“Oh, they’re disgusting,” she assured me, her face as expressive as her words. “The women do all their own housework, and they have so many children.”
Two great crimes—doing housework and having children.
Small wonder that the mother of George Washington lay for a hundred years in an unmarked grave before any one ever thought it worth while to write her life. She not only bore and brought up a houseful of sons and daughters, but she did housework—she ground and stuffed sausages for family consumption, and she wore an apron.
When told by a pompous courier that His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief of the American and French Armies was on his way to pay her a visit, she replied:
“Tell George I’ll be glad to see him. Sukie, go bring me a clean apron.”
Now we’ve gotten so snobbish, we the descendants of that sturdy old stock, that the sight of a woman next door wearing an apron makes us run away. Having run as far as possible, we turn around and find fault with that woman and her children for not imbibing American ideals.
It is our fault that in our country the immigration question has developed into an emergency—if from an asylum for the oppressed peoples of the earth the United States has become a pest-house.
After stating that I consider stopping immigration at least for a term of years an urgent necessity to the health of our country, it may seem useless to answer the second of the two questions propounded at the beginning of this chapter. But I would like to write briefly of a few of the nationalities with whom I came in close contact during my four years in the underbrush.
Jews and Italians are very attractive when met in their homes. Among my fellow workers I often heard Jews spoken of as “dirty Tykes.” Now I never succeeded in learning just what “Tyke” means. I never found any one who was sure about the spelling of the word. They would assure me that it meant a Jew, but why a Jew they could give no explanation.
So far as my observation went, the Jews of the tenements are not a dirty people, far from it. Some of the cleanest, best-kept homes that I entered were those of Jews—German Jews, Russian Jews, Polish Jews, and Jews the country of whose birth I never learned.