In these little East Side cafés, over a steaming glass of tea or a temperate meal, endless discussions take place. In the groups that gather there are many men of education who, during their first years in this country, worked as cloakmakers, tailors, or factory operatives until they were able to obtain employment more suited to their aptitudes or talents.
The cafés and the bookshop where the interesting proprietor specializes in radical literature are the meeting-places for the “intellectuals,” centers from which radiate influences that are not insignificant. As they prosper, many of these men move their families to other parts of the city, but they continue to be East Siders at heart, and find congenial atmosphere in their old haunts. So they come back for the fellowship they miss in their new habitations.
The saloons of the neighborhood touch the life of an entirely different set. They are informal club-houses for many men, some of whom have for years been members of the same political organization. Not that the organization trusts to the saloon alone. All through our neighborhood are the club-houses maintained for members of the party who are kept together through social intercourse.
However, among workingmen, the saloon may be patronized for other reasons than refreshment and sociability. When I expressed to a sober man, long out of work, my surprise that he should have been seen going into a saloon, he explained that if a man did not sometimes go there he was likely to be out of work a longer time. “The fellows just kind of talk about jobs when they’re sittin’ round in the saloons, and sometimes you pick up something.” His reasoning reminded me of a friend who professed indifference to the numerous expensive clubs to which he belonged, but found them useful in his business. “Often a chance conversation or a meeting with men develops into something big.”
When the Empress of Austria was assassinated in 1898 newspaper reporters, seeking “color,” asked the settlement’s direction to anarchists who, in the excitement of the time, were believed to form a considerable portion of the East Side population.
I recalled two men who, in a cellar in Grand Street, had a few rows of books for sale which advertised them as “Dealers in Radical Literature.” One partner proclaimed himself a State Socialist, the other a Philosophic Anarchist. The latter, mild and gentle, devoted disciple of Prudhon, with whose writings he was familiar, was almost pathetically grateful, and showed not altogether complimentary surprise when we purchased Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” Tolstoi’s “My Life,” and Walt Whitman’s poems. In his naïve simplicity he assumed that only those unsure of food and shelter found interest in such literature, and later he and his partner, in all seriousness, proposed, with our co-operation, to reform society.
They had decided, after much thought, that the reason the people they met at the settlement seemed to sympathize and understand was because of the books they read. They felt sorry for the people on Fifth Avenue who, living so far away from the poor, could not know how things might be remedied. Their plan was that I should rent a store opening on the avenue, place comfortable chairs and tables upon which books could be spread. These books the merchants would loan,—their whole stock, if necessary,—and then people passing on foot or driving by could stop and read.
Such naïveté could hardly be met with to-day, for education and discussion of themes of social interest have widened the minds of the community and contact with people of different positions in life is much more general.