“Counting little bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens (and they are pretty nearly indistinguishable), Mr. Daniels tells us that half the Polish families in Buffalo, or 40,000 people, average two occupants to a room. There are beds under beds (trundle beds, by the way, were once quite respectable), and mattresses piled high on one bed during the day will cover all the floors at night. Lodgers in addition to the family are in some sections almost the rule rather than the exception. Under such conditions privacy of living, privacy of sleeping, privacy of dressing, privacy of toilet, privacy for study, are all impossible, especially in the winter season; and those who have nerves, which are not confined to the rich in spite of an impression to the contrary, are led near to insanity. Brothers and sisters sleep together far beyond the age of safety. It begins so, and parents do not realize how fast children grow, or how dangerous it all is.”[[204]]
Even in Buffalo, the congestion problem is not limited to the Poles. The author just quoted describes the Italians as tending to establish residences in old hotels, warehouses, and abandoned homesteads, and says, “As late as 1906 we found Italians living in large rooms, subdivided by head-high partitions of rope and calico, with a separate family in each division.”
In Milwaukee there are three foci of the tenement evil, the Italian quarter, the Polish quarter, and the Jewish quarter. While there are not the large tenement houses that prevail in larger cities, there are the same evil conditions in the small cottages of the laboring class. The following paragraphs give a vivid picture of some of the conditions in each of these three sections.
In the Italian district, “Entering one of these dwellings we had to duck our heads to escape a shower bath from leaking pipes above the door. Incidentally, we had to dodge a crowd of the canine family which did not seem to be particularly pleased with our visit. The rooms were dark. Something, which I supposed was food or intended for food, was bubbling on a little stove. A friendly goat was playing with the baby on the floor, and the pigeons cooed cheerily near by. Through the door of the kitchen we got the odor of the stable. The horses had the best room. In the middle room, which was absolutely dark, on a bed of indescribable filth, lay an aged woman, groaning with pain from what I judged to be ulcerated teeth, but which for aught she knew might have been a more malignant disease. In this single dwelling, which is not unlike many we saw, there lived together in ignorant misery one man, two women, ten children, six dogs, two goats, five pigeons, two horses, and other animal life which escaped our hurried observation.”
“In the Ghetto, in one building, live seventy-one people, representing seventeen families. The toilets in the yard freeze in winter and are clogged in summer. The overcrowding here is fearful and the filth defies description. Within the same block are crowded a number of tenements three and four stories high with basement dwellings. One of these is used as a Jewish synagogue. Above and beneath and to the rear this building is crowded with tenement dwellers. The stairways are rickety, the rooms filthy, and all are overcrowded. The toilets for the whole population are in the cellar adjoining some of the dwelling rooms, reached by a short stairway. At the time of our visit the floors of this toilet, both inside and outside, were covered with human excrement and refuse to a depth of eight to twelve inches. Into this den of horrors all the population, male and female, had to go.”
A typical dwelling of the Polish working people is thus described. “There is an entrance, perhaps under the steps, which leads to the apartments below. In this semibasement in the front lives a family. There are perhaps two rooms, sometimes only one. In the rear of this same basement lives another family. Above, on the first floor, lives another family, likewise in two or three small rooms; and in the rear is another. Thus four or more families live in one small cottage—and, often, in true tenement style, they ‘take in’ boarders.... Here, together, live men, women, children, dogs, pigeons, and goats in regular tenement and slum conditions.”[[205]]
Such instances as these, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, are individual manifestations of conditions which are represented en masse by the figures of the Immigration Commission. It is apparent that slum conditions exist, fully developed, in other places than the great cities, and in other types of building than the regulation tenement. As will be seen later, they may be found in communities which do not come under the head of cities at all. The slum is a condition, not a place, and will crop up in the most unexpected places, whenever vigilance is relaxed. The slum can never be eradicated by erecting model dwellings, however well planned, nor by any other superficial method alone. The foundation of the slum rests in the social and economic relations of society, and can be effectually attacked only through them.
In the foregoing quotations, frequent reference is made to the filthy condition in which the dwellings of the foreign-born are kept. It is the current idea among a large class of people that extreme uncleanliness characterizes the great majority of immigrant homes. Unfortunately there is all too large a basis of truth for this impression. Yet there is undoubtedly much exaggeration on this point in the popular mind. The Immigration Commission found that out of every 100 homes investigated in its study of city conditions, 45 were kept in good condition, and 84 in either good or fair condition, though the foreign-born were inferior in this respect to the native-born. In many cases the filthy appearance of the streets in the tenement districts is due to negligence on the part of city authorities, rather than to indifference on the part of the householders. “In frequent cases the streets are dirty, while the homes are clean.”[[206]] Not only is it an error to suppose that all immigrants are filthy, but it is also untrue that all immigrants who are filthy are so from choice. While the standards of decency and cleanliness of many of our immigrant races are undoubtedly much below those of the natives, there are many alien families who would gladly live in a different manner, did not the very conditions of their existence seem to thrust this one upon them, or the hardship and sordidness of their daily life quench whatever native ambition for better things they might originally have had.
In the foregoing paragraphs mention has been made of the boarder as a characteristic feature of life in the tenements. He is, in fact, a characteristic feature of the family life of the newer immigrant wherever found. Since so large a proportion of the modern immigrants are single men, or men unaccompanied by their wives (see p. 191), there is an enormous demand for accommodations for male immigrants who have no homes of their own. This demand is met in two main ways. The most natural, and perhaps the least objectionable, of the two, where there are a certain number of immigrant families of the specified race already in this country, is for a family which has a small apartment to take in one or more boarders or lodgers of their own nationality. In this way they are able to add to their meager income, and thereby to increase the amount of their monthly savings, or perhaps to help pay off the mortgage on the house if they happen to be the owners. The motive is not always a financial one, however, but occasionally the desire to furnish a home for some newcomer from the native land, with whom they are acquainted, or in whom they are interested for some other reason.[[207]] The second way of solving the problem is for a number of men to band themselves together, hire an apartment of some sort, and carry on coöperative housekeeping in one way or another. A description of these households will be given later (p. 247).
The keeping of boarders or lodgers[[208]] is a very widespread practice among our recently immigrating families.