong and the foreigner is its most grievous
sufferer.
[Illustration: LITHUANIAN GIRL.]
But we must not over-estimate the lawlessness among these people. We
have seen the manner of life of the single men, and the dangers that
beset them. In the Pittsburgh situation what encouragement is there to
the immigrant who seriously wants to get ahead in life? I have it from
a priest that one-tenth of the young men of his race who come to this
district go to the bad; the other nine-tenths may drink more or less,
but they manage to save money and in time acquire property. Of the
Lithuanian families of Pittsburgh more than ten per cent own their own
homes. Many Poles and Slovaks also have purchased their own homes. When
an Italian resolves to stay in this country, he buys a house. But as yet
few Croatians, Ruthenians and Servians own real estate in Pittsburgh.
While the wages of the day laborers in the district are high for the
single man who lives on the boarding boss system, the foreigner who
brings his family here and pays American prices for the necessities of
life, faces a different situation. The father of a family cannot hope
to get accommodations for less than twelve or fifteen dollars a month,
and then he has only two or three rooms. The Slav, as we have seen, has
to pay more than the English-speaking man for the same house. The man
who earns thirty-seven dollars a month and has to pay twelve dollars in
rent has not a large fund on which to raise a family. He belongs to one
or two lodges which means an outlay of a dollar to a dollar and a half
each month. He must pay fifty cents a month to his church, and he is
compelled to send his children to the parochial school at, say, another
fifty cents a head, or three for a dollar. He must buy the school books
needed by the child; this may amount yearly to from three to four
dollars. Is it surprising, then, that the children are sent to work at
an early age and that many are raised in cramped and dirty quarters?
But this question of the children, of their health and education, we
must leave to later issues. When the mills are working regularly and the
father is able to work each day, the family manages to get along. But
when sickness comes or work ceases, then the pinch of hunger is felt.
Mrs. Lippincott of the Society for the Improvement of the Poor tells me
that in good times but few Slavs or Lithuanians apply for aid; that only
when the father is killed or injured, is aid needed, and that then it is
for medicine and proper food for the patient.[4]
[4] A study of the records of the charity department of Pittsburgh and
Allegheny indicated that the percentage of foreign born dependents
exceeds by perhaps ten per cent the percentage of foreign born in the
population. I refer to the city home, the city hospital, the poor
houses, the tuberculosis camp and outdoor relief. In the institutions
for the insane as many as forty-nine per cent were foreign born and of
the $311,470 appropriated for their maintenance on a given year, half
was thus bestowed upon the foreign born.
It must be remembered that influential men among the Slavs and
Lithuanians are prosperous and live in residential sections of
Pittsburgh. Some Poles and Italians are in the professions and some
Lithuanians are well to do business men. All these people, however,
do business among their own countrymen, and as yet their influence
is largely restricted to this circle. Sections of the city where
foreigners live are well supplied with banking facilities, which are
generally conducted by men of those nationalities. The leading banks of
Pittsburgh have learned that the immigrants save their money, and many
of them have a foreign exchange department at the head of which is put a
foreign-speaking man who is a leader among his countrymen.
In this connection, it is interesting to examine more closely what might
be called the personal ledger of the Slavic day laborer in Pittsburgh.
[Illustration: A SLAVIC HOUSEHOLD.]
We have seen that more than half the Italians, Croatians, Servians and
Ruthenians are single men, and that a large proportion of the other
races are similarly placed. Many are married but their wives are across
the seas. Their policy is to make all they can and spend as little as
possible. We have also seen that the wages of common labor are from
$1.35 to $1.65 a day and that those who have acquired a little skill
earn from $1.75 to $2.25. The monthly expenditure of single men bent
on saving will not exceed ten dollars a month. Some Russians complain
when their monthly bill amounts to eight dollars. The drinking bill will
not exceed five dollars a month; and the sum spent on clothing will
hardly equal that. Hence a common laborer can save from ten to fifteen
dollars a month; the semi-skilled workers from twenty to twenty-five
dollars; and boarding bosses accumulate what is to them a competence.
A banker doing business among the Servians of the South Side stated
that each pay day he sent back between $20,000 and $25,000 to the old
country on deposit. In September of 1907, one of the banks on the South
Side where the foreigners do business had $600,000 on deposit. Such a
showing has come only after a vigorous campaign on the part of the banks
of Pittsburgh to overcome the mistrust which foreigners feel toward
private institutions. Individual small banks conducted by men of their
own nationality were the rule for many years. The institutions were
ephemeral and the impression prevailed among the laborers that they were
schemes of sinister men to wheedle their money from them. Some men still
secrete their savings, trusting no one.
