You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as with an ax.—Jacob Riis.
Our foreign colonies are to a large extent in the cities of our own country. To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an American.—Robert Hunter.
The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons.—Robert D. Ward.
I. The Evils of Environment
Tendency Toward the Cities
As is the city, so will the nation be. The tendencies all seem to be toward steady concentration in great centers. The evils of congestion do not deter the thronging multitudes. The attractions of the city are irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions. The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid surroundings for the country. To the immigrants the city is a magnet. Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. In the great cities the immigrants are massed, and this constitutes a most perplexing problem. If tens of thousands of foreigners could somehow be gotten out of New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, and be distributed where they are needed and could find work and homes, immigration would cause far less anxiety. But when the immigrant prefers New York or Chicago, what authority shall remove him to Louisiana or Oklahoma?
Perils Due to Environment
The foreigner is in the city; he will chiefly stay there; and the question is what can be done to improve his city environment; for the perils to which we refer are primarily due not to the foreigner himself but to the evil and vice-breeding conditions in which he has to exist. These imperil him and make him a peril in turn. The overcrowded tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization—these work together upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like circumstances.
A Call for Reform
How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty, perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the children with playgrounds and breathing space. And this work will be directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants, for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the slums.