Through the kindness of one of the Pittsburgh bankers, this table of
twelve representative Slavic depositors is given:
_Single Men._ _Married Men._
=============================================+=========================
1906-1907. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | 1 2 3 4 5
---------------------------------------------+-------------------------
Sept.-Nov. $95 $103 $45 $35 $110 $100 $60 | $240 $70 $100 $105
Dec.-Feb. 115 63 25 135 60 100 60 | 150 190 50
March-May 20 93 25 95 60 100 60 | 50 145 100 200 90
June-Aug. 207 76 105 73 50 55 | 115 120 200 140 40
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- | ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Totals $437 $335 $200 $338 $280 $300 $265 | $555 $525 $300 $440 $285
=============================================+=========================
[Illustration: UNIFORMED NATIONAL SOCIETIES IN SESQUI-CENTENNIAL
PARADE.]
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
IN THE CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.]
[Illustration: A CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.]
The fraternal organizations also among the Slavs, Lithuanians and
Italians provoke an increasing amount of thrift and provide various
forms of insurance. They are the dominant form of social organization
and afford opportunities for leadership to the stronger men. The
National Slovak Society, for instance, has a membership of 50,000, and
the Polish National Alliance one of 75,000. Pittsburgh has some thirty
locals of the latter alone, each with a list of from forty to 300
members. The lodge organizations of these people cannot be discussed in
detail in such a paper as this; here it is sufficient to note that in
case of sickness and death they look after their members; they provide
social centers for the more thrifty of the people, and tend generally to
raise the standard of life.
Outside these lodges, the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have their
organizations for enjoyment and amusement. Among the Poles there
are societies for self-culture, such as dramatic clubs and singing
societies.
There is reason to believe that the home governments of these people
foster the formation of organizations along racial lines; the church
also fosters these national societies. In so far as such organizations
perpetuate national customs and habits in America, they tend to make
assimilation difficult. A strong people swayed by racial consciousness
on foreign soil will either thrust its own concepts and ideals into
the social elements around it and modify them; or it will build around
itself a wall which the customs and habits of the country will find
difficulty in penetrating. This is seen going on in Pittsburgh. The
Poles and Italians form a city within a city; their customs and habits
are distinctly Polish and Italian.
When we come to political life, we must accord leadership to other than
the Slavic groups,--to the Italians. A political leader among them in
Pittsburgh claims that four fifths of all Italians who have been in
the country five years are naturalized. He held that the Italians of
Pittsburgh poll about 5,000 votes which are scattered over eleven
wards. Next to the Italians come the Poles. Many of them have been
voters for years, but of the influx that has come to Pittsburgh in the
last ten years not twenty per cent are naturalized. The Polish vote is
set at 4,000 and the Poles have two or three political clubs. Political
clubs are also found among the Lithuanians and Croatians. Too frequently
these racial leaders,--often saloon keepers,--are the satellites of
some English-speaking politician, and through them he controls "the
foreign vote." Some of the more intelligent of the foreign-speaking are
dissatisfied with this manipulation of their people; among these are
rising young men with political aspirations. It will not be long before
the city will feel their presence. If the Polish and Italian votes were
to be crystallized in some fifteen wards, the leaders there would have
the balance of power and control them.
Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have a strong religious element in their
make-up which plays a never-ending part in such racial communities as
are to be found in the Pittsburgh district. Unless this element is
reckoned with they are not to be understood. The vast majority belong to
the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants are found among each of the
races, but they form only a small percentage.[5] Certain of the Southern
Slavs are subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Russians
maintain a Greek Orthodox church. Religious ceremonies and observances
have strong hold upon the Poles and Lithuanians, the Croatians and
Servians.[6] We have seen that the number of males far exceeds that of
females among the immigrants from southeastern Europe. This the church
attendance corroborates. I have seen in Pittsburgh a congregation of one
thousand men, all in the prime of life, so intent upon the religious
exercises that the least movement of the priest at the altar found
immediate response in every member of the audience. The ritual of the
church has a deep hold upon Slav and Lithuanian; often the men go to
confession at six in the morning that they may go to communion the day
following. When men are so employed that they cannot attend mass on
Sundays, they will attend one on Saturdays. The home must be consecrated
once a year, and hundreds take their baskets laden with provisions to
church on Easter morning that the priest may bless the feast they hope
to enjoy that day.
[5] The Protestant denominations in the city are conducting mission work
among the Slavs and Italians. Several missionaries, colporteurs and
Bible readers are employed. There are among the Slovaks, Lithuanians,
Magyars and Italians, adherents of various Protestant churches.
[6] The Roman Catholic Church has not the influence over the Bohemians
and Italians that it has over the above mentioned people. The Bohemians
are many of them free thinkers. The Italians are deeply religious but
for the most part lukewarm in their attitude toward the church, and
their edifices do not compare with those of the Poles.
[Illustration: GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH.]
[Illustration: A GREEK ORTHODOX PRIEST.]
If we measure the efficiency of the Roman Catholic Church among the
Slavs and Lithuanians in Pittsburgh by money spent on buildings and
maintenance, it cannot be equalled either by American Catholicism or
Protestantism. The people give freely of their hard earnings to erect
costly church edifices and support the priesthood. The Slavs and
Lithuanians have been on the South Side of Pittsburgh only for the
last twenty years, but to-day they possess church property valued at
three-quarters of a million dollars, and most of it is paid for. They
also give toward the erection of parochial schools and maintain them.
The priests have great power over the lives of their people. Some of
them are charged with accumulating riches, but taken as a whole, I view
them as a body of men loyal to their vows and honoring the profession
wherein they serve. With the great numbers constantly coming from
Europe, it is surprising how carefully they keep in touch with the
newcomers. Slav and Lithuanian priests whose parishes are constantly
changing take a census each year. They know the affairs of their people.
They know their housing conditions, their hardships in mine and mill;
are familiar with the wrongs they suffer. In trouble the priests are
their counselors; they sympathize with them in their struggles; they
institute and manage insurance societies against sickness and accident.
Some of the priests found and control building and loan associations.
They at all times stimulate their people to rise to the level of other
people around them. The priests are busy men. A parish of two thousand
or three thousand means endless activities. With the influx of Slavs and
Lithuanians into the country, and the necessity of organizing parishes
where many of them settle, the difficulty has been to secure properly
qualified priests to take charge of the work. Hence, many of the Slav
and Lithuanian clergy are overworked and no assistance can be furnished
them. Their influence lies first with the adults who come from the
fatherland. The children are not as amenable to the discipline of the
church; neither do they give their earnings as freely to its support.
The growing problem of the church is to meet the religious needs of
people of Slavic blood raised in a new country.
* * * * *
This sketch,--brief though it is,--of the foreign-speaking peoples of
Pittsburgh shows clearly how dependent the industries are upon a supply
of able bodied men from Europe. The enterprising from agricultural
communities freely bring their strength to the expansion of American
industries, and never was there an army more docile and willing than
these newcomers. They believe in mutual protection and organize and
conduct various societies for this purpose. They find their pleasure in
many crude ways. They are loyal to their church, and the many churches
owned by them represent offerings made by men who literally earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow. Many of them save money and the number
of those who own their homes is annually increasing.
There are imperative needs of this element of the city's population
which must be met if the cause of civilization is to be served. The
fatal and non-fatal injuries of the mills fall heavily upon these
peoples. Each week a tale of wrong and suffering, agony and death, is
sent across the water, which seriously reflects upon the industrial life
of America. The value placed on human life here will not bear comparison
with that of older countries whose civilization we say is lower than
ours. The great need of the hour is a current and detailed record of the
serious accidents of the district, that the public may know exactly at
what cost of life and limb industry is carried on, and may exhaust every
means for lessening the sacrifice.
[Illustration: A SLAVIC LABORER.]
We saw that the housing conditions of many of these peoples are a
disgrace to civilization. The insufficiency of houses, the greed of
landlords, the exigencies of some foreigners and the penury of others,
bring about this condition. There should be stricter regulation of
immigrant boarding houses. Men who coin money in shacks and those
foreign born who are too greedy to pay for decent quarters, should feel
the firm hand of the law. Crowding, dirt and filth are not American and
should not be tolerated in any American city.
But negative work is not enough; positive and aggressive work must
be done if the foreign-speaking are to rise to the measure of their
opportunity. Every nationality has its aesthetic side, and Pittsburgh
has done nothing to bring this to the fore. Other cities have fostered
the national dance, have encouraged works of art, and have induced
the foreigner to show the artistic side of his nature. Cannot this
be done in Pittsburgh? Give these people a chance to bring out their
needle-work, to show their artistic skill, to sing their national songs,
and to dance their native dances, and the life of the city will be
richer and stronger.
Then why should the people who gave Lafayette a welcome that has become
historical, and who championed the cause of Kossuth, not go forth
in sympathy to these people of Slav and Iberic extraction? They are
left in ignorance of our language, our laws, our government, and our
history. This rich inheritance we cherish, and we believe it is more
excellent than any of which the older countries of Europe can boast. If
this be so, is it not our privilege and duty to train these peoples of
southeastern Europe in the principles of democracy? Thousands of these
peoples yearn for a knowledge of our language and an insight into that
form of government that has made America great among the nations of the
earth, and we should be willing to go half way and meet the need.
The public school can take up this work with greater zeal; the social
agencies of all sorts can stretch the cords of their tents and take in
the men who are anxious to learn.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
IN THE LIGHT OF A FIVE-TON INGOT.]
SOME PITTSBURGH STEEL WORKERS[7]
JOHN ANDREWS FITCH
FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
It is estimated that between 70,000 and 80,000 men are employed
in the manufacture of steel in Allegheny county. Their homes are
clustered about the mills along the rivers, they are clinging to
the bluffs of the South Side, and they are scattered over Greater
Pittsburgh, from Woods Run to the East End. Up the Monongahela valley
are the mill-towns,--Homestead of Pinkerton fame, Braddock with its
record-breaking mills and furnaces, Duquesne where the unit of weight
is a hundred tons, and McKeesport, home of the "biggest tube works on
earth." Here are countrymen of Kossuth and Kosciusko, still seeking
the blessings of liberty, but through a different channel,--high wages
and steady employment. Here are English, German and Scandinavian
workmen, full of faith in the new world democracy; and here are
Americans,--great-grandsons of Washington's troopers, and sons of men
who fought at Gettysburg.
[7] This is a description of leading types of steel workers. A
discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry is reserved for a
later number.
Fully sixty-five per cent of these men are unskilled, but the remaining
thirty-five per cent, the skilled and semi-skilled, are the men who
give character to the industry. This is the class from which foremen
and superintendents and even the steel presidents have been recruited,
and it is the class that furnishes the brains of the working force. It
is of them that I write. To know these men you must see them at work;
you must stand beside the open-hearth helper as he taps fifty tons of
molten steel from his furnace, you must feel the heat of the Bessemer
converters as you watch the vessel-men and the steel pourer, and above
the crash and roar of the blooming mills you must talk with rollers
and hookers, while five-and ten-ton steel ingots plunge madly back and
forth between the rolls. You must see the men working in hoop mills and
guide mills, where the heat is intense and the work laborious; you must
see them amid ladles of molten steel, among piles of red hot bars, or
bending over the straightening presses at the rail mills.
But to know them best you should see them at home. There the muscular
feats of the heater's helper and the rough orders of the furnace boss
are alike forgotten, and you find a kindly, open-hearted, human sort of
men. You grow into an understanding of them as they tell of hopes and
plans or mistakes and failures, and understanding becomes sympathy as it
comes home to you how close some half-spoken disappointment presses in
upon them. It was in this way that for nine or ten months I lived among
the steel workers, and came to number some of them as friends.
The skilled workers are generally of Anglo-Saxon, German or Keltic
origin, the largest proportion being American born. They are not
educated, so far as school and university training are concerned, but
they are post graduates in the school of experience.
The visitor in a steel mill sees only faces reddened by the glare of
fire and hot steel, muscles standing out in knots and bands on bare
arms, clothing frayed with usage and begrimed by machinery. The men do
not differ materially from other workmen, and the visitor passes on
and forgets them. The world is full of men in greasy overalls. But a
workman is not merely a workman, any more than a business man is merely
a business man. He is also a man, whether he works in a mill or sits at
a desk. So I shall introduce some of these men and let them talk to you,
as they talked to me. Bear in mind that the things they talk about could
be taken up from another point of view. In the following interviews I am
making no interpretation of the workers from the employer's standpoint.
These are the issues of life as seen by the men themselves.
[Illustration: _Courtesy Carnegie Steel Co._
POURING MOLTEN IRON, JUST TAPPED FROM BLAST FURNACE, INTO BESSEMER
CONVERTER.]
Jack Griswold is a Scotch-Irish furnace boss who came to America and
got a laborer's position at a Pittsburgh blast furnace, when the common
labor force was largely Irish. Those were the days before the advent
of the "furriners." I sat in Griswold's sitting room in his four-room
cottage one evening and he told me about the men who work at the
furnaces, and about the "long turn."
"Mighty few men have stood what I have, I can tell you. I've been twenty
years at the furnaces and been workin' a twelve-hour day all that time,
seven days in the week. We go to work at seven in the mornin' and we
get through at night at six. We work that way for two weeks and then we
work the long turn and change to the night shift. The long turn is when
we go on at seven Sunday mornin' and work through the whole twenty-four
hours up to Monday mornin'. That puts us onto the night turn for the
next two weeks, and the other crew onto the day. The next time they get
the long turn and we get twenty-four hours off, but it don't do us much
good. I get home at about half past seven Sunday mornin' and go to bed
as soon as I've had breakfast. I get up about noon so as to get a bit
o' Sunday to enjoy, but I'm tired and sleepy all the afternoon. Now,
if we had eight hours it would be different. I'd start to work, say,
at six and I'd be done at two and I'd come home, and after dinner me
and the missus could go to the park if we wanted to, or I could take
the childer to the country where there ain't any saloons. That's the
danger,--the childer runnin' on the streets and me with no time to take
them any place else. That's what's driven the Irish out of the industry.
It ain't the Hunkies,--they couldn't do it,--but the Irish don't have to
work this way. There was fifty of them here with me sixteen years ago
and now where are they? I meet 'em sometimes around the city, ridin'
in carriages and all of them wearin' white shirts, and here I am with
these Hunkies. They don't seem like men to me hardly. They can't talk
United States. You tell them something and they just look and say 'Me
no fustay, me no fustay.' That's all you can get out of 'em. And I'm
here with them all the time, twelve hours a day and every day and I'm
all alone,--not a mother's son of 'em that I can talk to. Everybody says
I'm a fool to stay here,--I dunno, mebbe I am. It don't make so much
difference though. I'm gettin' along, but I don't want the kids ever
to work this way. I'm goin' to educate them so they won't have to work
twelve hours."
There is a considerable difference between a blast furnace foreman and a
Bessemer steel pourer. The furnace man gets rather low wages, while the
steel pourer is well paid and works eight hours a day for six days in
the week. It was Jerry Flinn who told me how he had worked up from his
first job as laborer, to a position as steel pourer. I met him just as
he got home from the mill one day, and I asked how he managed to work
only an eight-hour shift when other men had to work twelve. He told
me that attempts have been made to introduce a twelve-hour day in the
converting department but without success. Two Pittsburgh mills have
tried it and both went back to eight hours because the heat is so great
as to make it impossible for the men to work that long.
"It must be hard," said Flinn, "for the twelve-hour men to have to work
alongside of us eight-hour men. During the twelve hours of their day
they work with all three crews of the eight-hour men. One crew gets
through and goes home soon after the twelve-hour men come out, the next
crew works its eight hours and goes home, and the third crew comes out
before those twelve-hour fellows can quit. The eight-hour men get a lot
more pleasure out of life than the twelve-hour men do. We can go to
entertainments and social affairs as we couldn't if we had to get up
next morning and go to work at six o'clock."
Flinn is fifty-two years old, and tells you his strength is not up to
what it was, say fifteen years ago. The men who went to work with him as
young men are nearly all dead, and to-day he is one of the oldest men in
his mill. He speaks lightly of the danger of accidents, and says that
he has encountered only the minor ones. Once when they were changing
stoppers, the crane dropped the old one just as it swung clear of the
edge of the ladle. It fell on him, burning him and breaking his leg.
At another time he failed to lower the stopper in time, and the stream
of molten steel struck the edge of a mold as the train was shifted; it
splashed onto the platform, burning his legs so severely that, for six
weeks afterwards, he was unable to turn over in bed. It is a common
thing for metal to fly that way; the sparks strike his face, they lodge
in his nose or his ears, and once he nearly lost the sight of an eye. He
refers to these things as trifles.
What I said of the half concealed disappointments which are real and
tragic in the life of a steel worker, would have been clear to you had
you heard the story of Robert Smith, as he told it himself. As a boy
he went to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania and did not
get into the mills until he was about thirty years old. Then he came
to Pittsburgh, took a laborer's position, and began to work up slowly
year after year until he occupied a place of some importance, though
not in the first class of skilled men. After he had been there a few
years, there was a labor difficulty in this mill and he left and went
to another plant where he took a position similar to his last one. As a
new man he could not advance as rapidly as he might have done in the old
mill, and before he could get into the best of standing, he was thrown
out of work by further labor troubles. He secured a position in another
mill where he remained for two years till forced out by a strike to seek
work in a fourth mill. Here he remained for ten years in a subordinate
position. At the end of that time, he was promoted and became for the
first time in his life, the first man in the crew. Then, in some way, he
incurred the dislike of the superintendent, and the man on the opposite
shift worked against him because he wanted Smith's job for a friend.
So, after working for three years in a position for which, as he said,
he had served a ten years' apprenticeship, Smith again lost his place
and was obliged to apply for work in still another mill. He had been
a leader in the union, and it was a feeling almost religious in its
devotion that bound him to it. To get into this new mill he had to agree
to give up his union card. To-day he says that he is a strong union man
at heart, but his connection with it is over. Now, at nearly sixty years
of age, he is working in a semi-skilled position, although fitted to
take his place among the men of the best skill and to handle a crew.
Smith is a man of more than ordinary intelligence. He is a man of
religious inclinations and a church member. He regrets the twelve-hour
day now chiefly on the ground that it keeps the young men away from
church. If he had not become a church-member when he had an eight-hour
day, he doesn't see how he ever could have become interested in
religious matters. He lives in a comfortable home which he owns and
where he spends most of his time when not in the mill. After supper he
sits down to read for a short time before going to bed, but he told
me with considerable regret that he was unable to do any systematic
reading. A few years ago he read several of Shakespeare's plays, but
he had to force himself to do it, he gets sleepy so soon after supper.
Since that time he has not attempted anything more serious than the
daily paper.
Of course, the question of organized labor suggests a number of other
considerations. The old union attitude towards employers is not of
consequence now in Pittsburgh, for most of the steel mills of the
district have been non-union for ten or fifteen years. This fact,
however, makes it all the more worth while to consider the present
attitude of the men as individuals.
Jim Barr is a man thirty-five years old who came from England when he
was a small boy. It has been only during the last ten years or so that
Barr has worked in a steel mill, but he has lived in the steel district
longer than that. He occupies a skilled position in one of the mills
where he works every day but Sundays from seven in the morning until
six in the evening, and on alternate Sundays he has the long turn of
twenty-four hours. This Sunday work, he told me, came in after the union
had been driven out, and the twelve-hour day is more general now than it
was under unionism.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
OF THE OLD TIME IRISH IMMIGRATION.]
"Tell me, how can a man get any pleasure out of life working that way?"
Barr asked me almost with a challenge. We were sitting before the grate
in his comfortable and tastefully furnished parlor. There were pictures
on the wall, a carpet on the floor, and the piano in the corner spoke
of other things than endless drudgery. He seemed to interpret my swift
glance about the room, for he went on, "I've got as good a home here as
a man could want. It's comfortable and I enjoy my family. But I only
have these things to think about, not to enjoy. I'm at work most of the
day, and I'm so tired at night that I just go to bed as soon as I've
eaten supper. I have ideas of what a home ought to be, all right, but
the way things are now I just eat and sleep here."
Barr works in a position where he encounters considerable heat, and
he says that alone is very exhausting even when a man does not do
hard physical labor. There is great danger, too, in the sweat that
keeps a man's clothing wet all of the time. If he gets into a draught
he is likely to contract a cold or pneumonia. Working under such
conditions shortens a man's life, to Barr's mind, and although he is but
thirty-five years old he tells you he feels a decline in his strength.
The men find that it costs more to live, too, when working in the mills,
for they need the best of food and the warmest clothing in order to
keep going. The little chance for recreation leads them to the saloons
as the natural place for relaxation. They go there much oftener, in his
opinion, than they would if they had more time for social enjoyment;
and of course there is a good deal of money spent there that is needed
for other things. He says that men frequently spend twenty dollars in a
single night after payday. But the thing on which Barr seems to have the
strongest convictions is the plan of the United States Steel Corporation
of issuing stock to employes.
"The men have been fooled by this proposition," he declared, "and they
really believe that the corporation wants to do big things for them in
offering such liberal dividends. But let me tell you something
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